Ok, so I had a look at the screenies, and wasn't completely repulsed. Certainly, there are some aspects of the wm that could, theoretically, be quite useful. Transparency on any window (and not to the root window, I mean real transparency, like has been possible in windows since win2k), rotation on an x-axis (well, sometimes) and certainly scaling would be really useful. Well, at least, that's what I think, but the crux of the matter is that we all have personal tastes, and that's probably part of what draws us to "alternative" operating systems like linux and bsd. And any others that I have left out before an OS zealot flames me.
So I go get the packages, which, on dialup, does take a little time (Ok, I was kinda using all the bandwidth I could at the time). I compile and install both nucleo and metissa. So far, so good.
I followed the instructions that were given to a T, and the X server actually started up, joy of joys, with what seemed to be a working wm.
Seemed to be.
Because none of the goodies that were supposed to work (rotation, scaling, transparency, feeding the dog) did, in fact, work. Neither did any of the usual things you would expect a window manager to do: window movement and resizing, for a start.
And don't even start me on fvwm. Or the color cyan. We are out of the 70's and there's no need to inflict that on ourselves any more. Heck, if I wanted that, I would just go get a fugly sun box.
I'm quite willing to try it all again, if there is someone with some ground-breaking tips for me. I'm certainly not beyond being told that there was something banally silly that I was doing. But remember, I was following instructions.
All the negativity aside, I think that there is potential here. Perhaps this is something for the good people at x.org to look at. Certainly a properly hardware accellerated X server would be good. Something that does all of the other nifty things that metisse promises (the aforementioned scaling and transparency at least, though I think that the rotation and pee-back ideas are quite novel) would be a great step in a good direction, imho.
Perhaps it's also time for the good people at the enlightenment project to get something solid from E17 out there. Much of the hardware accelleration that should be taken advantage of on today's desktops is supposed to be in there.
I'm using debian sid on a dell inspiron 1100 -- first off, getting linux alive on this machine isn't the easiest, and Dell seem to be on a mission to break things with every BIOS release. Oddly enough the bios is on revision 29, and the last revision broke my ability to halt the system. But I digress.
After seeing that distros like mandrake were getting in on the x.org action, i also had a look.
I only had 2 issues:
xdm wouldn't compile -- so i removed it from the makefile, since i don't use xdm
make install didn't run ldconfig, which meant that x was horribly broken the first few times i ran it until i figured out from an strace that programs like glxinfo were looking for.so's where they weren't. Running ldconfig sorted out the problem.
My experiences have, so far, been ok with x.org's version. Quake3 framerates seem at least as good, perhaps a little better than xfree86, and glxgears reports higher framerates than I remember under xfree. Startup is a little quicker, and X in general seems a little snappier. I don't know how much to attribute to the fact that the running version of X was compiled from source and the original version was binary installed from a.deb. But, purely on an ethical level, I am happy with x.org's version, and I will try it on my desktop when I get back home -- I know the q3 response on that machine a lot better, and that will give me a more accurate feel for x.org's version.
Personally, i think that there isn't really anything more that would be "killer" that isn't implemented in M$ office -- well nothing that is required for useful functionality. So the "killer feature" of OOo has to be the simple one: price. If OOo can do all that M$ Office can do, then i don't know of a single company, student, or household with a shred of intelligence who will choose the platform-locked, proprietry M$ Office. And the pdf export utility is, according to regular users of OOo, a nifty feature in itself. I fully expect M$ to clone this in Office at some point. And let's not forget the open document standards that mean that anyone can, in theory, write viewers, editors and importers for your OOo documents, no matter what version they were created with.
Nifty features in KDE above Explorer are far too many to mention. Suffice to say that i showed Knoppix to a few windows-bound work colleagues, and had them all in awe of the prettiness (yes, that is actually a sought-after feature) as well as the functionality provided.
I think that some of the problem you may be experiencing is that there really isn't all that much left to do on a desktop for Joe User. Just because there has already been so much innovation in solving the needs of a user.
At the end of the day, anyone can argue any way for any product. One of the biggest arguments i have is ethical, and that's enough reason to carry on testing betas and working in young environments . Also, you have to realise that there are a lot of people for whom price is a big issue: students, for instance, should not be shelling out hard-earned wages to pay for a non-evolving, locked office suite. I'm glad i can offer people like that a very good, free alternative.
Out of pure interest, what does it look like KDE is "catching up" to? A machine installed with the default GNU/Linux/KDE setup has a lot more than one installed with the straight Windows/Explorer setup, both in functionality and in looks. I think that M$ are the ones who should be playing catch-up...
"Right now,OOo is just copying MS Office and isn't really doing anything innovative or new."
whaaaaat? Have you actually bothered to take a little look at Open Office? Your comment would definately suggest not! Yes, there are similarities, and the most prominent reason would simply be that there will be no user acceptance of an office suite that totally breaks the mold: Joesephine Secretary has been using M$ Word & Excel for ages, and she's not going to even bother if she can't use the interface like she's used to. And, let's face it, the M$ Office interfaces are rather well laid out, which almost makes up for the price tag (more than a month's salary for an average person here (south africa) to buy the full version of Office from a regular retailer), the annoying assistant (which, strangely enough, i have heard of some people getting quite upset about *missing* after techies disabled on install out of kindness!) and morphing document standards. Well, maybe not;p
The point is also that OOo is *younger* than M$ office and is trying to break into the userspace occupied by junkies addicted to expensive software. Also, i don't see useful integrations like pdf output support in M$ Office (yes, i know you can get printer drivers that do this for you, but this is Joesphine User: she's not going to be able to get that without some hand-holding).
OOo is set to take the office arena by even more storm than it generates now. I take my virtual hat off to OOo developers. You are doing an excellent job, and the jump from 1.0.3 to 1.1 was a phenominal leap in performance and functionality that i have not seen in version jumps from M$ Office: i see only a bright future.
Why is M$ Office "so popular" you ask? Simple: People were using it long ago, and became locked into document standards. For the same reasons that the company i work at is now locked into Corel products, except that people do innovate readers for M$ documents, and then M$ just changes the format completely, and even their old products can't cope with the new formats (there's not even a plugin or anything! how rude!), so people shell out again and buy the next version with all it's new bugs and security holes, and the stats report a happy M$ Office mass.
Yes, MSSQL is good. But far too expensive, and the only thing stopping PostgreSQL from taking the world by complete storm is, imho, win32 support, which is coming. Excel provides a lot of functionality yet to be supported in other spreadsheet programs (Especially with macro scripting: in particular, i now have to install M$ Office on a spare box so i can rip the IP out of a spreadsheet's internal code for a client who wants something a bit more solid to sell), but i can see that's not far off: Gnumeric and OOo are doing fairly good jobs now, and the road only l eads upward.
I've heard this "no one innovates like M$" bull for far too long. For a company that has billions of dollars, thousands of developers and many many years in the industry, i would hope that they manage to steal^H^H^H^H^Hinnovate ideas properly by now. And for every success, there are a lot of dropouts (need i mention Bob?) -- Microsoft has the resources to fund, launch, and quickly sweep under the carpet their many failures. They take more shots: of course they get a few. But if you have a close look at a lot of M$ stuff, it's not all that "innovative" -- it's just the first time that it's aggressively marketed to Joe Public, who runs Win32 because that's how his machine was sold to him.
Hardware accelleration in a wm/gui? wait for e17, my friend: it will most likely only be ready at about the same time as longhorn tho ):
The entire point i think is that i see a lot of innovation and worthwhile, hard work taking place in the *nix arena, and remove (once again) my virtual hat to the coders in the arena. Never give up just because some spawn of the Dark Lord (uncle Bill) tells you that "there's nothing new under the sun" that hasn't come from M$
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Ok, so I had a look at the screenies, and wasn't completely repulsed. Certainly, there are some aspects of the wm that could, theoretically, be quite useful. Transparency on any window (and not to the root window, I mean real transparency, like has been possible in windows since win2k), rotation on an x-axis (well, sometimes) and certainly scaling would be really useful. Well, at least, that's what I think, but the crux of the matter is that we all have personal tastes, and that's probably part of what draws us to "alternative" operating systems like linux and bsd. And any others that I have left out before an OS zealot flames me.
So I go get the packages, which, on dialup, does take a little time (Ok, I was kinda using all the bandwidth I could at the time). I compile and install both nucleo and metissa. So far, so good.
I followed the instructions that were given to a T, and the X server actually started up, joy of joys, with what seemed to be a working wm.
Seemed to be.
Because none of the goodies that were supposed to work (rotation, scaling, transparency, feeding the dog) did, in fact, work. Neither did any of the usual things you would expect a window manager to do: window movement and resizing, for a start.
And don't even start me on fvwm. Or the color cyan. We are out of the 70's and there's no need to inflict that on ourselves any more. Heck, if I wanted that, I would just go get a fugly sun box.
I'm quite willing to try it all again, if there is someone with some ground-breaking tips for me. I'm certainly not beyond being told that there was something banally silly that I was doing. But remember, I was following instructions.
All the negativity aside, I think that there is potential here. Perhaps this is something for the good people at x.org to look at. Certainly a properly hardware accellerated X server would be good. Something that does all of the other nifty things that metisse promises (the aforementioned scaling and transparency at least, though I think that the rotation and pee-back ideas are quite novel) would be a great step in a good direction, imho.
Perhaps it's also time for the good people at the enlightenment project to get something solid from E17 out there. Much of the hardware accelleration that should be taken advantage of on today's desktops is supposed to be in there.
Let the flames begin.
I'm using debian sid on a dell inspiron 1100 -- first off, getting linux alive on this machine isn't the easiest, and Dell seem to be on a mission to break things with every BIOS release. Oddly enough the bios is on revision 29, and the last revision broke my ability to halt the system. But I digress.
After seeing that distros like mandrake were getting in on the x.org action, i also had a look.
I only had 2 issues:
My experiences have, so far, been ok with x.org's version. Quake3 framerates seem at least as good, perhaps a little better than xfree86, and glxgears reports higher framerates than I remember under xfree. Startup is a little quicker, and X in general seems a little snappier. I don't know how much to attribute to the fact that the running version of X was compiled from source and the original version was binary installed from a .deb. But, purely on an ethical level, I am happy with x.org's version, and I will try it on my desktop when I get back home -- I know the q3 response on that machine a lot better, and that will give me a more accurate feel for x.org's version.
point taken
Personally, i think that there isn't really anything more that would be "killer" that isn't implemented in M$ office -- well nothing that is required for useful functionality. So the "killer feature" of OOo has to be the simple one: price. If OOo can do all that M$ Office can do, then i don't know of a single company, student, or household with a shred of intelligence who will choose the platform-locked, proprietry M$ Office. And the pdf export utility is, according to regular users of OOo, a nifty feature in itself. I fully expect M$ to clone this in Office at some point. And let's not forget the open document standards that mean that anyone can, in theory, write viewers, editors and importers for your OOo documents, no matter what version they were created with.
Nifty features in KDE above Explorer are far too many to mention. Suffice to say that i showed Knoppix to a few windows-bound work colleagues, and had them all in awe of the prettiness (yes, that is actually a sought-after feature) as well as the functionality provided.
I think that some of the problem you may be experiencing is that there really isn't all that much left to do on a desktop for Joe User. Just because there has already been so much innovation in solving the needs of a user.
At the end of the day, anyone can argue any way for any product. One of the biggest arguments i have is ethical, and that's enough reason to carry on testing betas and working in young environments . Also, you have to realise that there are a lot of people for whom price is a big issue: students, for instance, should not be shelling out hard-earned wages to pay for a non-evolving, locked office suite. I'm glad i can offer people like that a very good, free alternative.
Out of pure interest, what does it look like KDE is "catching up" to? A machine installed with the default GNU/Linux/KDE setup has a lot more than one installed with the straight Windows/Explorer setup, both in functionality and in looks. I think that M$ are the ones who should be playing catch-up...
"Right now,OOo is just copying MS Office and isn't really doing anything innovative or new."
;p
whaaaaat? Have you actually bothered to take a little look at Open Office? Your comment would definately suggest not! Yes, there are similarities, and the most prominent reason would simply be that there will be no user acceptance of an office suite that totally breaks the mold: Joesephine Secretary has been using M$ Word & Excel for ages, and she's not going to even bother if she can't use the interface like she's used to. And, let's face it, the M$ Office interfaces are rather well laid out, which almost makes up for the price tag (more than a month's salary for an average person here (south africa) to buy the full version of Office from a regular retailer), the annoying assistant (which, strangely enough, i have heard of some people getting quite upset about *missing* after techies disabled on install out of kindness!) and morphing document standards. Well, maybe not
The point is also that OOo is *younger* than M$ office and is trying to break into the userspace occupied by junkies addicted to expensive software. Also, i don't see useful integrations like pdf output support in M$ Office (yes, i know you can get printer drivers that do this for you, but this is Joesphine User: she's not going to be able to get that without some hand-holding).
OOo is set to take the office arena by even more storm than it generates now. I take my virtual hat off to OOo developers. You are doing an excellent job, and the jump from 1.0.3 to 1.1 was a phenominal leap in performance and functionality that i have not seen in version jumps from M$ Office: i see only a bright future.
Why is M$ Office "so popular" you ask? Simple: People were using it long ago, and became locked into document standards. For the same reasons that the company i work at is now locked into Corel products, except that people do innovate readers for M$ documents, and then M$ just changes the format completely, and even their old products can't cope with the new formats (there's not even a plugin or anything! how rude!), so people shell out again and buy the next version with all it's new bugs and security holes, and the stats report a happy M$ Office mass.
Yes, MSSQL is good. But far too expensive, and the only thing stopping PostgreSQL from taking the world by complete storm is, imho, win32 support, which is coming. Excel provides a lot of functionality yet to be supported in other spreadsheet programs (Especially with macro scripting: in particular, i now have to install M$ Office on a spare box so i can rip the IP out of a spreadsheet's internal code for a client who wants something a bit more solid to sell), but i can see that's not far off: Gnumeric and OOo are doing fairly good jobs now, and the road only l eads upward.
I've heard this "no one innovates like M$" bull for far too long. For a company that has billions of dollars, thousands of developers and many many years in the industry, i would hope that they manage to steal^H^H^H^H^Hinnovate ideas properly by now. And for every success, there are a lot of dropouts (need i mention Bob?) -- Microsoft has the resources to fund, launch, and quickly sweep under the carpet their many failures. They take more shots: of course they get a few. But if you have a close look at a lot of M$ stuff, it's not all that "innovative" -- it's just the first time that it's aggressively marketed to Joe Public, who runs Win32 because that's how his machine was sold to him.
Hardware accelleration in a wm/gui? wait for e17, my friend: it will most likely only be ready at about the same time as longhorn tho ):
The entire point i think is that i see a lot of innovation and worthwhile, hard work taking place in the *nix arena, and remove (once again) my virtual hat to the coders in the arena. Never give up just because some spawn of the Dark Lord (uncle Bill) tells you that "there's nothing new under the sun" that hasn't come from M$