...are almost never related to the desktop as such. For example, two of my headaches right now on my dad's machine is Flash
This is a annoyance for me too. Right now I'm using Codeweaver's crossover to run the Windows Flash plugin (it actually uses ALSA then, and I can set which soundcard to use in winecfg).
and embedded WMV, there's a lot of news clips and other stuff he'd like to watch.
Recently the support in mplayer and VLC for wmv9 and MMS streaming have been improved greatly thanks to the ffmpeg project. You might want to try the latest VLC and it's plugin.
Same goes for almost every piece of proprietary crap I have to deal with
I have to agree that there seem to be continuous problems with all this proprietary crap.
In KDE, you can't just install a kde app. It's part of kdebasekitchensink. And there are odd dependencies all over.
Not really. Just dependencies on KDE libraries that can be shared memory wise. My old Pentium 3 laptop is faster using KDE 3.5.5 and KDE apps than using XFCE4 and a bunch of GTK applications (I notice redrawing on GTK applications for one, and they respond slower).
? klauncher,kdeinit,kded launched just to run a terminal ??
Yes, the beauty of it, is that everything is almost reusable in KDE which helps create applications that take less memory and develop them faster.
If there is a need for daemons running for, printing, sound, mounting or whatever, these should all be started at boot time, not as part of running the desktop.
Provided they're actually used outside of the desktop, yes. Otherwise that's just bloat in my opinion.
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
Requesting source of 'marketshare' statistics please.
"How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?"
If it isn't easy. I blame the developers/company for this (I don't own a copy of Quake 3).
Installing Unreal Tournament for me is just inserting the CD, double clicking the.run file, then you're given a graphical installer, which just requires you to click "begin install" to get it installed (then you can run it from the menu of your WM/DE).
don't complain when hardware companies don't bother to release drivers, or other software manufacturers don't port their products over to Linux.
Mac users do this more than Linux users actually.
You can't have it both ways. If you want stuff to "work" on Linux, you need to get a large enough user base to make it worth developers while. Of course, in order to get that user base, you need to start making stuff work on Linux.
Example: Office software
Working fine here.
The standard for office document formats is Microsoft Office. It doesn't matter what any ISO or RFC claims. To the extent that software cannot open, view, and save a document or spreadsheet from Office and to Office, it is not compliant with the standard. In layman's terms, that means it's broke.
Huh? The software I have installed can open, view, save a document and a spreadsheet to and from Microsoft office. Why are you spreading FUD?
Another example: software installation
Any time a command line is required for a standard install of software, the installer is broken. The process should be double-click, next, I Agree, next, next, finish(maybe one or two more or fewer nexts as required).
We have this already on Linux. Why are you spreading FUD?
Another news flash: Windows is free (as in beer) for 90% of its users. It comes pre-installed on your computer. And the computer may actually be cheaper than a similar model with Linux installed, which means that Linux is actually (*gasp*) more expensive than Windows.
I've only noticed such schemes from Dell. I don't buy from them for other reasons. However if you want a Linux system, try a real Linux vendor like System76.
I believe the "free software" community is truly on the verge of becoming systematically self-destructive (if it's not there already).
I consider this more FUD.
Consider the latest Debian drama where people were actually paid to do some work. The Horror!!
Debian isn't really a distribution you would see average Joe using. I also don't see how people falling out over issues is unique to the "free software community" either. Nor do I see how this means the "free software community" is self-destructive.
There are plenty of examples of free software developers who are getting paid which isn't being argued over.
If linux people want windows joe-blow, and the real question to ask is "do you REALLY?", to adopt linux then it is going to be more about the simplicity of the distro than what windows manager is used.
Wrong. To get average joe to adopt Linux, all one has to-do is make sure they sell Linux systems in shops, not Windows.
Why does everyone here overlook the fact that a default install of a modern distro can't play mp3s, flash, and basically all video formats (like someone said earlier: it doesn't matter whose fault this is.)
You can buy Linux distributions with said support out of the box if you don't want to-do it yourself (see commercial versions of SuSE Linux and Mandriva Linux).
I've used Linux for years and I still don't bother trying to get any of this working, never mind getting it to work smoothly with stuff embedded in web pages.
For me, it's editing a text file, once. Then I can install whatever I need.
I know most of it is theoretically possible, but once you're hacking autoconf files and manually setting LD_LIBRARY paths it's beyond what many people want to deal with.
For me, it's just been knowing which packages to install.
The lack of a diverse array of superfriendly, fast end-user applications and games that you can buy for Linux off-the-shelf at OfficeMax, Staples and OfficeDepot
I've never even heard of Officemax, Staples and OfficeDepot. But they do sell Unreal Tournament, Quake , OpenOffice.org in the local stores here which support Linux (Windows version also in the same box).
The X Windows foundation
What's wrong with it? It's certainly not speed.. Because UT, Second life, hell World of Warcraft under Wine is faster than under Windows, OSX.
The lack of more closely integrated OpenGL with both the window manager and the graphics card driver
Isn't that one of the goals of Beryl?
The X Windows foundation
Sorry. I'm at a loss what's wrong with it.
X is great when you want graphics over a network, but it will always be mediocre used for a desktop. A successful Linux desktop must be next generation, not last generation.
Seems to work really well here locally.
Sure, X can be enhanced with "work around" features to bypass TCP/IP when the client and server are both in the same box
Unix sockets aren't a workaround at all.
but not without performance cost compared to something like an XBox or a Playstation II, which is the kind of GUI performance you need to at least appear to be "next generation" in comparison with XP/Vista...
I honestly thought the X-box, PS2 performances were crap for the hardware they had.
I actually spent a couple of years using Linux as my primary desktop at home but I don't anymore
How many years ago was that anyway?
as I ended up dual booting into W2K and then ended up spending all of my time in W2K running the apps and even developing some OpenGL programs,
There is better OpenGL performance under Linux, it's quite obvious when you run games and look at their FPS. Let's not forget that Windows is still using le olde OpenGL 1.5.
As much as I hate Microsoft, even W2K beats out KDE and Gnome on the two factors that are the most important-- graphic application availability, and performance.
I wouldn't be using KDE 3.5 if it wasn't faster than Windows. I hated waiting for dialogs to redraw when I was maxing out my tiny memory, waiting for file open/save dialogs to actually display a folder, waiting for the entire desktop (Taskbar, desktop, explorer in general) to unfreeze because I tried to access a file share (which ran into some problems, because destination computer was just rebooting or network being slow because it was a VPN connection).
Apple has a proven track record when it comes to security updates,
Proven, how?
I've read articles in the past that mentioned Apple was often slower than Microsoft at releasing critical updates. The Linux communities being faster than Microsoft often at releasing critical security updates.
If you don't have Office compatibility, nobody's going to install your program.
I would.
The sad fact is that MS Office and its variants are on a huge number of PCs out there, and as long as you have any kind of need to interoperate with other people, you absolutely need to have that ability.
I used to send documents to people, that were really rtf files, just renamed to.doc. I wrote once a engine on a website that created invoices in text format, but used the extension.doc, which opened up just fine in Word.
It means that you have the option of reading documents that people send you in.DOC format
Heh.. There are so many.doc viewers out there already.
Besides, novices aren't really exposed to ACLs all that often. If they are, something else is wrong, because on a personal computer, there are no other "entities" that need access to files, so ACLs aren't terribly used anyway, unless of course your novices know what changing the rights for IWAM_DS261841 might do, and in the workgroup environment, if you have a novice managing your fileserver security, you deserve whatever comes of it.
Guess you've never seen a 'family' computer.
In practice, I've taught users to share files on unix and to share files on windows, and believe it or not, you can tell novices "to share a file with everyone type ``ln filename/public''" and they'll get it right 100% of the time, but you say "now open//files/public in a new window, now resize them so they're not fullscreen, okay, now hold alt and drag from one to the other, and then stop using the original and only edit on the server" (etc), and you'll find them holding shift, or trying all kinds of other things.
I've managed to get people who aren't really computer literate to use ACLs from the security preferences tab under Windows, without teaching them. They've figured out themselves how to deny/allow specific groups and users. I haven't even had to tell them that deny takes presidence over allow, since the system warns them about it.
Doing the same with Unix extra/user/group/other permissions... Well -- even I have problems doing that. Allowing all users, but denying a specific user? I actually have to think very hard on the best way to-do that.
NTFS ACLs are confusing. As useful as they may be, real human beings don't know about them or care about them. You know, the kinds of real human beings that use workstations.
I do think they're easier for a novice to understand than Unix's extra/user/group/other permissions.
Sure, it says "Server" in the name but it works just fine as a desktop OS too.
Except most anti-virus software (including ones you paid for) refuse to install on a server version of windows. Wanting you to pay a premium for the version that runs on the server.
The basics about that webpage is that the developer has already made the search engine plug-in for you to download.
Which is part of Firefox, Seamonkey and a bunch of other browsers. Did you even read the frontpage?
So you still need to be a developer to publish out the search engine to the public.
It's a simple piece of javascript to just make a link that adds a search engine (I've done it myself for Wiki search engines). Not sure why you'd need a developer to use a cut'n'paste javascript in a webpage.
Show me a provider with similar costs and similar paying schemes (ie: not having to pay monthly to keep the account, free pc2pc through said gateway), while having solutions to get around very restrictive firewalls for SIP, while providing a very decent call quality at low bandwith, please.
I'm having trouble locating one on that website you gave.
At the risk of asking a dumb question, how do you specify a user agent? Is there an easy way of doing this?
Konqueror: Setting -> Configure Konqueror -> Browser Identification -> New -> When browsing the following site: Domain.com Use the following identification:
Opera, while on the site: Tools -> Quick preferences -> Edit site preferences -> Network -> Identify as
Then for that specific domain, you'll have that browser agent.
SANE still lists my hardware (Microtek Scanmaker 4850 scanner) as unsupported, and Microtek doesn't return my e-mails.
To say the least, I'm actually suprised you have scanner hardware that doesn't work.
Nothing much I can say to that. Every USB scanner I've tried at work and previous schools I've worked at have always worked for me (which is probably 30+ different models which weren't bought with Linux in mind).
I notice that Firefox has sometimes takes quite a bit of memory (although never got to 1GB). But still no indications of any memory leaks. I've tried to replicate these issues in the past, rather than saying, "It's got a memory leak" without any evidence on bugzilla. But so far I haven't found any, at all.
Could you please post the evidence you found of the actual memory leak. Preferably a dump of some sort that we can look at and verify ourselves the actual 'leak'.
The only time I actually had a memory leak problem, was a issue with the Flash plugin under Windows. But I solved that by updating Flash.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't agree to the license used in Virtual PC, so I can't test it under that.
If it isn't easy. I blame the developers/company for this (I don't own a copy of Quake 3).
Installing Unreal Tournament for me is just inserting the CD, double clicking the
I've only noticed such schemes from Dell. I don't buy from them for other reasons. However if you want a Linux system, try a real Linux vendor like System76.
I consider this more FUD.Debian isn't really a distribution you would see average Joe using. I also don't see how people falling out over issues is unique to the "free software community" either. Nor do I see how this means the "free software community" is self-destructive.
There are plenty of examples of free software developers who are getting paid which isn't being argued over.
Actually, a few companies off that list didn't make Windows ports of some games.
What's wrong with that?Wait for Wine to support it I guess. Although I'm pretty happy with my current collection.
Seems to work really well here locally.
Unix sockets aren't a workaround at all.I honestly thought the X-box, PS2 performances were crap for the hardware they had.
How many years ago was that anyway?
There is better OpenGL performance under Linux, it's quite obvious when you run games and look at their FPS. Let's not forget that Windows is still using le olde OpenGL 1.5.
I wouldn't be using KDE 3.5 if it wasn't faster than Windows. I hated waiting for dialogs to redraw when I was maxing out my tiny memory, waiting for file open/save dialogs to actually display a folder, waiting for the entire desktop (Taskbar, desktop, explorer in general) to unfreeze because I tried to access a file share (which ran into some problems, because destination computer was just rebooting or network being slow because it was a VPN connection).
However, the question remains. Proven, how?
I've read articles in the past that mentioned Apple was often slower than Microsoft at releasing critical updates. The Linux communities being faster than Microsoft often at releasing critical security updates.
Heh.. There are so many
Doing the same with Unix extra/user/group/other permissions... Well -- even I have problems doing that. Allowing all users, but denying a specific user? I actually have to think very hard on the best way to-do that.
I'm having trouble locating one on that website you gave.
Konqueror: Setting -> Configure Konqueror -> Browser Identification -> New ->
When browsing the following site: Domain.com
Use the following identification:
Opera, while on the site: Tools -> Quick preferences -> Edit site preferences -> Network -> Identify as
Then for that specific domain, you'll have that browser agent.
Firefox: User agent switcher (has a easy toolbar button).
Nothing much I can say to that. Every USB scanner I've tried at work and previous schools I've worked at have always worked for me (which is probably 30+ different models which weren't bought with Linux in mind).
Got Linux, got Firefox, surfed web.
I notice that Firefox has sometimes takes quite a bit of memory (although never got to 1GB). But still no indications of any memory leaks. I've tried to replicate these issues in the past, rather than saying, "It's got a memory leak" without any evidence on bugzilla. But so far I haven't found any, at all.
Could you please post the evidence you found of the actual memory leak. Preferably a dump of some sort that we can look at and verify ourselves the actual 'leak'.
The only time I actually had a memory leak problem, was a issue with the Flash plugin under Windows. But I solved that by updating Flash.