KDE has a lot of nice things, but some of us just want a taskbar, a start menu and a system tray. The fancy new desktop things in KDE don't interest me all since I don't even have a desktop turned on. Same with the fancy new graphics (I like Clearlooks) and programs (I used to like Amarok, but Banshee suddenly became more attractive with KDE 4).
You do know that you don't have to use "fancy new desktop things" and "fancy new graphics" just because KDE provides them, right? You can, um, turn them off?
I did run into some 'social' subsystem (akonadi or some such) that actually launches a MySQL instance with a 50MiB (and growing) seed database to track one thing or another (or something; I haven't the faintest idea what it's trying to do.)
Akonadi is basically an abstraction layer for all PIM data (e-mail, contact info, calendar, to-do list, etc). As long as you're not using KDE's PIM programs, you won't miss it.
First it was that KDE basically made it's ui a mix of vista and macos to have a selling point and rushed out of the door limping.
Having used Vista and OS X, and as a KDE user, I feel very comfortable in saying that KDE "basically" did nothing of the sort, and you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Now Gnome is all like 'we want our own plasma shell just because'.
It's interesting how GNOME are always playing catch-up, isn't it?
Tried 4.5 on a new distro (Sabayon) install and was very disappointed. Dolphin was frustrating to use, and most other things were too just too buggy and unstable.
Interesting. I've been using KDE4 on Fedora as my main system since about Christmas 2008, and I haven't found it to be "buggy and unstable" since about mid-2009. What particular bugs have you encountered? Might be something to do with my hardware setup that's making it more stable for me...
The Gnome version just worked.
Do you mean, "I want KDE to act exactly like GNOME, but it doesn't, so it's clearly inferior"? Because I see that a lot. Last time I used GNOME it was exactly as buggy and unusable as KDE, just in different places.;-)
Still KDE is missing integration for FF, Chrome, OO.
Um. Surely you mean, "Still FF, Chrome, OO is missing integration for KDE"? Last time I checked, it was unreasonable to expect KDE developers to go out and patch KDE integration into [insert your every favourite application here].
I think OS community does not have enough resources to maintain different applications for several desktop, or maintain several desktops.
As long as people are able to choose to do something different, there will be people who do choose to something different. As soon as you mandate the One True Desktop Environment (for example) you lose most of the power of Free software.
Competition is good, but linux needs standards to make it easier for software and hardware manufactures to support it.
Surely having an interface consistent with 99.9% of the other applications running on your system is more useful than keeping up with the Jones's latest patent-encumbered different-for-the-sake-of-being-different UI fad?
As an Emacs user, I beg to differ.
You misunderstand. 99.9% of the other applications running on my system is GNU Emacs. It's the best editor, after all!
So: If I install LO work, how well will it work with DOC files? All my coworkers are using Word 2003 and I don't want to cause any disruption by sending them funky files.
Things interoperate pretty well, in my experience, particularly if you are using exactly the same fonts. In some cases, LO/OOo seem to manage to open.doc files more reliably than MSO, which seems bizarre; might be due to the way that the import/export filters are implemented in each.
How bloody clueless. This is like questioning the fact that we have more than one set of automobile designs and assembly plants, or more than one political party, or multiple soft drink bottling and distribution networks.
Clearly the submitter believes that a planned economy is the best economy!
Why would anyone want one of those? Surely having an interface consistent with 99.9% of the other applications running on your system is more useful than keeping up with the Jones's latest patent-encumbered different-for-the-sake-of-being-different UI fad?
Everybody knows any P2P protocol is strictly used for pirating, so then it's alright!
Those small companies and users are probably infringing something somewhere too, so they're all criminals anyways.
Yargh! Those lilly-livered scallywags wot call themselves "Producers" are pedalin' stolen wares foisted from real Content Producers under legal duress! Aye!
This is pretty much correct.
The true artisans be shackled and made to slave away in concerts and promo gigs to make ends meat.
As is this. It's well-documented that recording industry accounting practices are designed to ensure that artists never succeed in paying back their advances, no matter how much revenue is obtained by the industry from "peddlin'" (n.b. spelling) their work.
I say we smartly keel-haul the dirty bilge rats! Nay, lay siege and claim the bountiful media booty, make like Robin Hood with the lot of it, then scuttle the lot of 'em!
For the sake of clarity, the Pirate Party UK endorses the former strategy, but not the latter.
I come up with a server structure and software than ensures good performance on every server streaming videos and decide to spend money improving it and creating a version that can be rolled out to any setup.
I wouldn't say that's "part of this implementation of VP8" even if you squint really hard and look at it at a funny angle, so you should be fine.
The level of dis-ingenuity and sophism represented by the name of that "so-called" standard used to make me almost nauseous with disgust. Maybe I've got hardened to it by now.
Does any vendor properly implement the standard? Unless you have 2 vendors that do an honest attempt to implement it then I would say it isn't a viable standard.
The standard is published, anyone can implement, the fact that they choose not to doesn't make it not a standard. FOSS, Open Source, Freedom...all that rhetoric... sounds more like 'it's only a standard if it's developed by our community, not if it's by someone we don't like'
Hmm. The problem is this: you have one standard which is relatively short, re-uses many other well-established standards for which there is existing code that can easily be plugged in, is clearly broken down into different levels of functionality, and for which there are already several pre-existing interoperable implementations for which you can get source code so you can see how it's done.
On the other hand, you have a second standard which extends to several thousand pages, defines its own incompatible versions of a bunch of stuff for which there are good pre-existing standards, exists under the shadow of a massive cloud of patents that are only licensed for you to use if you completely and accurately implement the specification, requires that you put deliberate bugs in your code to open many files, and for which there is no existing conformant implementation (and the single pre-standardisation implementation is closed-source anyway).
You are writing an open source program to generate nicely-formatted spreadsheet reports from a database. You have a finite amount of time. Which standard would you pick to implement first?
Uhhhh..maybe you didn't get the memo but H.264 works in Firefox now thanks to MSFT.
Can this support be legally packaged and distributed by a Linux or BSD distribution? Does the plugin work on Mac OS X? No? So, no, h.264 does not work in Firefox, it works in Firefox on a single operating system distributed by a single company, maybe, if you install the right plugins.
On the other hand, WebM and Theora are going to be supported on every platform that Firefox runs on. That's a lot more valuable.
H264 is an open standard and if you pay your money you won't be sued by the patent pool.
If you need permission to use it, is it really open? I think that's the main point people seem to disagree on here.
Yes -- this question really cuts to the heart of the issue for me. Personally, I object to describing a standard as "free and open" unless it is possible to write and distribute a GPL implementation in such a way that Linux distributions can safely package and include it. WebM is open (the specifications are available to anyone and anyone is permitted to implement them) and free (anyone can obtain a non-exclusive, perpetual, sub-licensable license to all of the necessary patents).
Video compression is a patent minefield, and indemnity is pretty much an absolute requirement these days if you expect to be taken seriously.
MPEG-LA will not stand behind h.264 with indemnity from patent suits, so clearly your assertion is false and indemnity is not an "absolute requirement... if you expect to be taken seriously."
No matter how far back you get, there's a 0 at the end. That 0 isn't going to get a 1 added to it and start a domino effect to magically make 0.9999... less than 1.
Linguam romanae scio. Latina difficila non est; ego in annis tribus didici.
I know the Roman language.
I would personally translate that as "I know the Romans' language," i.e., "<The language> <of the Romans> <I know>". The Romans' language being, of course, Latin.
The h.264 patents will eventually die, and we'll eventually have a select few codecs which are supported everywhere, and the video tag will thus become like the img tag, and all of these debates will become as irrelevant as the "Don't use GIFs" debates back when the FSF was using JPEGs for everything (since PNG hadn't been invented).
The "Don't use GIFs" debate became irrelevant when the relevant patents lapsed. But I for one am not willing to wait 20 years to be able to assume that the codecs I need for viewing video on the web are available in my Linux distribution's default repositories. Trying to move towards having a patent-unencumbered video standard as the lowest-common-denominator choice for web video seems to be an option that makes good sense. Maybe we can make the "Don't use h.264 debate" irrelevant while the patents are still out there?
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The only real competition KDE has today is XFCE.
KDE has a lot of nice things, but some of us just want a taskbar, a start menu and a system tray. The fancy new desktop things in KDE don't interest me all since I don't even have a desktop turned on. Same with the fancy new graphics (I like Clearlooks) and programs (I used to like Amarok, but Banshee suddenly became more attractive with KDE 4).
You do know that you don't have to use "fancy new desktop things" and "fancy new graphics" just because KDE provides them, right? You can, um, turn them off?
I did run into some 'social' subsystem (akonadi or some such) that actually launches a MySQL instance with a 50MiB (and growing) seed database to track one thing or another (or something; I haven't the faintest idea what it's trying to do.)
Akonadi is basically an abstraction layer for all PIM data (e-mail, contact info, calendar, to-do list, etc). As long as you're not using KDE's PIM programs, you won't miss it.
First it was that KDE basically made it's ui a mix of vista and macos to have a selling point and rushed out of the door limping.
Having used Vista and OS X, and as a KDE user, I feel very comfortable in saying that KDE "basically" did nothing of the sort, and you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Now Gnome is all like 'we want our own plasma shell just because'.
It's interesting how GNOME are always playing catch-up, isn't it?
Tried 4.5 on a new distro (Sabayon) install and was very disappointed. Dolphin was frustrating to use, and most other things were too just too buggy and unstable.
Interesting. I've been using KDE4 on Fedora as my main system since about Christmas 2008, and I haven't found it to be "buggy and unstable" since about mid-2009. What particular bugs have you encountered? Might be something to do with my hardware setup that's making it more stable for me...
The Gnome version just worked.
Do you mean, "I want KDE to act exactly like GNOME, but it doesn't, so it's clearly inferior"? Because I see that a lot. Last time I used GNOME it was exactly as buggy and unusable as KDE, just in different places. ;-)
Still KDE is missing integration for FF, Chrome, OO.
Um. Surely you mean, "Still FF, Chrome, OO is missing integration for KDE"? Last time I checked, it was unreasonable to expect KDE developers to go out and patch KDE integration into [insert your every favourite application here].
I think OS community does not have enough resources to maintain different applications for several desktop, or maintain several desktops.
As long as people are able to choose to do something different, there will be people who do choose to something different. As soon as you mandate the One True Desktop Environment (for example) you lose most of the power of Free software.
Competition is good, but linux needs standards to make it easier for software and hardware manufactures to support it.
What, you mean like POSIX, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and all of these other cross-DE specifications?
Surely having an interface consistent with 99.9% of the other applications running on your system is more useful than keeping up with the Jones's latest patent-encumbered different-for-the-sake-of-being-different UI fad?
As an Emacs user, I beg to differ.
You misunderstand. 99.9% of the other applications running on my system is GNU Emacs. It's the best editor, after all!
The point is that English language doesn't have a word that describes the sense of the project as "Libre" does,
Actually it does and it's a directly derived from the Latin "libre" it's called: Liberty.
That's a noun, "libre" is an adjective. Off the top of my head, I can't think of an adjectival form for "liberty".
So: If I install LO work, how well will it work with DOC files? All my coworkers are using Word 2003 and I don't want to cause any disruption by sending them funky files.
Things interoperate pretty well, in my experience, particularly if you are using exactly the same fonts. In some cases, LO/OOo seem to manage to open .doc files more reliably than MSO, which seems bizarre; might be due to the way that the import/export filters are implemented in each.
How bloody clueless. This is like questioning the fact that we have more than one set of automobile designs and assembly plants, or more than one political party, or multiple soft drink bottling and distribution networks.
Clearly the submitter believes that a planned economy is the best economy!
Did they finally ... give us a ribbon?
Why would anyone want one of those? Surely having an interface consistent with 99.9% of the other applications running on your system is more useful than keeping up with the Jones's latest patent-encumbered different-for-the-sake-of-being-different UI fad?
Everybody knows any P2P protocol is strictly used for pirating, so then it's alright!
Those small companies and users are probably infringing something somewhere too, so they're all criminals anyways.
Yargh! Those lilly-livered scallywags wot call themselves "Producers" are pedalin' stolen wares foisted from real Content Producers under legal duress! Aye!
This is pretty much correct.
The true artisans be shackled and made to slave away in concerts and promo gigs to make ends meat.
As is this. It's well-documented that recording industry accounting practices are designed to ensure that artists never succeed in paying back their advances, no matter how much revenue is obtained by the industry from "peddlin'" (n.b. spelling) their work.
I say we smartly keel-haul the dirty bilge rats! Nay, lay siege and claim the bountiful media booty, make like Robin Hood with the lot of it, then scuttle the lot of 'em!
For the sake of clarity, the Pirate Party UK endorses the former strategy, but not the latter.
Then everyone business and and ISP on the planet could block .riaa resolution, keeping us safe from permanent hearing damage by hearing their content.
FTFY.
I come up with a server structure and software than ensures good performance on every server streaming videos and decide to spend money improving it and creating a version that can be rolled out to any setup.
I wouldn't say that's "part of this implementation of VP8" even if you squint really hard and look at it at a funny angle, so you should be fine.
It irks me every time I read OOXML.
The level of dis-ingenuity and sophism represented by the name of that "so-called" standard used to make me almost nauseous with disgust. Maybe I've got hardened to it by now.
Does any vendor properly implement the standard? Unless you have 2 vendors that do an honest attempt to implement it then I would say it isn't a viable standard.
The standard is published, anyone can implement, the fact that they choose not to doesn't make it not a standard. FOSS, Open Source, Freedom...all that rhetoric... sounds more like 'it's only a standard if it's developed by our community, not if it's by someone we don't like'
Hmm. The problem is this: you have one standard which is relatively short, re-uses many other well-established standards for which there is existing code that can easily be plugged in, is clearly broken down into different levels of functionality, and for which there are already several pre-existing interoperable implementations for which you can get source code so you can see how it's done.
On the other hand, you have a second standard which extends to several thousand pages, defines its own incompatible versions of a bunch of stuff for which there are good pre-existing standards, exists under the shadow of a massive cloud of patents that are only licensed for you to use if you completely and accurately implement the specification, requires that you put deliberate bugs in your code to open many files, and for which there is no existing conformant implementation (and the single pre-standardisation implementation is closed-source anyway).
You are writing an open source program to generate nicely-formatted spreadsheet reports from a database. You have a finite amount of time. Which standard would you pick to implement first?
Yes, but WHATEVER YOU DO. Do NOT apply that to Google and WebM.
More than a single vendor supports WebM, so I don't see what the problem is. Oh wait -- you own an Apple device, don't you?
What kind of standard is a standard if nobody but a single vendor supports it?
Around here, it's called a Microsoft standard...
Sony have a quite a few of those, too. MiniDisc, DAT, ATRAC, Memory Stick, and UMD? So at least 5, off the top of my head.
Uhhhh..maybe you didn't get the memo but H.264 works in Firefox now thanks to MSFT.
Can this support be legally packaged and distributed by a Linux or BSD distribution? Does the plugin work on Mac OS X? No? So, no, h.264 does not work in Firefox, it works in Firefox on a single operating system distributed by a single company, maybe, if you install the right plugins.
On the other hand, WebM and Theora are going to be supported on every platform that Firefox runs on. That's a lot more valuable.
H264 is an open standard and if you pay your money you won't be sued by the patent pool.
If you need permission to use it, is it really open? I think that's the main point people seem to disagree on here.
Yes -- this question really cuts to the heart of the issue for me. Personally, I object to describing a standard as "free and open" unless it is possible to write and distribute a GPL implementation in such a way that Linux distributions can safely package and include it. WebM is open (the specifications are available to anyone and anyone is permitted to implement them) and free (anyone can obtain a non-exclusive, perpetual, sub-licensable license to all of the necessary patents).
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office-formula
Video compression is a patent minefield, and indemnity is pretty much an absolute requirement these days if you expect to be taken seriously.
MPEG-LA will not stand behind h.264 with indemnity from patent suits, so clearly your assertion is false and indemnity is not an "absolute requirement... if you expect to be taken seriously."
0.9999... = 1 - 0.0000... = 1.
No matter how far back you get, there's a 0 at the end. That 0 isn't going to get a 1 added to it and start a domino effect to magically make 0.9999... less than 1.
Wasn't that easy?
Linguam romanae scio. Latina difficila non est; ego in annis tribus didici.
I know the Roman language.
I would personally translate that as "I know the Romans' language," i.e., "<The language> <of the Romans> <I know>". The Romans' language being, of course, Latin.
The h.264 patents will eventually die, and we'll eventually have a select few codecs which are supported everywhere, and the video tag will thus become like the img tag, and all of these debates will become as irrelevant as the "Don't use GIFs" debates back when the FSF was using JPEGs for everything (since PNG hadn't been invented).
The "Don't use GIFs" debate became irrelevant when the relevant patents lapsed. But I for one am not willing to wait 20 years to be able to assume that the codecs I need for viewing video on the web are available in my Linux distribution's default repositories. Trying to move towards having a patent-unencumbered video standard as the lowest-common-denominator choice for web video seems to be an option that makes good sense. Maybe we can make the "Don't use h.264 debate" irrelevant while the patents are still out there?
Taught her how to use even a PCB layout software in a couple days, amazing.
Which PCB layout package was it, if you don't mind me asking?