At this point moving to BSD would indeed be a breath of fresh air for the open source software community. A lot of the classic UNIX goodness is still there but also plenty of modern features. There's now also PC-BSD for those who want to get a desktop running quickly.
Also make a minimalistic website with the only VLC cone logo with a drop shadow, along with a text "Simple. Beautiful. Elegant. Media the way you want it." Then just a big download button.
(My personal foible: I stop and start videos a lot, and hunting with the slider to find out where I left off is a royal pain, so I googled "how to make VLC remember position". Big mistake. VLC doesn't implement this simple feature, but you can get a plugin that does.
I encountered the same problem and VLC does seem to have some kind of built-in bookmark feature, but in my case the "go to bookmark" hotkeys did not work.
Heh, good point. People are quick to boast "naanaananaa, didn't fall for this scam, I'm so smart" about these cables. But Apple bakes the snake oil in a bit more discretely and nerds are happy to pay the extra stardust price.
Hard to prove, but still good thinking. Just tapping the handful of big trackers would indeed give NSA quite nice eagle-eye view of what's happening in torrent traffic.
Umm, no. The trackers do not transmit bulk data, but only metadata (file names, other client IP addresses, etc.). The peers themselves still have to provide the ability to let other clients to connect to them.
The real problem of an uncentralized (non-BitTorrent) P2P network would be that you need to know an IP of at least one active peer to "bootstrap" you inside the network. That's why the eDonkey client back in the day shipped with a small initial peer list.
It's a bit surprising that media cartels have attacked against the torrent indexes such as TPB, but have not tried to take down the trackers that much. Not yet, at least. 30 million connected clients, that's mindblowing.
Given the propensity for american media cartels to levy disproportionately heavy lawswuits for content, sometimes in the billions or trillions of US dollars, most people use magnet links.
Take a look at a Magnet link, it has a list of trackers right in the URL.
Can we at least get an optional, properly functioning, vsync'ed, tear-free compositor built in to XFCE sometime before the decade is out? That's probably the only reason I don't use XFCE instead of something like KDE or Cinnamon. KDE, Cinnamon, and even the abomination (Gnome 3) have all solved the screen tear problem, but not XFCE.
Yeah, I rant about that occasionally. From Bountysource I found this item planning DRI3 Present support for the compositor. The hypothesis is that it would provide proper vertical backing for application image buffers. Looking at the comments, the code has been in place in Xfwm for quite a while already. Whether it actually works remains to be seen. Was the work finished and tested properly? Is the driver support in place and functional? I certainly still hope that this implementation solves the problem.
15 years ago, most distros did not work out of the box on most *current* hardware then.
That is not the point here. Although I agree that hardware support is these days very good in Linux. It does not cause big problems for me.
The point is that in relation to Windows, today Linux is generally not "significantly more lightweight" like it was in the past. All those people running Xfce can run full modern Windows 10 on the same machines without any problems. I'm not saying that they would necessarily want to, but perfomance-wise it would work fine.
I use XFCE and have for several years. I believe the Supreme Penguin uses it too.
In a video from 6 months ago where Supreme Penguin shows his treadmill desk setup, a GNOME3 desktop can be seen. It's true that he did use XFCE at some point though.
Um, just so we're clear, you're saying that you want desktop effects on an old machine - Linux is crap because it can't make your old computer do all the things that your new computer can do?
Yes, exactly. Because somehow Windows manages to do it just fine.
Uh... my guess would be ElementaryOS somehow didn't auto-detect your graphics card right and you were using X with VESA.
I verified that and it is properly using the official Intel graphics driver.
Dude, Linux runs on the Raspberry Pi.
The desktop is quite crusty on R-Pi too. It's fine for embedded/server use though, and I do not have complaints about those scenarios. It will be interesting to see how Windows 10 performs on R-Pi 2.:)
Use XFCE on old hardware. And new hardware; it's the current king of traditional desktop interfaces in the window manager world.
XFCE hasn't seen a new release in almost 3 years, the compositor tears (because it is based on XRender), and it does not have any desktop effects. Windows on the same hardware runs cool zoom animations and translucency without a hitch. Other than that, XFCE seems relatively glitch-free, so I agree that it's one of the best choices.
Re bugs, my experience has been Linux is pretty bug-free. The only thing I'm running into trouble with is X deciding to segfault every week or so on my work machine.
Now you are just cheerleading.:) You can't realistically say that your experience is "pretty bug-free" if X (in practice: whole desktop) crashes roughly weekly.
Compared to what? I can't even run modern MacOS or Windows on my old Macbooks and PCs, and Linux runs circles around the old versions of the OSes that came with them by default. Oh wait, you're joking. So hard to tell when people mistake Ubuntu for Linux around here.
Just compared the latest preview version of Elementary OS and the latest preview version of Windows 10 on a notebook with C1D and GMA950.
Elementary OS had horrible tearing, choppy and slow animations, and popped up a "System problem detected" right on the first boot.
Windows 10 worked fully smoothly with all the bells and whistles.
Linux is not the way to breathe life into an old computer anymore. That time was 15 years ago. These days you can make an old PC run Linux fast only by using a simple window manager and turning off all the desktop effects. Even then you would be left dealing with loads of bugs everywhere.
This. He might be looking for a single monolithic program, but his problem is actually completely solvable with clever usage of UNIX. It's the perfect platform for creating a customized pipeline for this kind of task.
Slashdot Mirror
At this point moving to BSD would indeed be a breath of fresh air for the open source software community. A lot of the classic UNIX goodness is still there but also plenty of modern features. There's now also PC-BSD for those who want to get a desktop running quickly.
It's funny because SystemD integration of VLC has actually begun.
Also make a minimalistic website with the only VLC cone logo with a drop shadow, along with a text "Simple. Beautiful. Elegant. Media the way you want it." Then just a big download button.
(My personal foible: I stop and start videos a lot, and hunting with the slider to find out where I left off is a royal pain, so I googled "how to make VLC remember position". Big mistake. VLC doesn't implement this simple feature, but you can get a plugin that does.
I encountered the same problem and VLC does seem to have some kind of built-in bookmark feature, but in my case the "go to bookmark" hotkeys did not work.
I would test a nightly build and then report your experience to bug #11060.
Heh, good point. People are quick to boast "naanaananaa, didn't fall for this scam, I'm so smart" about these cables. But Apple bakes the snake oil in a bit more discretely and nerds are happy to pay the extra stardust price.
Hard to prove, but still good thinking. Just tapping the handful of big trackers would indeed give NSA quite nice eagle-eye view of what's happening in torrent traffic.
Umm, no. The trackers do not transmit bulk data, but only metadata (file names, other client IP addresses, etc.). The peers themselves still have to provide the ability to let other clients to connect to them.
The real problem of an uncentralized (non-BitTorrent) P2P network would be that you need to know an IP of at least one active peer to "bootstrap" you inside the network. That's why the eDonkey client back in the day shipped with a small initial peer list.
It's a bit surprising that media cartels have attacked against the torrent indexes such as TPB, but have not tried to take down the trackers that much. Not yet, at least. 30 million connected clients, that's mindblowing.
Given the propensity for american media cartels to levy disproportionately heavy lawswuits for content, sometimes in the billions or trillions of US dollars, most people use magnet links.
Take a look at a Magnet link, it has a list of trackers right in the URL.
I fully agree.
The Xfwm's current compositor is based on XRender and thus generally cannot guarantee vertical synchronization.
Can we at least get an optional, properly functioning, vsync'ed, tear-free compositor built in to XFCE sometime before the decade is out? That's probably the only reason I don't use XFCE instead of something like KDE or Cinnamon. KDE, Cinnamon, and even the abomination (Gnome 3) have all solved the screen tear problem, but not XFCE.
Yeah, I rant about that occasionally. From Bountysource I found this item planning DRI3 Present support for the compositor. The hypothesis is that it would provide proper vertical backing for application image buffers. Looking at the comments, the code has been in place in Xfwm for quite a while already. Whether it actually works remains to be seen. Was the work finished and tested properly? Is the driver support in place and functional? I certainly still hope that this implementation solves the problem.
Sadly I see a lot of those here in Finland too. Nice little machines but the owners keep getting calls from 2005 which wants its CPU power back.
15 years ago, most distros did not work out of the box on most *current* hardware then.
That is not the point here. Although I agree that hardware support is these days very good in Linux. It does not cause big problems for me.
The point is that in relation to Windows, today Linux is generally not "significantly more lightweight" like it was in the past. All those people running Xfce can run full modern Windows 10 on the same machines without any problems. I'm not saying that they would necessarily want to, but perfomance-wise it would work fine.
I use XFCE and have for several years. I believe the Supreme Penguin uses it too.
In a video from 6 months ago where Supreme Penguin shows his treadmill desk setup, a GNOME3 desktop can be seen. It's true that he did use XFCE at some point though.
Um, just so we're clear, you're saying that you want desktop effects on an old machine - Linux is crap because it can't make your old computer do all the things that your new computer can do?
Yes, exactly. Because somehow Windows manages to do it just fine.
He is clearly overplaying it so probably just joking. :)
Uh ... my guess would be ElementaryOS somehow didn't auto-detect your graphics card right and you were using X with VESA.
I verified that and it is properly using the official Intel graphics driver.
Dude, Linux runs on the Raspberry Pi.
The desktop is quite crusty on R-Pi too. It's fine for embedded/server use though, and I do not have complaints about those scenarios. It will be interesting to see how Windows 10 performs on R-Pi 2. :)
Use XFCE on old hardware. And new hardware; it's the current king of traditional desktop interfaces in the window manager world.
XFCE hasn't seen a new release in almost 3 years, the compositor tears (because it is based on XRender), and it does not have any desktop effects. Windows on the same hardware runs cool zoom animations and translucency without a hitch. Other than that, XFCE seems relatively glitch-free, so I agree that it's one of the best choices.
Re bugs, my experience has been Linux is pretty bug-free. The only thing I'm running into trouble with is X deciding to segfault every week or so on my work machine.
Now you are just cheerleading. :) You can't realistically say that your experience is "pretty bug-free" if X (in practice: whole desktop) crashes roughly weekly.
The screen has crappy resolution - less than 10% more pixels than those old Windows desktops displayed in 800x600.
Except that it's a 4.5" display. For that size of screen, 960x540 is a deluxe resolution.
Netbooks were brilliant and were hot sellers before Microsoft decided they should run Windows CE instead of Linux
Windows CE? Most of them ran Windows XP or Windows 7 Starter.
True, but in Slashdot you're supposed to be a mindless zombie who automatically hates everything SystemD-related.
Compared to what? I can't even run modern MacOS or Windows on my old Macbooks and PCs, and Linux runs circles around the old versions of the OSes that came with them by default. Oh wait, you're joking. So hard to tell when people mistake Ubuntu for Linux around here.
Just compared the latest preview version of Elementary OS and the latest preview version of Windows 10 on a notebook with C1D and GMA950.
Elementary OS had horrible tearing, choppy and slow animations, and popped up a "System problem detected" right on the first boot.
Windows 10 worked fully smoothly with all the bells and whistles.
Linux is not the way to breathe life into an old computer anymore. That time was 15 years ago. These days you can make an old PC run Linux fast only by using a simple window manager and turning off all the desktop effects. Even then you would be left dealing with loads of bugs everywhere.
Why not?
This. He might be looking for a single monolithic program, but his problem is actually completely solvable with clever usage of UNIX. It's the perfect platform for creating a customized pipeline for this kind of task.