We tend not to like IDEs very much.
There's an awful lot of them, to say you don't like then, there's the Qt IDE, Sun's IDE, KDevelop, Anjuta...
Because it doesn't?
Um, look beyond the word processor. The spreadsheet is pretty rough and the Access-clone is terrible.
I'd put that all under the category of "most of us don't like getting our hands held" I mean, who would use access when you can make a mysql database with web front-end for entering/querying data etc?
Same deal with ide's, some people use them, a lot don't. I use emacs to code, while emacs is a heavily featured editor, the only real thing I use in comparison to even notepad would be the syntax highlighting. I know what I'm doing usually, I don't want silly bloated tools to get in my way.
I have semi-frequently posted about my views on changing copyright (not getting rid of it, just more sane time limits of 15-30 years from publication) I haven't in this article, however I usually tend to get modded up. It's all in the justification.
because libraries have been around since long before this extreme copyright length, and usage restriction business. Any attempt at barring all libraries would meet extreme resistance.
Completely agree, it should be noted a lot of people here seem to think fedora is a 'desktop' os in the same way as ubuntu etc etc. I'd argue that it's an os 'for developers, by developers'.
Since it's so bleeding edge, when things sometimes unnoticably break upstream, they can break with fedora too, if you have a lot of experience it's usually not even an issue though and you can fix it yourself
I think somewhere in between the realm of 15 to 30 years is more than reasonable. If you have not made money on something by the time your 50 that you made when you were 20 then it is better served for the public good.
Steamboat willie came out in 1928, that that particular cartoon is still in copyright 80 years later is rediculous.
It is essentially depriving the public of public domain, copyright is given as an incentive to authors of works to make works, but can you honestly say that it gives benefit to you 70 years after your death?
Most of the problem people have with copyright nowadays is all about the absurd duration.
To be fair, I've been a linux user over a decade, and upon returning to uni one of the first programming courses I had was.net with microsoft everywhere. So I setup a development environment with monodevelop and mono.
Development has been rather painless so far at least for CLI programs, and the resulting binaries run with the.net framework aswell as mono, on linux, windows and mac.
The moment I no longer need to use c# I'll instantly go back to c++ and c coding. Even in instances where your uni 'makes' you use microsoft stuff, linux is so flexible nowadays that there is almost always some way to do it in linux without them being any the wiser.
What do you do with the people who claim to be ill or have something wrong with them that are really just paranoid though?
I see people with nothing really wrong with them go to the doctors all the time complaining of almost completely irrelevant things. If there's nothing wrong with them, a correct diagnosis would basically yield a 'go home, nothings wrong with you' instead of being given a myriad of drugs and charged for the affair.
My logic is a socialized system would be more likely to tell it as it is than to try to make the patient 'happy'
using non rechargable batteries I get between 20-25 hours of play time on a wiimote, rechargables only about 8 hours but they are rechargable so meh. Is that really so bad?
I also used dmix with alsa for quite a long time, waited about two years after pulseaudio was introduced to my distro to switch to it, and I think my timing was about right, they seem to have solved most of the issues.
while I agree pulseaudio can be retarded at times, I don't see why people are having so many problems in general.
I think you mistook what your parent meant, in regards to pick one he was meaning for the developer to pick one, not the user. The user could have them all installed if they like.
Better hope it supports your package system, and better hope it was made for Gnome or GTK or whatever you're using
gtk and qt applications can run on the one machine simultaneously, so not an issue. As for sound if the distro has it's shit together it should support pretty much all of the different standards out there out of the box.
creating a simple tarball or zip file which has a linux program that runs on almost any distro that has the same cpu arch is a lot easier than many people make it out to be (yes I've done it).
more than 5% perhaps, but that is still not exactly important enough for everyone to know what your on about, geeks in london, france, spain, italy, germany, australia etc all would justifiably have no idea about this memorial day business. Combined they would have easily have 2/3rds of the worlds geeks also.
Err no! Rampant piracy would kill the PS1 since software houses would not make games for this console because they would not make any money.
Even pirates sometimes buy games that they really like, even if they have it pirated. And I did not say that everyone pirated, just a considerable number. Not initially of course though, since when the console was new console and cd burner prices were high.
You are correct in that CD's were much cheaper than cartridges at the time but the CD could hold over 600MB compared to the Nintendo Cartridge of approx 30MB and many gaming houses made full use of that.
Nintendo just had different values than sony, load times were never an issue on N64 games for a reason. Although some ps1 games had a nice minigame or two while the actual game was loading, both neat and pretty pathetic.
If we look at the PS2 which everyone will have to admit was an incredible success.
Even though technically it was the weakest console hardware in many respects. Inertia counts for a lot. The success of the ps1 had almost guaranteed the success of the ps2, unless they botched it which they didn't.
In regards to the ps3, it was/is essentially a stillborn. All that effort for such lackluster sales. So much put in for a return that was less than stellar. Two competitors started to see things swing their way, and it would be hard to argue this hasn't hurt sonys game devision to some extent.
It could well be argued that the PS1 was the run-away success that it was because of exclusive Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid franchises. For the PS2, it was much the same, except that it had then gained Grand Theft Auto (yes, I know it came to the PC and 360 later, but by then it really was a one horse race).
PS1 succeeded because of rampant piracy, then network effects. every man and his dog mod chipped his ps1, and bought a few legit games and downloaded a lot. Also legitimate game prices, ps1 games were a lot cheaper being on cds than their cartridge equivalent.
You have little clue about the reality of oss code checking etc. I implore you to submit a patch to a random major oss project that causes a vulnerability and see if it becomes accepted.
Within projects there are hierarchies of developers, everyone checks eachothers code up the chain, and the lower people can check the upper chains patches also, of course with little recourse over the source tree except to perhaps fork, but people will be notified if anything malicious happens at the upper echelons.
As for you shouldn't trust any author with oss, check all code yourself, how is that any different from saying 'you shouldn't trust any proprietary code, you should check it all in a debugger and reverse engineer it yourself'?
at least oss has transparency, and you can see the trails of who has done what. I agree the packagers almost always trust upstream, but why shouldn't they? upstream will have clean packages or they will fall from grace when it is discovered by a curious third party. It is in upstreams best interest to thoroughly ensure the source is clean.
It is very non-trivial for a new developer to have a large patch accepted in a major oss project, entirely because of all of the checks and balances upstream (the people who write the software).
at the core of any successful oss project, is typically a few (2-20) core people that oversee, check everything and are dedicated to making the project a success, putting backdoors in does not help that goal.
Yes, because often you can release code in binary form that you're not allowed to release in source form. That happens, umm, never.
err.. that can and does happen, depending on licensing agreements, you can buy licenses to use some libraries in your product X, but if you then released source to your product AND proprietary library so you could compile it, company you bought it off would rip you to shreds.
Prime example being punkbuster for q3, had to be removed for the source distribution because punkbuster library isn't owned by ID software but by some anti-cheating company
look up the word proprietary, it does not mean what you think it means. (hint: Sole proprietor in control) (and no the distro vendor does not have absolute control over what repos you use)
apt, rpm, slackware's tgz. Your definition of proprietry is somewhat flawed (it doesn't mean 'commercial' or 'closed source').
definition of proprietary: The word proprietary indicates that a party, or proprietor, exercises private ownership, control or use over an item of property.
the deb and rpm formats for instance, are completely open, no-one needs to ask permissions from a proprietor to use the standards so it is far from a proprietary standard.
As for their primary implementations, they are not directly controlled by anyone since they are under the gpl, you are free to take it and change it etc, that is completely at odds with a sole proprietor having control
i do believe you yourself should consider what is or isn't proprietary, it is very difficult for an open standard to be 'proprietary' or gpl apps to be proprietary
as for an example you've given, tgz that's a tarred gzip file... I could make an extractor for that in like ten minutes, the documentation is out there for it, it's quite simple, saying it is proprietary is like saying UTF-8 text files are proprietary... it really isn't.
You just made his point for him. There is no standard package management - there are dozens of tools, and dozens more repositories for them.
yes because two end tools (yum, apt-get) constitute dozens, and it is so difficult to translate yum install blah to apt-get blah, could argue 3, with emerge on gentoo, but it's usage isn't exactly common.
Yes they are splintered, but both are extremely smooth functioning and easy to use, and very similar in operation just not in name, big deal.
If it is as difficult for the lay person to understand 'yum install (name of program to install)' then how would that person even understand how to install things in windows without having route-learned it in the first place?
since the two main package managers take out the whole finding the software and downloading it etc that you have to do in windows, it makes it a lot easier.
In regards to IDEs I mentioned eclipse first since it is what I primarily use when not in emacs, Haven't used Kdevelop myself but know people who have and quite like it, thusly why it was mentioned, they would be very non-typical developers though so likely a bad example, my bad.
I said raster as opposed to vector because in my opinion they are two completely different targets. Illustator and photoshop are different products for different things after all, you must admit.
My favorite "useless feature" is track changes in Word. Do you have any idea how surprised people get when they send me a Word document and I send them back all my edits with cute little bubble comments next them? Does OO support track changes? Cause if they dont, that is a shame... it is a damn useful feature once somebody drops change-tracked document on your lap and you go "wow, I never knew this existed!"
Question is though, does this effect the programs major aim by not having it present? as handy dandy as it may be, will not having little bubbles pop up with comments on changes etc destroy it's utility as a word processor? not particularly. also if the same thing could be achieved in a different way, would you adjust and do it? or complain it doesn't do it in way x that ms office does? there's a big difference.
as for everyone always wanting everything, the gimp does have some things photoshop doesn't, while photoshop has quite a few more things gimp doesn't, so essentially even with photoshop you wouldn't have it all, only a subset of the total. I'd like to think people are smart enough to think hmmm this doesn't have tool x, but tool y can be used to achieve the same thing with a different method, and change their habits. Gimp is not a photoshop clone, there shall not be one type of editor to rule them all.
For instance biggest bitch about gimp is typically on the UI, yes it's different, but most of the biggest complaints about essentially stem from 'it's not photoshop' it isn't, everyone knows that, but it does do it's function well, even if the workflow and tools used to achieve the same or similar result are different.
Essentially, I have no sympathy for people who's biggest complaint about gimp is 'it's not photoshop' as opposed to 'it doesn't serve it's purpose', which I believe it does.
Yes, and the most common ones that people use are catered for, you will still have the stand-outs that use features others don't, and it won't suit them, but they will be the minority, not the majority.
If the gimp could not adequately edit photo's for a family photo album for instance, it wouldn't exactly be much of a raster editor would it? And something tells me we have more mom's and pops doing that than professional photo people around was the point.
but the fact is, gui is the most important thing in software.
Right... so how do you propose remoting wirelessly into a box 1200km away using hf data communications where you can only get 1200 BAUD and get the crazy likely minutes per frame lag of using vlc or the like?
It's not something a typical end-user would do, but it's a prime example how on linux, you can do anything you want, if you know how to
netbooks were a playing field where both windows and linux had to compete from start, without any external forces. inspite of an early start, linux has now failed. so, instead of accepting its inferiority,
wait wait wait.... you are proposing that there were no external forces here? so you don't consider the fact that almost everyone knows how yo use windows and very few know how to use linux an external force? come on. A completely level playing field would have someone who has never use both of them decide, which frankly, won't happen, and we don't expect it to but saying it is level is a bit of a farce.
The odds were against, lucky to have gotten as much share as it had considering most places stopped stocking linux versions and those of us who wanted had to buy windows.
Then you go onto inferiority like it's an established fact *sigh* remind me, how long did you have to sit there adjusting settings when installing the os, and how many device drivers did you have to install since things didn't just work? To say outright that linux is inferior is a very big call sir, in some aspects it is lacking of course, but windows fails on more accounts (depending on what you consider important).
i've realized that windows is much more stable*
Congratulations, you've found a stable windows setup, My uptime count says my computer has been up for 4 months, and that wasn't a crash it was a reboot to use newer kernel that reset it then. since your using compiz, I assume your also using a binary driver for your video card? if it's anything other than nvidia or intel of course it's likely going to be hell, btw you'll likely find the SysRq keys useful here, no need to pull power, I've never had X lockup but I have had one or two inconsiderate programs not release the keyboard/mouse. But yes, what happens when you install bad windows drivers *gasp* bsod. What happens when you install bad video drivers in linux, video dies, unsurprisingly, but it is still more than recoverable, if you know how. (ssh'ing and killing X is handy if second computer nearby and ctrl-alt-backspace doesn't function like on newer distros)
More to the point, you can't fix things in windows, when things do screw up, your likely best course of action is to reinstall, with linux if in the odd chance something is borked, there is always a way to resolve it.
But yes, I haven't had the linux kernel proper crash on me in about six years, and that was due to known flaky hardware (which windows wouldn't even boot off it was so bad)
- Gimp is *not* Photoshop. Sorry. I know I mentioned this, but I'll repeat it again. You insult people who actually use Photoshop by making this claim.
This is true, however how many people actually use the entirety of the features of photoshop? I would daresay that the overwhelming majority of non-professional raster editors would suffice with gimp, simply because they don't need half of the functionality photoshop provides
- There is no common way to install and remove software.
Look up packagekit, it hooks into rpm, apt, etc etc, and lets face it, all distros, more or less use apt or yum, two different things with nearly identical uses... yeah, so difficult. which brings us onto our next point
- There are too many distros with too many proprietary ways of doing things. Too many proprietary repositories, too many proprietary package systems, to many proprietary filesystem layouts.
This is worse than the hyprebole you were complaining about, 'proprietary package systems' name one used in a common distro, please?, proprietary file system layouts you could be referring to fat patents and ntfs, but both have been supported under linux for a long time now.
And so far as proprietary repos only really fedora requires the click and install installing of a single rpm to get rpmfusion and all of the patent-encumbered things they won't ship, again, so difficult to look up 'fedora faq' to find out that mp3 etc etc can all be gotten working just by installing one lousy file. The majority of other distros package the proprietary bits with it anyway, so no complication. and finally...
- There is no stable base to write drivers (thus no hardware support)
So far as packaging a binary for release, I think nvidia has the best method here, binary blob with compilable source that links it to the kernel, works wonders. But really, if your making device drivers for the linux kernel, why not aim for inclusion in the main kernel tree? having it in there equates to basically free maintenance of your drivers almost indefinitely (so long as people have the hardware). Having the hardware 'just work' when linux boots as a side benefit.
Funnily enough, one of the biggest problems I find with windows apart from it's lack of usability is it's lack of in-built driver support. I can install linux on a 2-3 year old machine, with various ethernet cards and sound boards etc, and have all the hardware just work. Whereas with windows you have to hunt down exactly what the hardware is, where the drivers are, and hope to god drivers were written for your version of windows.
there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
So far as MSDN replacement, try devhelp has documentation for most used libraries etc etc. So far as visual studio replacement, people aren't going to make an IDE EXACTLY the same as visual studio, that would be idiotic, however if your after a nice usable ide with similar features, may I suggest looking into eclipse, kdevelop etc.
Only if Linux advocates and developers take a realistic look at their product offerings and their standing in the market.
Their product offerings typically aren't a problem... except to those who assume for instance that gimp must be 100% exact clone of photoshop, or eclipse must be exact 100% clone of visual studio. The fact is, people do use these open source products for professional quality work (admittedly fewer of them), and it does work. But you will never make someone happy who expects a clone.
So far as standing in the market, I agree it's minimal, but it's rising all the time, ten years ago I could tell someone about linux and they'd go 'what?' nowadays most even non-techs I meet know about to to at least some extent, even if they have never used it. But really market standing is irrelevant if they have a piece of software that functions well and does it's desired purpose. Who cares if linux takes over the world or stays as a niche, if it functions well for those of us who choose to use it.
looks kinda neat, straps a bit gay though, make some form of cover for the front and rear of the person and it may just look like your going to a japanese anime convention or something.
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We tend not to like IDEs very much. There's an awful lot of them, to say you don't like then, there's the Qt IDE, Sun's IDE, KDevelop, Anjuta... Because it doesn't? Um, look beyond the word processor. The spreadsheet is pretty rough and the Access-clone is terrible.
I'd put that all under the category of "most of us don't like getting our hands held" I mean, who would use access when you can make a mysql database with web front-end for entering/querying data etc?
Same deal with ide's, some people use them, a lot don't. I use emacs to code, while emacs is a heavily featured editor, the only real thing I use in comparison to even notepad would be the syntax highlighting. I know what I'm doing usually, I don't want silly bloated tools to get in my way.
It's a device that generates static electricity.
and a daihatsu mira weighs in at 660kg, while true a fair majority of cars weigh a tonne or more, there are a fair few about that weigh less.
I have semi-frequently posted about my views on changing copyright (not getting rid of it, just more sane time limits of 15-30 years from publication) I haven't in this article, however I usually tend to get modded up. It's all in the justification.
because libraries have been around since long before this extreme copyright length, and usage restriction business. Any attempt at barring all libraries would meet extreme resistance.
Completely agree, it should be noted a lot of people here seem to think fedora is a 'desktop' os in the same way as ubuntu etc etc. I'd argue that it's an os 'for developers, by developers'.
Since it's so bleeding edge, when things sometimes unnoticably break upstream, they can break with fedora too, if you have a lot of experience it's usually not even an issue though and you can fix it yourself
I think somewhere in between the realm of 15 to 30 years is more than reasonable. If you have not made money on something by the time your 50 that you made when you were 20 then it is better served for the public good.
Steamboat willie came out in 1928, that that particular cartoon is still in copyright 80 years later is rediculous.
It is essentially depriving the public of public domain, copyright is given as an incentive to authors of works to make works, but can you honestly say that it gives benefit to you 70 years after your death?
Most of the problem people have with copyright nowadays is all about the absurd duration.
To be fair, I've been a linux user over a decade, and upon returning to uni one of the first programming courses I had was .net with microsoft everywhere. So I setup a development environment with monodevelop and mono.
Development has been rather painless so far at least for CLI programs, and the resulting binaries run with the .net framework aswell as mono, on linux, windows and mac.
The moment I no longer need to use c# I'll instantly go back to c++ and c coding. Even in instances where your uni 'makes' you use microsoft stuff, linux is so flexible nowadays that there is almost always some way to do it in linux without them being any the wiser.
What do you do with the people who claim to be ill or have something wrong with them that are really just paranoid though?
I see people with nothing really wrong with them go to the doctors all the time complaining of almost completely irrelevant things. If there's nothing wrong with them, a correct diagnosis would basically yield a 'go home, nothings wrong with you' instead of being given a myriad of drugs and charged for the affair.
My logic is a socialized system would be more likely to tell it as it is than to try to make the patient 'happy'
using non rechargable batteries I get between 20-25 hours of play time on a wiimote, rechargables only about 8 hours but they are rechargable so meh. Is that really so bad?
I also used dmix with alsa for quite a long time, waited about two years after pulseaudio was introduced to my distro to switch to it, and I think my timing was about right, they seem to have solved most of the issues.
while I agree pulseaudio can be retarded at times, I don't see why people are having so many problems in general.
I think you mistook what your parent meant, in regards to pick one he was meaning for the developer to pick one, not the user. The user could have them all installed if they like.
Better hope it supports your package system, and better hope it was made for Gnome or GTK or whatever you're using
gtk and qt applications can run on the one machine simultaneously, so not an issue. As for sound if the distro has it's shit together it should support pretty much all of the different standards out there out of the box.
creating a simple tarball or zip file which has a linux program that runs on almost any distro that has the same cpu arch is a lot easier than many people make it out to be (yes I've done it).
more than 5% perhaps, but that is still not exactly important enough for everyone to know what your on about, geeks in london, france, spain, italy, germany, australia etc all would justifiably have no idea about this memorial day business. Combined they would have easily have 2/3rds of the worlds geeks also.
Err no! Rampant piracy would kill the PS1 since software houses would not make games for this console because they would not make any money.
Even pirates sometimes buy games that they really like, even if they have it pirated. And I did not say that everyone pirated, just a considerable number. Not initially of course though, since when the console was new console and cd burner prices were high.
You are correct in that CD's were much cheaper than cartridges at the time but the CD could hold over 600MB compared to the Nintendo Cartridge of approx 30MB and many gaming houses made full use of that.
Nintendo just had different values than sony, load times were never an issue on N64 games for a reason. Although some ps1 games had a nice minigame or two while the actual game was loading, both neat and pretty pathetic.
If we look at the PS2 which everyone will have to admit was an incredible success.
Even though technically it was the weakest console hardware in many respects. Inertia counts for a lot. The success of the ps1 had almost guaranteed the success of the ps2, unless they botched it which they didn't.
In regards to the ps3, it was/is essentially a stillborn. All that effort for such lackluster sales. So much put in for a return that was less than stellar. Two competitors started to see things swing their way, and it would be hard to argue this hasn't hurt sonys game devision to some extent.
It could well be argued that the PS1 was the run-away success that it was because of exclusive Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid franchises. For the PS2, it was much the same, except that it had then gained Grand Theft Auto (yes, I know it came to the PC and 360 later, but by then it really was a one horse race).
PS1 succeeded because of rampant piracy, then network effects. every man and his dog mod chipped his ps1, and bought a few legit games and downloaded a lot. Also legitimate game prices, ps1 games were a lot cheaper being on cds than their cartridge equivalent.
You have little clue about the reality of oss code checking etc. I implore you to submit a patch to a random major oss project that causes a vulnerability and see if it becomes accepted.
Within projects there are hierarchies of developers, everyone checks eachothers code up the chain, and the lower people can check the upper chains patches also, of course with little recourse over the source tree except to perhaps fork, but people will be notified if anything malicious happens at the upper echelons.
As for you shouldn't trust any author with oss, check all code yourself, how is that any different from saying 'you shouldn't trust any proprietary code, you should check it all in a debugger and reverse engineer it yourself'?
at least oss has transparency, and you can see the trails of who has done what. I agree the packagers almost always trust upstream, but why shouldn't they? upstream will have clean packages or they will fall from grace when it is discovered by a curious third party. It is in upstreams best interest to thoroughly ensure the source is clean.
It is very non-trivial for a new developer to have a large patch accepted in a major oss project, entirely because of all of the checks and balances upstream (the people who write the software).
at the core of any successful oss project, is typically a few (2-20) core people that oversee, check everything and are dedicated to making the project a success, putting backdoors in does not help that goal.
Yes, because often you can release code in binary form that you're not allowed to release in source form. That happens, umm, never.
err.. that can and does happen, depending on licensing agreements, you can buy licenses to use some libraries in your product X, but if you then released source to your product AND proprietary library so you could compile it, company you bought it off would rip you to shreds.
Prime example being punkbuster for q3, had to be removed for the source distribution because punkbuster library isn't owned by ID software but by some anti-cheating company
look up the word proprietary, it does not mean what you think it means. (hint: Sole proprietor in control) (and no the distro vendor does not have absolute control over what repos you use)
apt, rpm, slackware's tgz. Your definition of proprietry is somewhat flawed (it doesn't mean 'commercial' or 'closed source').
definition of proprietary: The word proprietary indicates that a party, or proprietor, exercises private ownership, control or use over an item of property.
the deb and rpm formats for instance, are completely open, no-one needs to ask permissions from a proprietor to use the standards so it is far from a proprietary standard.
As for their primary implementations, they are not directly controlled by anyone since they are under the gpl, you are free to take it and change it etc, that is completely at odds with a sole proprietor having control
i do believe you yourself should consider what is or isn't proprietary, it is very difficult for an open standard to be 'proprietary' or gpl apps to be proprietary
as for an example you've given, tgz that's a tarred gzip file... I could make an extractor for that in like ten minutes, the documentation is out there for it, it's quite simple, saying it is proprietary is like saying UTF-8 text files are proprietary... it really isn't.
You just made his point for him. There is no standard package management - there are dozens of tools, and dozens more repositories for them.
yes because two end tools (yum, apt-get) constitute dozens, and it is so difficult to translate yum install blah to apt-get blah, could argue 3, with emerge on gentoo, but it's usage isn't exactly common.
Yes they are splintered, but both are extremely smooth functioning and easy to use, and very similar in operation just not in name, big deal.
If it is as difficult for the lay person to understand 'yum install (name of program to install)' then how would that person even understand how to install things in windows without having route-learned it in the first place?
since the two main package managers take out the whole finding the software and downloading it etc that you have to do in windows, it makes it a lot easier.
In regards to IDEs I mentioned eclipse first since it is what I primarily use when not in emacs, Haven't used Kdevelop myself but know people who have and quite like it, thusly why it was mentioned, they would be very non-typical developers though so likely a bad example, my bad.
I said raster as opposed to vector because in my opinion they are two completely different targets. Illustator and photoshop are different products for different things after all, you must admit.
My favorite "useless feature" is track changes in Word. Do you have any idea how surprised people get when they send me a Word document and I send them back all my edits with cute little bubble comments next them? Does OO support track changes? Cause if they dont, that is a shame... it is a damn useful feature once somebody drops change-tracked document on your lap and you go "wow, I never knew this existed!"
Question is though, does this effect the programs major aim by not having it present? as handy dandy as it may be, will not having little bubbles pop up with comments on changes etc destroy it's utility as a word processor? not particularly. also if the same thing could be achieved in a different way, would you adjust and do it? or complain it doesn't do it in way x that ms office does? there's a big difference.
as for everyone always wanting everything, the gimp does have some things photoshop doesn't, while photoshop has quite a few more things gimp doesn't, so essentially even with photoshop you wouldn't have it all, only a subset of the total. I'd like to think people are smart enough to think hmmm this doesn't have tool x, but tool y can be used to achieve the same thing with a different method, and change their habits. Gimp is not a photoshop clone, there shall not be one type of editor to rule them all.
For instance biggest bitch about gimp is typically on the UI, yes it's different, but most of the biggest complaints about essentially stem from 'it's not photoshop' it isn't, everyone knows that, but it does do it's function well, even if the workflow and tools used to achieve the same or similar result are different.
Essentially, I have no sympathy for people who's biggest complaint about gimp is 'it's not photoshop' as opposed to 'it doesn't serve it's purpose', which I believe it does.
Yes, and the most common ones that people use are catered for, you will still have the stand-outs that use features others don't, and it won't suit them, but they will be the minority, not the majority.
If the gimp could not adequately edit photo's for a family photo album for instance, it wouldn't exactly be much of a raster editor would it? And something tells me we have more mom's and pops doing that than professional photo people around was the point.
but the fact is, gui is the most important thing in software.
Right... so how do you propose remoting wirelessly into a box 1200km away using hf data communications where you can only get 1200 BAUD and get the crazy likely minutes per frame lag of using vlc or the like?
It's not something a typical end-user would do, but it's a prime example how on linux, you can do anything you want, if you know how to
netbooks were a playing field where both windows and linux had to compete from start, without any external forces. inspite of an early start, linux has now failed. so, instead of accepting its inferiority,
wait wait wait.... you are proposing that there were no external forces here? so you don't consider the fact that almost everyone knows how yo use windows and very few know how to use linux an external force? come on. A completely level playing field would have someone who has never use both of them decide, which frankly, won't happen, and we don't expect it to but saying it is level is a bit of a farce.
The odds were against, lucky to have gotten as much share as it had considering most places stopped stocking linux versions and those of us who wanted had to buy windows.
Then you go onto inferiority like it's an established fact *sigh* remind me, how long did you have to sit there adjusting settings when installing the os, and how many device drivers did you have to install since things didn't just work? To say outright that linux is inferior is a very big call sir, in some aspects it is lacking of course, but windows fails on more accounts (depending on what you consider important).
i've realized that windows is much more stable*
Congratulations, you've found a stable windows setup, My uptime count says my computer has been up for 4 months, and that wasn't a crash it was a reboot to use newer kernel that reset it then. since your using compiz, I assume your also using a binary driver for your video card? if it's anything other than nvidia or intel of course it's likely going to be hell, btw you'll likely find the SysRq keys useful here, no need to pull power, I've never had X lockup but I have had one or two inconsiderate programs not release the keyboard/mouse. But yes, what happens when you install bad windows drivers *gasp* bsod. What happens when you install bad video drivers in linux, video dies, unsurprisingly, but it is still more than recoverable, if you know how. (ssh'ing and killing X is handy if second computer nearby and ctrl-alt-backspace doesn't function like on newer distros)
More to the point, you can't fix things in windows, when things do screw up, your likely best course of action is to reinstall, with linux if in the odd chance something is borked, there is always a way to resolve it.
But yes, I haven't had the linux kernel proper crash on me in about six years, and that was due to known flaky hardware (which windows wouldn't even boot off it was so bad)
- Gimp is *not* Photoshop. Sorry. I know I mentioned this, but I'll repeat it again. You insult people who actually use Photoshop by making this claim.
This is true, however how many people actually use the entirety of the features of photoshop? I would daresay that the overwhelming majority of non-professional raster editors would suffice with gimp, simply because they don't need half of the functionality photoshop provides
- There is no common way to install and remove software.
Look up packagekit, it hooks into rpm, apt, etc etc, and lets face it, all distros, more or less use apt or yum, two different things with nearly identical uses... yeah, so difficult. which brings us onto our next point
- There are too many distros with too many proprietary ways of doing things. Too many proprietary repositories, too many proprietary package systems, to many proprietary filesystem layouts.
This is worse than the hyprebole you were complaining about, 'proprietary package systems' name one used in a common distro, please?, proprietary file system layouts you could be referring to fat patents and ntfs, but both have been supported under linux for a long time now.
And so far as proprietary repos only really fedora requires the click and install installing of a single rpm to get rpmfusion and all of the patent-encumbered things they won't ship, again, so difficult to look up 'fedora faq' to find out that mp3 etc etc can all be gotten working just by installing one lousy file. The majority of other distros package the proprietary bits with it anyway, so no complication. and finally...
- There is no stable base to write drivers (thus no hardware support)
So far as packaging a binary for release, I think nvidia has the best method here, binary blob with compilable source that links it to the kernel, works wonders. But really, if your making device drivers for the linux kernel, why not aim for inclusion in the main kernel tree? having it in there equates to basically free maintenance of your drivers almost indefinitely (so long as people have the hardware). Having the hardware 'just work' when linux boots as a side benefit.
Funnily enough, one of the biggest problems I find with windows apart from it's lack of usability is it's lack of in-built driver support. I can install linux on a 2-3 year old machine, with various ethernet cards and sound boards etc, and have all the hardware just work. Whereas with windows you have to hunt down exactly what the hardware is, where the drivers are, and hope to god drivers were written for your version of windows.
there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
So far as MSDN replacement, try devhelp has documentation for most used libraries etc etc. So far as visual studio replacement, people aren't going to make an IDE EXACTLY the same as visual studio, that would be idiotic, however if your after a nice usable ide with similar features, may I suggest looking into eclipse, kdevelop etc.
Only if Linux advocates and developers take a realistic look at their product offerings and their standing in the market.
Their product offerings typically aren't a problem... except to those who assume for instance that gimp must be 100% exact clone of photoshop, or eclipse must be exact 100% clone of visual studio. The fact is, people do use these open source products for professional quality work (admittedly fewer of them), and it does work. But you will never make someone happy who expects a clone.
So far as standing in the market, I agree it's minimal, but it's rising all the time, ten years ago I could tell someone about linux and they'd go 'what?' nowadays most even non-techs I meet know about to to at least some extent, even if they have never used it. But really market standing is irrelevant if they have a piece of software that functions well and does it's desired purpose. Who cares if linux takes over the world or stays as a niche, if it functions well for those of us who choose to use it.
looks kinda neat, straps a bit gay though, make some form of cover for the front and rear of the person and it may just look like your going to a japanese anime convention or something.