Kind of ironic considering that in terms of appearance KDE is actually the more windows-ish one right now and Gnome is closer to OS X.
That's bullshit. The only aspect of GNOME's HIGs that matches OSX's is the button order. By default KDE Desktop's task bar is located at the bottom of the screen like Windows. That's it.
Anything else is completely different. In fact, when you compare KDE's Oxygen icon set and GNOME's Tango icon set to Windows and Mac OS X, you'll notice that Oxygen is clearly influenced by Mac OS X and look alot alike, while Tango looks like Windows 95.
That said, moving beyond the plain looks, both GNOME and KDE SC behave quite a bit differently than Windows and Mac OS X. The things you can do with KDE Plasma are very radical, even though the default setup is conservative. GNOME is also quite different with their Shell path.
Go-OO and Novell OpenOffice are basically the same. There are only minor differences. Novell OO consists only of release versions (no betas, etc) and it seems to me that it undergoes a longer QA period. At least Go-OO crashed on my Windows installation, while Novell OO did not. Strangely even Sun OO crashed.
Darwin is not a fork of FreeBSD. Darwin has its own kernel that's partially BSD-based. Darwin's userland is mostly FreeBSD and Apple contributes the changes to the FreeBSD-based userland directly to the FreeBSD project. So the relationship between Apple and FreeBSD (at least on the userland part) is similar to Ubuntu and Debian.
IIRC this was requested. The BeOS binary-compatible code was suggested to be placed in/beos while the GCC4 code should be placed into/haiku. If my memory serves me right, this idea wasn't welcome because it's too much work, wastes too much space on old PCs and so on.
Quoting Hubert Figuière doesn't make much sense without telling the people who he is. He was a BeOS application developer. Within the BeOS community he is one of the better known developers. He was the initial developer of BePDF -- the first and AFAIK still only PDF viewer for BeOS/Haiku. He also did a few other apps for BeOS, but BePDF is the most prominent one. If I'm not mistaken, he later ported AbiWord to Mac OS X. Today he's employed by Novell to work on OpenOffice.
Unfortunately releasing 4.0 like this makes KDE look bad. I really doubt distributions will include it as a default option until it becomes more polished. KDE 4.0 was not intended by the KDE team to become the default desktop in any distro (AFAIK the next Fedora-KDE release ship with 4.0 as default).
Granted, I never used KDE much before 3.0, but IIRC, 3.0 was a big improvement over 2.0 in functionality and elegance. No, it wasn't perfect, but it was much more polished than 4.0. KDE 3.0 was mainly a port of KDE 2.x to Qt 3. In KDE 4.0 major components have been rewritten. That wasn't the case with KDE 3.0 -- with one (AFAIK just one) notable major exception: KDevelop. KDevelop 3.0 wasn't released until IIRC KDE 3.2. KDE 4.0 can better be compared with KDE 2.0 and GNOME 2.0.
Now, in a year 4.1 and 4.2 will probably get close to the 3.5 branch, but I'm just worried that KDE's reputation might suffer in the mean time. Does GNOME's reputation suffer because of the 2.0 release?
While AC/Johnny used harsh language, he's basically right. It's almost impossible for free software projects to support proprietary file formats to 100%. There's another way, though: use Photoshop's batch tool to export your PSD files into an open format. At worst a new file format plugin for PS has to be written. That's probably still easier than reverse engineering the PSD format.
I'm sure that I'll be modded down for my following comment, but I post it anyway:
Vorbis is pretty much dead. While its quality is good, Vorbis has quite high performance requirements just for decoding (negligible on current desktop PCs, but not on portables that run on battery). Even Vorbis's developer Xiph.org acknowledged that and instead of trying to "fix" Vorbis, they started development of an entirely new audio codec called Ghost.
While Vorbis and Theora are in no way proprietary, the industry already decided to support MPEG-4. Even Microsoft supports it out of the box on Xbox 360 and Zune. Vorbis was cool when it was released, but it never had a modern video codec as companion.
Ogg Vorbis and Theora aren't standards. Yes, they are open and at least Vorbis is quite good, but both are not standards (as in: standardized by ISO or a similar organisation).
Apple does it by itself, because old ports of Java for Mac OS (classic) by Sun were so bad that Apple thought doing Java itself is better than letting Sun ruin it. IIRC Apple even chose a Java implementation from Microsoft for a while, because it was better than Sun's Java version.
Did you even read TFA? It says nowhere that Apple is doing a Java port to the iPhone, but that a Sun developer expects the community to do an independent port.
That's strange, because I feel the opposite. IMHO the whole *drake*-tools just feel tacked on while Kubuntu's System Setting feel integrated. I don't have to open two different configuration tools in Kubuntu, because I don't know in which of those two I'll find the option I look for.
AAC is free and open. If it wasn't there wouldn't be FAAC. If one thing is unfree, then it's US's patent laws. But as most people in the world live outside the USA, it doesn't matter.
Exactly. Other manufacturers work on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFKyAMQPbmIsimmilar concepts. The iPhone is a cool device for its design concepts, but once the competition is ready, we have the choice to pick something else.
Ogg Vorbis won't be supported officially, because A) AAC is very good, B) AAC is open (patented only in the USA, but even there free for non-commercial use), and C) even Xiph.org is currently developing an incompatible codec called "Ghost" to replace Vorbis.
it is half Sun's fault, half Apple's. Apple says "I will handle my own Java", Sun says "OK than you handle it" I'm not 100% sure if my memory is right, but I think it was like this:
Sun did in the past ship Java for Mac -- as did Microsoft. Sun's Java was so bad, Apple bundled Microsoft's JavaVM. When MS dropped Java, Apple thought that they could do better than Sun and licensed the code from Sun. Sun sources were (are?) only handed to Apple after Sun did/does a release. So Apple leaves the basic VM code largely intact and focuses on platform integration (= Aqua GUI for Java).
I may remember wrong. If I do, please don't kill me.:-)
lets talk about Java on the Mac when Apple stops sabotaging Java in general. Who's sabotaging? From the "big three" platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), Mac OS X is the only platform not supported by Sun. If Apple didn't do the porting, there would be no Java for Mac OS X at all.
Don't support ODF just because it's not the Microsoft format. But that's the main reason. No, not because it's MS, but instead because it's from a single company. ODF may not be perfect, but at least it's developed by a comitee with members from various organisations (Sun, Adobe, KDE, IBM, even Novell and so on). See http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/membership.php?wg_abbrev=office. Thanks to KDE's membership (and possibly also Adobe's) ODF works well for frame-based documents. Thanks to Royal National Institute for the Blind ODF 1.2 will feature lots of improvements for disabled people.
MS is also a OASIS member. MS could have participated in the developement of ODF, if MS thinks that ODF doesn't cover all its needs. A single company may work on a draft (the old OO 1.x (.swx) format basicly served as draft) before submitting it to a comitee to work on a proposal for standardization. Even Adobe did this with PDF (Adobe handed the PDF spec to AIIM first).
I have a Nokia phone. The hardware is very robust, but the software usability isn't the greatest. I've never used a cell phone with good usability (haven't used the iPhone yet).
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Kind of ironic considering that in terms of appearance KDE is actually the more windows-ish one right now and Gnome is closer to OS X.
That's bullshit. The only aspect of GNOME's HIGs that matches OSX's is the button order.
By default KDE Desktop's task bar is located at the bottom of the screen like Windows. That's it.
Anything else is completely different. In fact, when you compare KDE's Oxygen icon set and GNOME's Tango icon set to Windows and Mac OS X, you'll notice that Oxygen is clearly influenced by Mac OS X and look alot alike, while Tango looks like Windows 95.
That said, moving beyond the plain looks, both GNOME and KDE SC behave quite a bit differently than Windows and Mac OS X.
The things you can do with KDE Plasma are very radical, even though the default setup is conservative. GNOME is also quite different with their Shell path.
Go-OO is mostly developed by Novell so obviously Novell puts it into its own Linux distro, openSUSE. ;-)
Go-OO and Novell OpenOffice are basically the same. There are only minor differences. Novell OO consists only of release versions (no betas, etc) and it seems to me that it undergoes a longer QA period. At least Go-OO crashed on my Windows installation, while Novell OO did not. Strangely even Sun OO crashed.
Darwin is not a fork of FreeBSD. Darwin has its own kernel that's partially BSD-based. Darwin's userland is mostly FreeBSD and Apple contributes the changes to the FreeBSD-based userland directly to the FreeBSD project. So the relationship between Apple and FreeBSD (at least on the userland part) is similar to Ubuntu and Debian.
IIRC this was requested. The BeOS binary-compatible code was suggested to be placed in /beos while the GCC4 code should be placed into /haiku. If my memory serves me right, this idea wasn't welcome because it's too much work, wastes too much space on old PCs and so on.
BeOS was about "real-time" GUI interaction, not offering a real-time-capable kernel.
Quoting Hubert Figuière doesn't make much sense without telling the people who he is. He was a BeOS application developer. Within the BeOS community he is one of the better known developers. He was the initial developer of BePDF -- the first and AFAIK still only PDF viewer for BeOS/Haiku. He also did a few other apps for BeOS, but BePDF is the most prominent one.
If I'm not mistaken, he later ported AbiWord to Mac OS X. Today he's employed by Novell to work on OpenOffice.
KDE 4.0 can better be compared with KDE 2.0 and GNOME 2.0. Now, in a year 4.1 and 4.2 will probably get close to the 3.5 branch, but I'm just worried that KDE's reputation might suffer in the mean time. Does GNOME's reputation suffer because of the 2.0 release?
While AC/Johnny used harsh language, he's basically right. It's almost impossible for free software projects to support proprietary file formats to 100%. There's another way, though: use Photoshop's batch tool to export your PSD files into an open format. At worst a new file format plugin for PS has to be written. That's probably still easier than reverse engineering the PSD format.
Vorbis is just an Audio codec. If Apple (or anybody else) wanted, they could just put a Vorbis track into a DRMed container.
I'm sure that I'll be modded down for my following comment, but I post it anyway:
Vorbis is pretty much dead. While its quality is good, Vorbis has quite high performance requirements just for decoding (negligible on current desktop PCs, but not on portables that run on battery). Even Vorbis's developer Xiph.org acknowledged that and instead of trying to "fix" Vorbis, they started development of an entirely new audio codec called Ghost.
While Vorbis and Theora are in no way proprietary, the industry already decided to support MPEG-4. Even Microsoft supports it out of the box on Xbox 360 and Zune. Vorbis was cool when it was released, but it never had a modern video codec as companion.
Ogg Vorbis and Theora aren't standards. Yes, they are open and at least Vorbis is quite good, but both are not standards (as in: standardized by ISO or a similar organisation).
Apple does it by itself, because old ports of Java for Mac OS (classic) by Sun were so bad that Apple thought doing Java itself is better than letting Sun ruin it. IIRC Apple even chose a Java implementation from Microsoft for a while, because it was better than Sun's Java version.
Or Apple could release their Cocoa port as open source.
I really don't think that this particular Java port will run on OSX without X11.
Did you even read TFA? It says nowhere that Apple is doing a Java port to the iPhone, but that a Sun developer expects the community to do an independent port.
That's strange, because I feel the opposite.
IMHO the whole *drake*-tools just feel tacked on while Kubuntu's System Setting feel integrated.
I don't have to open two different configuration tools in Kubuntu, because I don't know in which of those two I'll find the option I look for.
AAC is free and open. If it wasn't there wouldn't be FAAC.
If one thing is unfree, then it's US's patent laws. But as most people in the world live outside the USA, it doesn't matter.
Exactly. Other manufacturers work on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFKyAMQPbmIsimmilar concepts.
The iPhone is a cool device for its design concepts, but once the competition is ready, we have the choice to pick something else.
ODF will be supported in Leopard.
Ogg Vorbis won't be supported officially, because A) AAC is very good, B) AAC is open (patented only in the USA, but even there free for non-commercial use), and C) even Xiph.org is currently developing an incompatible codec called "Ghost" to replace Vorbis.
Sun did in the past ship Java for Mac -- as did Microsoft.
Sun's Java was so bad, Apple bundled Microsoft's JavaVM. When MS dropped Java, Apple thought that they could do better than Sun and licensed the code from Sun. Sun sources were (are?) only handed to Apple after Sun did/does a release. So Apple leaves the basic VM code largely intact and focuses on platform integration (= Aqua GUI for Java).
I may remember wrong. If I do, please don't kill me.
If Apple didn't do the porting, there would be no Java for Mac OS X at all.
MS is also a OASIS member. MS could have participated in the developement of ODF, if MS thinks that ODF doesn't cover all its needs.
A single company may work on a draft (the old OO 1.x (.swx) format basicly served as draft) before submitting it to a comitee to work on a proposal for standardization. Even Adobe did this with PDF (Adobe handed the PDF spec to AIIM first).
I have a Nokia phone. The hardware is very robust, but the software usability isn't the greatest. I've never used a cell phone with good usability (haven't used the iPhone yet).