> Problem is, we want non-hackers (which is most > computer users, believe it or not) to use Linux > too
Do we? Serious question: why do we want this? I've always wondered. I use the OS I like (Solaris) and I don't care *at all* what anyone else uses. I just don't get this advocacy thing.
Despite the flag waving and fanaticism I think most people round here would probably hate it if Linux went mainstream, because they'd lose their superior, leeter-than-thou bragging rights. I imagine they'd all move to AtheOS or Plan9 or somesuch, then scoff at l4me linux lusers.
This is a KDE/GNOME thread: the "friendly" faces of Unix. That means dozens of "your all ghey I use blackbox/FVWM/fluxbox/E/screen/ratpoison" posts from weenies trying to impress the stupid trend-following GNOME/KDE herd.
Sorry. I'm sure I had a point to make when I started writing this...
Speaking as a huge fan of the GIMP, I have to agree with this point. I really don't like GTK2 either. But, I haven't seen the fancy new file selector yet, so maybe that will help me change my mind.
Just because someone says they don't like something it doesn't make them a troll.
> Who wants to use a proprietary sound format, when they can use a much more appealing open format
The key word here is "use". Can I use ogg on my iPod? In my car mp3 player? Practically anywhere at all? No. This is news because it applies to something people like my Mum and Dad have heard of. I sincerely doubt that they are aware of OGG and FLAC.
Outside of slashdot people don't care about open vs proprietary, "free as in speech", elegance of algorithms or having the source. Technology is an enabler, not a fan-boy hobby horse.
Too many people lose sight of just how obscure the stuff we talk about on here is.
FWIW I think OGG is great. But I don't use it because it just isn't useful enough.
> Would LINUX exist or how would it of evolved > differently if Linus had learned to program on DOS > or a Mac?
You know, if he hadn't done it, someone else would have. It'd all be BSD round here instead.
You're right though. The Amiga community was incredible. The linux community captures many of the best aspects of it (sharing code for free, great apps) and most of the worst (bigoted, blinkered, ignorant zealotry.) Of course, what Linux doesn't have is rampant piracy killing all the commercial vendors.
WTF does the verb leverage mean? Suddenly I'm seeing and hearing it everywhere and I don't understand. I have a feeling it has replaced "facilitate" as a word misused by idiots who want to say "use" but sound more intelligent and important people around them.
> so what you are saying is that your middle name is FUD. stfu jerkoff.
Yes, that's exactly what I was saying. You interpret a text superbly, and word your critique with the kind of eloquence and sensitivity few writers even dream of.
i) the BSDs are pretty obscure. The people who use them do so for a reason. To get into BSD you've initially got to be attracted by something they offer, and what they offer is security. I'd say the average BSD user knows more about Unix than the average linux user. (No, I don't use BSD. Well, not much.)
ii) BSD is not a buzzword like linux. No clueless middle manager ever asked his clueless admin to set up an OpenBSD server because he saw an item on TV about it. Again, if BSD is there, it's probably there for a reason.
iii) the average/. linux weenie thinks knowing how to comment things out of inetd.conf makes him a security expert. He thinks his ultra-leet gentoo boxen are watertight, and doesn't need to implement a security policy or look at his logs, then gets worked over by a script kiddie.
iv) the herd's reaction is "it says something negative about linux, which is perfect, ergo it's FUD"
v) why do linux vendors (and also Sun) feel bundling as much freely downloadable crap as possible adds value to the product, rather than just making more of a PITA to manage properly?
I hate working on linux boxes that don't have ksh installed. (Yes, I know some do, just like some Suns have bash.)
I don't really have a problem with Sun giving you the bare minimum tools. I admit it can be a PITA to install stuff, but if you're doing a lot of builds, Jumpstart should be churning out boxes exactly how you like them.
I personally don't like the way more and more stuff has been creeping in to the standard Solaris install, even into the core cluster. If I'm building a DNS server. I don't *want* texinfo, JPEG libraries, LDAP and drivers for 10 different frame buffers. I certainly don't want Apache and Samba. Admittedly disk space isn't an issue any more, but it's more to back up, more potential tools for teh haxor, and longer find/es. (To be honest a large part of the problem is admins whose policy is always to install entire distribution + OEM.)
Oh, and I can get Exceed up and running for you. Can I have a job?
> And when they finally got them here, one of > the V100s did not boot.
> That's it, we almost ended up with a > network-enabled FORTH compiler that cost us > $1500.
My friend bought a new car, and the dealership accidentally gave him the wrong set of keys. That was it, he almost ended up with a sealed glass and metal box that cost him $35000.
One little tiny, easily rectified mistake does not mean the product sucks. If someone dismissed linux because they bought a preinstalled box which didn't boot because of a wrong jumper, would that mean linux was crappy? No. Of course not.
> I'm still glad we didn't wait for tech support > to react (and I'm pretty sure it would take > them several more weeks)
Have you ever *used* Sun support? To answer your later question, that's one of the reasons Sun are so expensive. They have great support. If you were on a decent support contract there could have been a guy with you inside an hour with a bag full of V100 parts. If you don't need support, go with linux/bsd or buy Sun kit off ebay.
Once more, FUD-ish Sun-bashing gets modded up as interesting/informative. Replies which dare to defend Sun are usually modded down. Flamebait, troll, whatever. (They should have a "-1 heresy" tag.)
> But just lay off the attempted cheap shots at Linux
I never mentioned linux. I said "Solaris is not so slow it's unusable on less than 32 CPUs". (My bad here - I forgot I was putting stuff on an HTML message board and just typed a "less than", which disappeared, then missed it in the preview. D'oh!)
That, for the hard of thinking, means that I believe Solaris is not slow on small machines. It in no way implied that I think linux does not scale. (I don't know enough about linux on big machines to comment.)
> Jackass.
I'll lay off the cheap shots at linux if you lay off the cheap shots at people whose posts you can't understand. Deal?
Wow some of the comments on here are uninformed. Especially those modded informative or interesting.
"Hey, Solaris sucks! Linux is way better and it's free as in speech!" +5 interesting
"Hey Linux does everything Solaris does and it's free as in beer" +5 informative
"Hey there was a film called Solaris! OMG LOL!!!" +5 funny
Do you *never* get bored of pointing out that x86 chips have higher clock speeds than SPARCs?
Don't you think we *know* by now that Linux is free?
If you know how to handle Solaris, you will know that: it has some features that linux does not. It's no harder to build software for than linux. Trusted Solaris privileges are not the same as sudo. dtrace is not the same as cat/proc/whatever. Solaris is not so slow it's unusable on 32 CPUs. Version 5.8 is not four versions older than 9. There are smarter ways of patching than downloading the recommended cluster every day. But hey, post uninformed crap and up your karma. That's what matters.
If you don't know what you're talking about, shut up and leave the discussion to people with some interest and background in the subject. And stop complaining that "no one uses Solaris, so who cares there's a new major release", when you've probably been up all night bitching on IRC that the mods here rejected the 2.6.3-rc3 release story you submitted.
I hope you're right, though most second-hand record shops have been gradually phasing out the vinyl for years. It takes up a lot more room, has a smaller market, costs roughly the same to buy, but sells for a third of the price of CDs.
Just as an aside, I strongly recommend everyone to avoid High Fidelity. It is without doubt the single worst book I have ever read.
It's a comment piece buried way down in the BBC business section, saying something 99.9999% of the world's population neither understand nor care about, and which the other 0.0001% are already thinking anyway.
To anyone bothered enough to have complained to the BBC and self-important enough to have posted your letter here. FIND SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT TO DO. If you all hate SCO so much, lobby them. (You have? Great!) Contribute to a piece of software that might help get linux noticed for the right reasons. Go out and get some fresh air. It might help you calm down.
So far as I can see this article reports a rumour as rumour, doesn't criticise linux and doesn't criticise linux users. God, you're all so precious about your little computer system. Get off the hobby horse.
The vocal minority make linux users look like a bunch of ignorant, righteous, blinkered partisans. Just the kind of people every CEO wants to move into his enterprise eh?
Shows what a person can do with computers
on
Three Blind Phreaks
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
when they don't have all that pr0n to distract them.
I've been using 1.3 as my main graphics tool (on Solaris) for a good while now. Even when it was a little unstable it was worth the odd crash because it's so much nicer to use than 1.2. The interface is very different, simpler and more intuitive, paths are vastly improved, as is the text tool. Apart from that though, I've been a little disappointed at the lack of new features. I understand the priority was the internal rewrite, so now that's done, fingers crossed that the developers will start giving us some nice new things to play with.
Having said that, let's get this clear: gimp is *not* a Photoshop replacement. In terms of functionality, it's just not in the same league. But what people forget is that PS is kind of like Word in that the core of it - the things everyone uses - was finished years ago. Now all they do is pile on more and more stuff that few of us will ever even learn.
If you make a living from graphics, you *need* Photoshop. If not, GIMP will serve you admirably, especially this new incarnation.
I've been using the two together since kde 1.1, and it always works just fine. Now and again you might have to tweak a header file or Makefile, but usually the core and 95% of the apps work right out of the box. (Sometimes the early betas just won't build, but I can live with that.)
I'll never understand why Sun went with GNOME over KDE, cos, in terms of stability at least, that's *always* sucked on Solaris. The only shame is that you can't, at least without *major* patching, build KDE with Forte.
Well written software requires very little effort to port from Unix to Unix. It's very rare I find anything written primarily for Linux that won't build on Solaris.
This makes it very frustrating when (usually linux) people can't see further than their own OS and fail to write portable code. It's not much more work really, and people will love you for it.
The world starts and ends with linux. Nothing else matters, because everything else sucks.
Think how many abandoned-at-version-0.1 sourceforge projects could be started with that money! I *so need* a wider choice of mail clients written in python. Or perhaps another window manager? You can never have too many of them. Write it in perl with 250 module dependencies!
Or maybe the money should go towards copying something Microsoft have already written. Okay, so everything they do sucks, but we need it all on Linux anyway. Not that we'd use it anyway, because we're all so l33t that we only use zsh, perl and screen.
dtrace looks fantastic. Solaris already has the best system monitoring tools around (at least that I've seen) but this looks so sweet.
ZFS seems nice too. What I'd really like to see is VxFS by default, but that's not likely to happen. (I'd also *really* like to see a version VxVM bundled to replace DiskSuite.... yeh, right)
The only other change I'd make is to kick GNOME out and have KDE be the new GUI, but once again, not a chance.
Good to see Sun coming out with some nice new stuff. It's been kind of disappointing how little the core OS has really gained over the last few versions.
Slashdot Mirror
> Problem is, we want non-hackers (which is most
> computer users, believe it or not) to use Linux
> too
Do we? Serious question: why do we want this? I've always wondered. I use the OS I like (Solaris) and I don't care *at all* what anyone else uses. I just don't get this advocacy thing.
Despite the flag waving and fanaticism I think most people round here would probably hate it if Linux went mainstream, because they'd lose their superior, leeter-than-thou bragging rights. I imagine they'd all move to AtheOS or Plan9 or somesuch, then scoff at l4me linux lusers.
This is a KDE/GNOME thread: the "friendly" faces of Unix. That means dozens of "your all ghey I use blackbox/FVWM/fluxbox/E/screen/ratpoison" posts from weenies trying to impress the stupid trend-following GNOME/KDE herd.
Sorry. I'm sure I had a point to make when I started writing this...
Speaking as a huge fan of the GIMP, I have to agree with this point. I really don't like GTK2 either. But, I haven't seen the fancy new file selector yet, so maybe that will help me change my mind.
Just because someone says they don't like something it doesn't make them a troll.
> "You wouldn't deny a chihauhau a place among dogs because it is too small."
I would deny it a place on Earth if it were within my power.
> Who wants to use a proprietary sound format, when they can use a much more appealing open format
The key word here is "use". Can I use ogg on my iPod? In my car mp3 player? Practically anywhere at all? No. This is news because it applies to something people like my Mum and Dad have heard of. I sincerely doubt that they are aware of OGG and FLAC.
Outside of slashdot people don't care about open vs proprietary, "free as in speech", elegance of algorithms or having the source. Technology is an enabler, not a fan-boy hobby horse.
Too many people lose sight of just how obscure the stuff we talk about on here is.
FWIW I think OGG is great. But I don't use it because it just isn't useful enough.
As do Solaris and HP-UX.
> Would LINUX exist or how would it of evolved
> differently if Linus had learned to program on DOS
> or a Mac?
You know, if he hadn't done it, someone else would have. It'd all be BSD round here instead.
You're right though. The Amiga community was incredible. The linux community captures many of the best aspects of it (sharing code for free, great apps) and most of the worst (bigoted, blinkered, ignorant zealotry.) Of course, what Linux doesn't have is rampant piracy killing all the commercial vendors.
WTF does the verb leverage mean? Suddenly I'm seeing and hearing it everywhere and I don't understand. I have a feeling it has replaced "facilitate" as a word misused by idiots who want to say "use" but sound more intelligent and important people around them.
use -> utilize -> facilitate -> leverage
Am I right?
> so what you are saying is that your middle name is FUD. stfu jerkoff.
Yes, that's exactly what I was saying. You interpret a text superbly, and word your critique with the kind of eloquence and sensitivity few writers even dream of.
i) the BSDs are pretty obscure. The people who use them do so for a reason. To get into BSD you've initially got to be attracted by something they offer, and what they offer is security. I'd say the average BSD user knows more about Unix than the average linux user. (No, I don't use BSD. Well, not much.)
/. linux weenie thinks knowing how to comment things out of inetd.conf makes him a security expert. He thinks his ultra-leet gentoo boxen are watertight, and doesn't need to implement a security policy or look at his logs, then gets worked over by a script kiddie.
ii) BSD is not a buzzword like linux. No clueless middle manager ever asked his clueless admin to set up an OpenBSD server because he saw an item on TV about it. Again, if BSD is there, it's probably there for a reason.
iii) the average
iv) the herd's reaction is "it says something negative about linux, which is perfect, ergo it's FUD"
v) why do linux vendors (and also Sun) feel bundling as much freely downloadable crap as possible adds value to the product, rather than just making more of a PITA to manage properly?
I hate working on linux boxes that don't have ksh installed. (Yes, I know some do, just like some Suns have bash.)
/es. (To be honest a large part of the problem is admins whose policy is always to install entire distribution + OEM.)
I don't really have a problem with Sun giving you the bare minimum tools. I admit it can be a PITA to install stuff, but if you're doing a lot of builds, Jumpstart should be churning out boxes exactly how you like them.
I personally don't like the way more and more stuff has been creeping in to the standard Solaris install, even into the core cluster. If I'm building a DNS server. I don't *want* texinfo, JPEG libraries, LDAP and drivers for 10 different frame buffers. I certainly don't want Apache and Samba. Admittedly disk space isn't an issue any more, but it's more to back up, more potential tools for teh haxor, and longer find
Oh, and I can get Exceed up and running for you. Can I have a job?
> And when they finally got them here, one of
> the V100s did not boot.
> That's it, we almost ended up with a
> network-enabled FORTH compiler that cost us
> $1500.
My friend bought a new car, and the dealership accidentally gave him the wrong set of keys. That was it, he almost ended up with a sealed glass and metal box that cost him $35000.
One little tiny, easily rectified mistake does not mean the product sucks. If someone dismissed linux because they bought a preinstalled box which didn't boot because of a wrong jumper, would that mean linux was crappy? No. Of course not.
> I'm still glad we didn't wait for tech support
> to react (and I'm pretty sure it would take
> them several more weeks)
Have you ever *used* Sun support? To answer your later question, that's one of the reasons Sun are so expensive. They have great support. If you were on a decent support contract there could have been a guy with you inside an hour with a bag full of V100 parts. If you don't need support, go with linux/bsd or buy Sun kit off ebay.
Once more, FUD-ish Sun-bashing gets modded up as interesting/informative. Replies which dare to defend Sun are usually modded down. Flamebait, troll, whatever. (They should have a "-1 heresy" tag.)
> But just lay off the attempted cheap shots at Linux
I never mentioned linux. I said "Solaris is not so slow it's unusable on less than 32 CPUs". (My bad here - I forgot I was putting stuff on an HTML message board and just typed a "less than", which disappeared, then missed it in the preview. D'oh!)
That, for the hard of thinking, means that I believe Solaris is not slow on small machines. It in no way implied that I think linux does not scale. (I don't know enough about linux on big machines to comment.)
> Jackass.
I'll lay off the cheap shots at linux if you lay off the cheap shots at people whose posts you can't understand. Deal?
Wow some of the comments on here are uninformed. Especially those modded informative or interesting.
/proc/whatever. Solaris is not so slow it's unusable on 32 CPUs. Version 5.8 is not four versions older than 9. There are smarter ways of patching than downloading the recommended cluster every day. But hey, post uninformed crap and up your karma. That's what matters.
"Hey, Solaris sucks! Linux is way better and it's free as in speech!" +5 interesting
"Hey Linux does everything Solaris does and it's free as in beer" +5 informative
"Hey there was a film called Solaris! OMG LOL!!!" +5 funny
Do you *never* get bored of pointing out that x86 chips have higher clock speeds than SPARCs?
Don't you think we *know* by now that Linux is free?
If you know how to handle Solaris, you will know that: it has some features that linux does not. It's no harder to build software for than linux. Trusted Solaris privileges are not the same as sudo. dtrace is not the same as cat
If you don't know what you're talking about, shut up and leave the discussion to people with some interest and background in the subject. And stop complaining that "no one uses Solaris, so who cares there's a new major release", when you've probably been up all night bitching on IRC that the mods here rejected the 2.6.3-rc3 release story you submitted.
I hope you're right, though most second-hand record shops have been gradually phasing out the vinyl for years. It takes up a lot more room, has a smaller market, costs roughly the same to buy, but sells for a third of the price of CDs.
Just as an aside, I strongly recommend everyone to avoid High Fidelity. It is without doubt the single worst book I have ever read.
To avoid repeating myself, This is why I think vinyl is great.
It's a comment piece buried way down in the BBC business section, saying something 99.9999% of the world's population neither understand nor care about, and which the other 0.0001% are already thinking anyway.
To anyone bothered enough to have complained to the BBC and self-important enough to have posted your letter here. FIND SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT TO DO. If you all hate SCO so much, lobby them. (You have? Great!) Contribute to a piece of software that might help get linux noticed for the right reasons. Go out and get some fresh air. It might help you calm down.
So far as I can see this article reports a rumour as rumour, doesn't criticise linux and doesn't criticise linux users. God, you're all so precious about your little computer system. Get off the hobby horse.
The vocal minority make linux users look like a bunch of ignorant, righteous, blinkered partisans. Just the kind of people every CEO wants to move into his enterprise eh?
when they don't have all that pr0n to distract them.
The same group of experts are due to publish a report suggesting the Internet may also be a treasure trove of porn.
Wouldn't it be better for everyone if we just sat down and decided which desktop was best, then all used it and just forgot about the other?
Honestly, why can't everyone just get along?
> 2004 is really beginning well for all those of
> us who use Linux as their primary desktop!"
Yes. Because GNOME and KDE only run on Linux, don't they?
Please, a little credit to the folk who right proper, portable code, and to those who port it.
I've been using 1.3 as my main graphics tool (on Solaris) for a good while now. Even when it was a little unstable it was worth the odd crash because it's so much nicer to use than 1.2. The interface is very different, simpler and more intuitive, paths are vastly improved, as is the text tool. Apart from that though, I've been a little disappointed at the lack of new features.
I understand the priority was the internal rewrite, so now that's done, fingers crossed that the developers will start giving us some nice new things to play with.
Having said that, let's get this clear: gimp is *not* a Photoshop replacement. In terms of functionality, it's just not in the same league. But what people forget is that PS is kind of like Word in that the core of it - the things everyone uses - was finished years ago. Now all they do is pile on more and more stuff that few of us will ever even learn.
If you make a living from graphics, you *need* Photoshop. If not, GIMP will serve you admirably, especially this new incarnation.
I've been using the two together since kde 1.1, and it always works just fine. Now and again you might have to tweak a header file or Makefile, but usually the core and 95% of the apps work right out of the box. (Sometimes the early betas just won't build, but I can live with that.)
I'll never understand why Sun went with GNOME over KDE, cos, in terms of stability at least, that's *always* sucked on Solaris. The only shame is that you can't, at least without *major* patching, build KDE with Forte.
Well written software requires very little effort to port from Unix to Unix. It's very rare I find anything written primarily for Linux that won't build on Solaris.
This makes it very frustrating when (usually linux) people can't see further than their own OS and fail to write portable code. It's not much more work really, and people will love you for it.
The world starts and ends with linux. Nothing else matters, because everything else sucks.
Think how many abandoned-at-version-0.1 sourceforge projects could be started with that money! I *so need* a wider choice of mail clients written in python. Or perhaps another window manager? You can never have too many of them. Write it in perl with 250 module dependencies!
Or maybe the money should go towards copying something Microsoft have already written. Okay, so everything they do sucks, but we need it all on Linux anyway. Not that we'd use it anyway, because we're all so l33t that we only use zsh, perl and screen.
w00t!
Nice to see the Amiga window borders on the S/MIME screenshot! But it will take more than that to pry me away from kmail.
dtrace looks fantastic. Solaris already has the best system monitoring tools around (at least that I've seen) but this looks so sweet.
ZFS seems nice too. What I'd really like to see is VxFS by default, but that's not likely to happen. (I'd also *really* like to see a version VxVM bundled to replace DiskSuite.... yeh, right)
The only other change I'd make is to kick GNOME out and have KDE be the new GUI, but once again, not a chance.
Good to see Sun coming out with some nice new stuff. It's been kind of disappointing how little the core OS has really gained over the last few versions.
abacuxen surely