KDE themes are great, but they're sort of hidden away. To change window decoration themes, right click on the titlebar and choose something the 'Decoration' submenu. All of these window decoration themes are proper QT themed - not pixmapped, and they look great (although there aren't many). The good thing is that the window decoration themes pick up the right colours from you colour choices in the control panel. It's a bit hard to explain, but if you go and try it out, you'll see what I mean.
As for widget theming, the KDE 2 widget theming system is very powerful. You can change the widget theme in the control panel, under 'Style'. There are quite a few native QT themes that emulate MacOS, SGI, BeOS etc. These are good because, like the window decoration themes, they reflect your colour and contrast choices from the colours control panel. KDE also does pixmap widget theming. There are only about 4 KDE2 pixmap widget themes on kde.themes.org, but the great thing is that KDE can use GTK pixmap themes, and is much faster than GTK due to it's advanced engine.
To use a GTK pixmap theme, use the program in the K menu called 'Legacy theme importer' (yes, that's a bit of a nasty name for it). You just need to untar the GTK theme wherever you want it, then tell the theme importer where the directory is.
However, there are a few drawbacks that I've noticed which I hope will get fixed for 2.1. Using KDE native pixmap themes seems to be somewhat slower than using GTK pixmap themes. I've noticed (for example) with the Aquatic KDE2 theme, that when drawing windows, the background behind the toolbars tehnd to flicker a bit, and draw a bit slugglishly (about the same speed as GTK themes on my box). And the GTK importer isn't bug-free. I've had problems with the GTK theme overriding my font choices in KDE, and as much as I try in the control panel under 'Fonts', I can't get it to do what I want. There are also problems with using GTK themes, in toolbars. For example the Aqua theme for GTK draws those 'bubble' things under toolbar icons when you mouseover them, but when used under KDE, you just see a bland bevelled rectangle when you mouseover. Another problem with the GTK themes is that it doesn't theme the Menu Bar, if you have it at the top of the screen like MacOS.
Other than these issues which I hope will be fixed soon, I love KDE2 and its themeing capabilities. Right now, I'm using the KDE2 native BeOS-style window decoration theme and QT theme. It looks beautiful, and it absolutely flies.
And how many of those installed Linux machines are crufty old servers sitting in the garage of some geek? I'm pretty sure that many more people *use* macOS than use Linux.
To be honest, in a 'commercial' OS environment, I'm starting to think that the definition of Linux has to be a combination of the kernel AND a set of libraries.
I think that's pretty much spot on. You couldn't seriously call a whole distribution with all its optional extras 'Linux', and it would also be silly to just think of it as a kernel. After all, who writes software for Linux that depends on the kernel and nothing else?
And that's where I'm worried. Sure, the kernels are compatible, but the kernel is only a small part of making a Linux system work. Unfortunately, people tend to only think of kernels when there is speak of fragmentation etc, and miss the bigger picture.
A while ago, I would have replied to this with the standard "It's open source yadda yadda yadda choice is good". However, after seeing Redhat's latest hijinxs with gcc, I'm starting to worry if this sort of thing will become a trend. So first it's gcc that's incompatible. Then what? Xfree86? glibc?
More work needs to be done to adhere to standards and distros not doing their own thing just for the hell of it. I'd really hate for Microsoft's 'mutant' ads to ring true.
If you mean they would have to change their name because of trademark issues, I'd say probably not. They wouldn't be nabbed for trademark infringment, because trademarks are only applicable in a certain field.
For instance Dulux probably has the trademark in the area of paints and hardware, which nobody would confuse with a DVD player. There wouldn't be any dilution of the branding by this DVD player being available (or at least any sane court would say so).
I don't know about Nautilus, but I'm pretty sure that Konqueror (the KDE file browser) is plugin-based, and has similar features to Nautilus, plus more.
Photoshop seems to run faster on my 266Mhz G3 at work, and the 350Mhz G3s at uni, much more than my K6-2/450. I notice an absolutely huge difference with Illustrator. The Mac version absolutely creams the Windows one.
Just as well; people have no business running software they can't (or won't) figure out. The only legitimate software gripes, I believe, are gripes against lacking features, not gripes against a user's inability to figure things out.
The typical excuse that people use for not bothering to consider usability. The idea that it's always the user's fault that they can't adapt to the way the developer things is absurd. Imagine if cars were so unnessecarily complicated that you couldn't drive a car until you were an experienced mechanic and could 'figure it out'. Software is made *to be used*. I suppose it never occurred to you that the developer may not be an all-important omniscient being that instinctively does things in the most logical and common-sensical way?
Re: your comment about/etc vs. the Windows registry: Just because it's better than Windows doesn't mean it's good./etc (or is it/usr/etc, or is it/usr/local/etc or is it ~/.$program ?) is a mess of differently formatted files in a difficult to understand hierarchy. It could certainly be done a lot better. Judging yourself by the competition is a good way to acheive mediocrity.
System-wide config files are in/etc. User specific config files are usually in the format.XXXXX in your home directory where XXXXX is the name of the program. And yes, the system is a a mess, though linuxconf and the Mandrake utils help a lot (see below).
Re: Control Panels,
The Mandrake *Drake utilities are very good. I love RPMDrake - It already has a catalogue of the RPMs on the installation CDs, and makes it a cinch to find what you want, and satisfies dependencies. DrakFont is good too - simplifies the unnecessary messing around with xset fp rehash and all that crap.
Re: Compiling
Yes,./configure;make;make install is pretty easy, but its a nightmare when you don't have the right includes/libs/etc.. I wish more people would use source RPMs or DEBs when distributing source. For one, it keeps your system nice and pristine and easy for uninstalling etc. and 2, it's easy to wrap a nice GUI around an rpm --rebuild, which would ease the pain of compiling software for a lot of people, and 3, it makes checking for dependencies so much nicer. I spent hours on the weekend hunting around for some obscure include file that a tarball needed to compile.
I really agree that these fairly simple things (like config files) are still stuck long ago in the past. I think most of these things don't get changed because they're "how it's done" rather than the best way of doing things.
Re: IE on MacOS, I'm pretty sure it's a whole new dev team for the mac version. A whole different codebase too.
For what MS gains from the Mac version, and the small market share of mac owners, I'm very surprised that MS put so much effort into it. Maybe the mac dev team is just really good, or maybe its a testament to how much Windows sucks, that IE is inferior for its flagship product.
I don't want reality in my games. That is what I am escaping from.
That's right, you don't want reality in a fantasy game, but you do want immersion. The whole strive of (most) video game graphics is to create as much of an immersive appearance as possible. This is to enhance the escapism that you experience.
Picture super mario bros on the NES, and then picture the exact same gameplay, but it 3d, ultra hi-res VR with force feedback. I know which one is going to be much more convincing to your senses. When you're playing games (to use this as an example) where the supposed 'clothes' on the characters are rigid and taught (a la Lara Croft) it is one out of many little things which disrupt the fantasy experience.
Games are much more exciting, as the illusion that you are there is greatened. When you can believe the illusion created by the graphics etc, then you'll feel much more adrenalin or distress or whatever emotions you feel playing games, because your senses are being fooled into thinking it's real.
On the other hand, if the gameplay was affected by the clothes (picture the character in Jedi Knight being caught up in his cloak as he tries to swing the lightsaber around), it would probably be pretty dumb. However, better immersion (through graphics, sound etc.) can only help the experience.
Click "Sort by MIME type" or whatever its called in the viewer window, then all the gifs are arranged together. Just drag a box around them, and drag 'em all to the right dir.
I'll agree with you that CLIs are better for SOME things, particularly maintenance-type tasks that can be done in bulk, scripted at the command line etc. However GUI file mangaers are great in that it's easy and fast to arbitrarily select things (because most of the time, you are probably concerned with the *content* of the files, not just the file extensions etc.) and to quickly visualise and recognise things by their icons. Maybe there are some people with an amazing ability to trawl through text, but it's much easier for most people to find the things that you're looking for by skimming over the icons. The colours, shapes etc. are all visual cues to help you recognise things, while on a CLI, you have to parse the text yourself because they all look more or less similar.
Also for most people, its much easier to actually work with things in a GUI than it is in a CLI, because of the recall/recognition memory thing. It's much easier to right-click on a floppy disk icon and choose format from the list of options, then choose a few options that are presented to you, than it is to remember the correct syntax for mk2fs and all the command like arguments, and if you forget, then looking up man pages.
You talked about being pretty, keep in mind that 'Graphical' is only 1/3rd of 'Graphical *User Interface*'. It's not just about the pretty pictures:)
There was a Gnome theme for KDE2 talked about on KDE Dot News about a week before KDE2's launch. You should be able to find out more details by searching the archives on that site.
If you like Altavista, you may like to try Raging Search. It's made by altavista, using the altavista engine and database, but without all the stupid portal crap - just like the Google interface.
Using a combo of Raging and Google, I can find most things that I want with very few troubles at all.
Hey, I wouldn't worry about the laws here in AU - mainly a token gesture to appease a power-wielding conservative politician. All they seem to have done is make ISPs offer filtering software to their clients (who don't have to use it). I've had no probs getting my fair share of pr0n ever since the law came in;).
Slashdot Mirror
KDE themes are great, but they're sort of hidden away. To change window decoration themes, right click on the titlebar and choose something the 'Decoration' submenu. All of these window decoration themes are proper QT themed - not pixmapped, and they look great (although there aren't many). The good thing is that the window decoration themes pick up the right colours from you colour choices in the control panel. It's a bit hard to explain, but if you go and try it out, you'll see what I mean.
As for widget theming, the KDE 2 widget theming system is very powerful. You can change the widget theme in the control panel, under 'Style'. There are quite a few native QT themes that emulate MacOS, SGI, BeOS etc. These are good because, like the window decoration themes, they reflect your colour and contrast choices from the colours control panel. KDE also does pixmap widget theming. There are only about 4 KDE2 pixmap widget themes on kde.themes.org, but the great thing is that KDE can use GTK pixmap themes, and is much faster than GTK due to it's advanced engine.
To use a GTK pixmap theme, use the program in the K menu called 'Legacy theme importer' (yes, that's a bit of a nasty name for it). You just need to untar the GTK theme wherever you want it, then tell the theme importer where the directory is.
However, there are a few drawbacks that I've noticed which I hope will get fixed for 2.1. Using KDE native pixmap themes seems to be somewhat slower than using GTK pixmap themes. I've noticed (for example) with the Aquatic KDE2 theme, that when drawing windows, the background behind the toolbars tehnd to flicker a bit, and draw a bit slugglishly (about the same speed as GTK themes on my box). And the GTK importer isn't bug-free. I've had problems with the GTK theme overriding my font choices in KDE, and as much as I try in the control panel under 'Fonts', I can't get it to do what I want. There are also problems with using GTK themes, in toolbars. For example the Aqua theme for GTK draws those 'bubble' things under toolbar icons when you mouseover them, but when used under KDE, you just see a bland bevelled rectangle when you mouseover. Another problem with the GTK themes is that it doesn't theme the Menu Bar, if you have it at the top of the screen like MacOS.
Other than these issues which I hope will be fixed soon, I love KDE2 and its themeing capabilities. Right now, I'm using the KDE2 native BeOS-style window decoration theme and QT theme. It looks beautiful, and it absolutely flies.
And how many of those installed Linux machines are crufty old servers sitting in the garage of some geek? I'm pretty sure that many more people *use* macOS than use Linux.
After reading a /. comment a while ago about this issue, I've been pronouncing it as "Oh Sex". It's got a much nicer ring to it, don't you think? ;)
To be honest, in a 'commercial' OS environment, I'm starting to think that the definition of Linux has to be a combination of the kernel AND a set of libraries.
I think that's pretty much spot on. You couldn't seriously call a whole distribution with all its optional extras 'Linux', and it would also be silly to just think of it as a kernel. After all, who writes software for Linux that depends on the kernel and nothing else?
And that's where I'm worried. Sure, the kernels are compatible, but the kernel is only a small part of making a Linux system work. Unfortunately, people tend to only think of kernels when there is speak of fragmentation etc, and miss the bigger picture.
A while ago, I would have replied to this with the standard "It's open source yadda yadda yadda choice is good". However, after seeing Redhat's latest hijinxs with gcc, I'm starting to worry if this sort of thing will become a trend. So first it's gcc that's incompatible. Then what? Xfree86? glibc?
More work needs to be done to adhere to standards and distros not doing their own thing just for the hell of it. I'd really hate for Microsoft's 'mutant' ads to ring true.
If you mean they would have to change their name because of trademark issues, I'd say probably not. They wouldn't be nabbed for trademark infringment, because trademarks are only applicable in a certain field.
For instance Dulux probably has the trademark in the area of paints and hardware, which nobody would confuse with a DVD player. There wouldn't be any dilution of the branding by this DVD player being available (or at least any sane court would say so).
I don't know about Nautilus, but I'm pretty sure that Konqueror (the KDE file browser) is plugin-based, and has similar features to Nautilus, plus more.
That's interesting..
Photoshop seems to run faster on my 266Mhz G3 at work, and the 350Mhz G3s at uni, much more than my K6-2/450. I notice an absolutely huge difference with Illustrator. The Mac version absolutely creams the Windows one.
The typical excuse that people use for not bothering to consider usability. The idea that it's always the user's fault that they can't adapt to the way the developer things is absurd. Imagine if cars were so unnessecarily complicated that you couldn't drive a car until you were an experienced mechanic and could 'figure it out'. Software is made *to be used*. I suppose it never occurred to you that the developer may not be an all-important omniscient being that instinctively does things in the most logical and common-sensical way?
Re: your comment about
Re: Config Files
/etc. User specific config files are usually in the format .XXXXX in your home directory where XXXXX is the name of the program. And yes, the system is a a mess, though linuxconf and the Mandrake utils help a lot (see below).
./configure;make;make install is pretty easy, but its a nightmare when you don't have the right includes/libs/etc.. I wish more people would use source RPMs or DEBs when distributing source. For one, it keeps your system nice and pristine and easy for uninstalling etc. and 2, it's easy to wrap a nice GUI around an rpm --rebuild, which would ease the pain of compiling software for a lot of people, and 3, it makes checking for dependencies so much nicer. I spent hours on the weekend hunting around for some obscure include file that a tarball needed to compile.
System-wide config files are in
Re: Control Panels,
The Mandrake *Drake utilities are very good. I love RPMDrake - It already has a catalogue of the RPMs on the installation CDs, and makes it a cinch to find what you want, and satisfies dependencies. DrakFont is good too - simplifies the unnecessary messing around with xset fp rehash and all that crap.
Re: Compiling
Yes,
I really agree that these fairly simple things (like config files) are still stuck long ago in the past. I think most of these things don't get changed because they're "how it's done" rather than the best way of doing things.
Re: IE on MacOS, I'm pretty sure it's a whole new dev team for the mac version. A whole different codebase too.
For what MS gains from the Mac version, and the small market share of mac owners, I'm very surprised that MS put so much effort into it. Maybe the mac dev team is just really good, or maybe its a testament to how much Windows sucks, that IE is inferior for its flagship product.
I'd recommend giving The Internet Junkbuster a try, for filtering out banners. It does wonders on my 33.6kbps modem at home.
Ah, but it depends how many people are sharing Metallica's new album. That could skew the figures somewhat ;)
Picture super mario bros on the NES, and then picture the exact same gameplay, but it 3d, ultra hi-res VR with force feedback. I know which one is going to be much more convincing to your senses. When you're playing games (to use this as an example) where the supposed 'clothes' on the characters are rigid and taught (a la Lara Croft) it is one out of many little things which disrupt the fantasy experience.
Games are much more exciting, as the illusion that you are there is greatened. When you can believe the illusion created by the graphics etc, then you'll feel much more adrenalin or distress or whatever emotions you feel playing games, because your senses are being fooled into thinking it's real.
On the other hand, if the gameplay was affected by the clothes (picture the character in Jedi Knight being caught up in his cloak as he tries to swing the lightsaber around), it would probably be pretty dumb. However, better immersion (through graphics, sound etc.) can only help the experience.
This is hilarious!. Slashdot reading computer geeks (yes I'm one too) are now flaming this guy saying 'get a life'.
;)
Do the words Pot, Kettle and black mean anything to you guys?
Simple answer to your predicament:
:)
Click "Sort by MIME type" or whatever its called in the viewer window, then all the gifs are arranged together. Just drag a box around them, and drag 'em all to the right dir.
I'll agree with you that CLIs are better for SOME things, particularly maintenance-type tasks that can be done in bulk, scripted at the command line etc. However GUI file mangaers are great in that it's easy and fast to arbitrarily select things (because most of the time, you are probably concerned with the *content* of the files, not just the file extensions etc.) and to quickly visualise and recognise things by their icons. Maybe there are some people with an amazing ability to trawl through text, but it's much easier for most people to find the things that you're looking for by skimming over the icons. The colours, shapes etc. are all visual cues to help you recognise things, while on a CLI, you have to parse the text yourself because they all look more or less similar.
Also for most people, its much easier to actually work with things in a GUI than it is in a CLI, because of the recall/recognition memory thing. It's much easier to right-click on a floppy disk icon and choose format from the list of options, then choose a few options that are presented to you, than it is to remember the correct syntax for mk2fs and all the command like arguments, and if you forget, then looking up man pages.
You talked about being pretty, keep in mind that 'Graphical' is only 1/3rd of 'Graphical *User Interface*'. It's not just about the pretty pictures
There was a Gnome theme for KDE2 talked about on KDE Dot News about a week before KDE2's launch. You should be able to find out more details by searching the archives on that site.
Well, I'm sure it's gotta be good - after all, it uses Unique Directory Technology in their Scalable Internet Search Infrastructure!
I just saw your sig. Here is the full thing (properly attributed):
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance
-- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
ATM Machines, PIN Numbers, gigaflops per second.
FLOP = FLoating Point Operations per Second.
Whilst on the topic of search engines, Let's not forget Search Bastard. I'm sure it wouldn't suffer from these sorts of problems.
If you like Altavista, you may like to try Raging Search. It's made by altavista, using the altavista engine and database, but without all the stupid portal crap - just like the Google interface.
Using a combo of Raging and Google, I can find most things that I want with very few troubles at all.
Or maybe even like XEROX.
Hey, I wouldn't worry about the laws here in AU - mainly a token gesture to appease a power-wielding conservative politician. All they seem to have done is make ISPs offer filtering software to their clients (who don't have to use it). I've had no probs getting my fair share of pr0n ever since the law came in ;).
Are you sure it's a Zip drive? IIRC, he put the disk into a Game Boy or something to hide it. I don't think you can fit a zip disk into a Game Boy...