Jamie Zawinski wrote an editorial regarding the status of video playback under Linux (note: strong language is used). My take: The guy is my hero (he could use better language though). This is exactly the status of usability on Linux, and not just with video players…
Linux Usability …or, Why Do I Bother
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
so sad…he could have tried kmplayer, of course he needs to run kde, but it’s the best interface to mplayer that i’ve ever tried, everything in a single window (ala ms Mediaplayer) no skins, just your regular kde theme, nice fullscreen, the only problem is that i’ve still to figure out how to tell it no to put subtitles in my dvds, but for that i just fire up mplayer from the console…
“*fantastic* comment:
http: //slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=51786&cid=5151874 ”
Couldn’t agree more.
I didn’t find the comment all that enlightening. The questions posed by the author of the comment are clearly answered in the documentation.
My opinion is that if, as a user, you aren’t even willing to read the instructions, then perhaps you have bigger problems than the software you are trying to install.
I actually found this follow up comment to be an excellent comment.
“If you don’t code but spend all your time giving shit to people who do code, critizing the people who code, berating the people who code then they will stop coding too. Why should somebody spend their time coding when all they get in return is a bunch of whining asshole users who go on a tirade about how stupid the coder is?”
The applications I write are for internal use. That’s why you don’t see the UIs.
And yes, I have looked through the source code for OSS applications, and there is a lot of horribly shitty code in many open source projects. Even the Linux kernel itself has some horribly shitty code in it.
Even the author of the C programming language looked at the Linux source code and said that it sucked and was horribly programmed.
So do you know for yourself that the code sucks, or are you just parroting back what Dennis Ritchie stated? Bottom line is that crap or not, the code works. I don’t see many people rushing out to adopt Dennis Ritchie’s Plan9, so perhaps that is the basis for his distaste. Also, have you looked at Windows code? I have. It is not a pretty sight either, but it works (sort of).
Another reason Linux isn’t ready for the average desktop. The attitude of “If you don’t like it, open your editor, fix it, and recompile it.” Like the average end user has the time or knowledge to do this.
Well, according to you, you are not the average user. So show us your UI prowess and contribute something other than banal comments.
Like I said… Welcome to to the real world. Products get reviewed. Products get harshly critisized.
So let me see if I understand what you are saying. OSS programmers need to accept lame comments and personal insults regarding their code from people like Jamie because you agree with him. However, if anyone criticizes those comments, then they are just moronic Linux zealots who don’t deserve the attention given to a minute speck of fly crap.
The truth is, insulting tirades such as Jamie’s deserve harsh criticism and no amount of your defending them or agreeing with them will make them correct.
Lord have mercy. It’s a rant.
But I think he’s dead on about crap UI and needlessly complex installations and mandatory commandline-fu to get a ‘puter to do something as basic as play a freaking media file.
And why is it so hard for companies to make a decent graphical installer? Mac OS X — download the tar.gz double click it, Aladdin Stuffit expander opens, unzips it, parks it on the desktop, I double click it, it transforms itself into the file type my computer can use, and I drag it to the folder I want it to live in. (And if I decide that no, really, it needs to go live in a different folder, I just drag its ass there and the system auto updates all the relevant paths. [Why can’t all OSes do that?])
I may be no great shakes as an artist, and I’ve never had a work of fiction published, but that doesn’t mean I have no qualifications to review work, or even rant about something I find particularly bad. (That’s my favorite logically fallacious counter-point “Well let’s see you write, draw, and color your own comic! Until you do that, you have no right to say that mine is bad!”)
I say kudos to JZ to giving Red Hat and the hordes of opens source coders out there a much needed smacking with a clue by four.
(Now somebody remind me, why do I want to give YDL a try?)
Fire up KDE, open Konqueror, click on a RPM, enter root password (or always stay root – not recommended, but most Winblows users do this…) – voila, your done.
Duh, that was hard…
Oh, and shut up about dependencies – I prefer dependencies about the redundancy that comes with Winblows, which wastes HDD space and bloats downloads.
Is any Linux rant found on the web eligible to be posted here?
I’ve had it, bye.
I agree totally with this guy. Nothing else to say. He voices every one of my opinions.
As a person who runs both linux and mac os x on the same box, the disparity between multimedia is astonishing. While neither a linux newbie or a guru, I still haven’t been able to get movies to play properly on my linux partition. Interestingly enough, the Mac OS X port of mplayer works great as someone has put a nice GUI on it.
…Red Hat 7.2 never was and never will be ready for the desktop. Even the latest Red Hat version is specified for server and corporate usage. Trying to find out whether Linux’s ready for Joe’s Desktop using Red Hat is misleading.
…skinning is a bad “feature” usability wise. But many users still seem to like it, so much even that you can’t really find any program for playin multimedia files anymore which doesn’t support skinning. In this regard Jamie Zawinski is “stupid” (as in “every Joe knows how to do it”) by not looking for any alternative skins.
…Eugenia is obviously not worried about the credibility of osnews. A bigger break for getting some distance to such misplaced “emotional news” might lead to a huge increase in quality for this site.
You just have to love this lady.. does she have ANY knowledge of computers and os’s at all? AT ALL? or is she just a bitter old lady out to make trouble?
this argument is old and weary.. to use mplayer, you can apt-get install, emerge.. portinstall pkg_add -r … in most os’s (unix/linux) you have packagemanagers and you have systems for updating/keeping this up to date. But my point is, your grandma isn’t (most likely) suited for linux, neither is eugenia. People that isn’t very into computers should maybe stick with windows and “let us click this button and watch the cute wizard” their way trough the world, reading mail and browsing. But for those who like to know what happens underneith it all, that wants control, that wants an alternative, this is one of them! critizising it based on the stupidity of the user is just lame, it is like critizising a F1-car beacause a grandma with a lada isn’t capable of driving it, it is STILL a hell of a car, she just doesen’t have the capability of running it.. now, stop this foolishness and let eugnenia bitter her way around to another board.
this article.. is it for real? does someone want to display themself as such a stupid individual? i just wonder. How ****** hard can it be.. for real? /me gets a bit tired when stupid fuc***s like this get to say so much! I’m stupid as hell myself, and i get mplayer to work superb, with AND withouth gui.. and cryptic commandline-commands? yes.. geeez… it is hard?! isn’t it…
[thul@masada]/Stor(67): mplayer b5.113-amc.avi <– that is a HELL of a line.. isn’t it? hard to remember all those HUGE commands..
I think it was not Dennis Ritchie that said the Linux kernel
was crap but Ken Thompson. That was 7 years ago. The kernel
has been cleaned up and improved a lot since then..
“So do you know for yourself that the code sucks, or are you just parroting back what Dennis Ritchie stated? Bottom line is that crap or not, the code works.”
using gets() to retrieve a string in C works too. But its horribly bad programming and opens up serious security holes. I’m not saying that Linux has security problems like this. What I am saying is that just because something works does not mean it is well programmed. You can also use
goto() in C (which some GNU utilities do by the way…) This is also horrible programming practice because it results in spaghetti code. Sure it works. But it is bad practice.
Yes, I have looked at quite a bit of the Linux source. And there is a lot of stuff that is very badly programmed. (Some of it affects performance quite seriously. The NFS subsystem is a good example.)
“Also, have you looked at Windows code? I have. It is not a pretty sight either, but it works (sort of).”
Yes. And some of it is horribly programemd too. But my specific gripe here, as I pointed out in another post, was with bad (or just plain lazy) GUI programming. For example, the point was made that the mouse pointer jumps to the top left corner of any new window that you open. I doubt that was intentional. It was probably just shitty programming of the mouse and or window event handler. (If it was intentional, the programmer needs to get his head examined.)
“So let me see if I understand what you are saying. OSS programmers need to accept lame comments and personal insults regarding their code from people like Jamie because you agree with him.”
Nope. What I am saying is that OSS programmers need to provide well thought out and logical responses to this stuff. Not just resort to their whine, pout, stomp feet, and name calling behavior that the first Linux zealots who responded to this did.
“if anyone criticizes those comments, then they are just moronic Linux zealots who don’t deserve the attention given to a minute speck of fly crap.”
They are Linux zealots if their criticism is “This guy is a moron and idiot and he must be beyond stupid if he can’t figure out how to install mplayer.” Instead of stating the reasons why they don’t think the criticism of the OSS product is justified, they jsut resort to childish name calling without givign any logical refutation of the criticism. Yes, that is zealotry.
“The truth is, insulting tirades such as Jamie’s deserve harsh criticism and no amount of your defending them or agreeing with them will make them correct.”
Are you a published author? Or artist? or developer? I am. Maybe when you are, you will understand. Negative criticism is part of the game. Responding to it with name calling and whining only makes you look immature and lends strength to the argument. It makes it look like you know the criticism is correct and you can’t reasonably or logically respond, so you just lose your temper and start name calling and such.
I didn’t say OSS programmers or Linux users had to just ignroe the criticism. What I said is that they need to respond logically and reasonably instead of using immature name calling that doesn’t address the criticism at all but only attacks the intelligence of the reviewer.
*fantastic* comment:
http: //slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=51786&cid=5151874
Sheer genius! This is the whole point. I know not ALL of Linux development is like this, but enough of it is to make Linux a chaotic mess.
To the hard-core Linux geeks who love to dump on everyone else (you know who you are):
I’m not exactly non-technical, but I have downloaded the binaries and sources for all the players Jamie tried and NEVER got one of them to even install, much less play. Did I try everything I could have to make them run? Obviously not. But why should I? Who needs the hassle? Why do I need to download Fred’s patch to Pedro’s libraries that require exactly Gnome X.X and glibc X.Y.Z and obscurelib a.d.e.f.gg? I don’t have that kind of free time.
I have seen several RTFM-type commments in this thread, mostly from one loudmouth. I DID read the FMs. Didn’t help. Most of them are incomplete or don’t address the problems I had.
To most people a computer is a tool (or toy) that helps them do things. We don’t use them to give us hours of endless frustration, especially the kind you create and flaunt in our faces.
If crap like that is what you geeks code for yourselves, fine; keep your code, and your high-horse elitist attitudes, to yourselves. As long as you think and work like this, I hope I never hear you complain about the MS monopoly. You are as much a part of the problem as MS (if not more).
Linux guys-if you want, in any serious way, to have Joe User adopt your platform and defeat the evil Microsoft empire, THEN YOU HAD BETTER WAKE UP AND LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT USABILITY ISSUES.
If you don’t, then quit complaining about Windows, and the predominance of the Redmond empire. I’m seeing a lot of the same folks who love posting flames about what crap Windows is getting their panties in a knot because someone dared to complain about their sacred platform. You can’t have it both ways.
You think that newbies comming across to Linux suffer frustration?
Geez, there’s plenty to be had within Microsoft Windows as well you know. I’d say for the average person on this board has the knowledge to maintain a Windows based system. How about the majority of users who don’t. Ever heard of *.tmp files that MS programs love to throw onto your disk but in many cases not remove them when they have served their purpose?
How about the dynamic swap file which is the default on a Windows install. Given time it will lead to defragmentation hell. Or what about those lovely well written programs that leave cruft in the Registry when they are uninstalled? I’m sure you know that can over a period of time create hell for the user who knows nothing of how to clean it out.
As for Plug n Play, please it’s a joke and a very poor one. Only 1 OS has achieved true plug and play and it wasn’t a Microsoft one. Try BeOS.
Hardware installations?
Software problems?
Every OS has issues and not one of them has reached the Holy Grail in ease of use. Most and including OS X still have maintenance requirements that to the average person on the street have no idea. No different to a car, servicing has to be done on a regular basis but most people who use computers fail to realise this and then wonder why their system goes belly up after a year of use.
Linux might not be the easiest OS to use but what it does it does very well and that also includes sound and video playback. Better quality than windows, god knows why but the utilisation of hardware seems more efficient and my ears and eye’s don’t deceive me. Now if only I could get Steinberg to release their products for Linux. hmmmm one can dream can’t they.
I think jwz’s comments pertain more to problems with
mplayer and rpm than Linux in general.
When it comes to Linux I smell a Rhat. And that rhat is rpm. Red Hat has done a disservice to Linux by saddling it with rpm hell Fortuneately, there is urpmi, apt4rpm, synaptic to make rpm useable. It is only by bringing some apt to rpm that makes it useable. Here’s to the day rpm is apt in all but name.
Debian is not hard to install. Most of the people who parrot that myth,never even tried to or did back in the
days of slink or hamm.I did it as a cluesless newbie with Potato. Woody installation is easier than that. The new sarge will be easy and breazy.
When I hear about people who can’t install Debian it tells
me somthing alright , but not about Debian.
Sorry, but JWZ isn’t the only one who gets to dish out the cold hard truth.
If you can’t install regular Debian, try Libranet.
If you can’t install Libranet,try Xandros.
If you can’t install Xandros, give learning to
tying your shoelaces another go.
Tux is a freindly feller. He will teach you how.
Linux:improving daily.
I just spend 3 hours trying to get realplayer (both real one and real 8) to work with Red Hat. I even installed netscape to get it to work with streaming video from news.com. The problem is news.com uses embedded html alongside video. Well after 3 hours of my life it doesn’t fucking work. So I am typing this from Microsoft Windows XP. I am getting sick of trying to get linux to work. Sure gnome2 looks nice but its not worth the fucking heartache to get shit working. Linux is great for embedded apps and servers but has no fucking place on the desktop. X windows fucking blows (as it crashed over 20 times with my experiment) and everything is like fucked up patches and modules and shit that never fucking works. Fuck linux on the desktop. Just use Windows for now. There is not a fucking choice here. I don’t give a fuck whether Linblows or fucking Red Hat look good but as of 2003 linux on the desktop is fucking shit. Although RhythmBox and ogg vorbis fucking rule. I just wish I could use linux for everything and that incudes watching porn from cinemanow.com. Damn, Damn, Damn.
…ever with that rant was that it was posted as editorial on way too many places. Don’t blame Eug/OSNews too much though cause it was slashdotted too obviously.
It can all be summed up in this from his page:
“Perhaps your experience was different. Good for you.”
It’s not a review or editorial, it’s a rant, it’s allowed to be full of misstakes, curses and obvious incorrect statements.
So I repeat, only misstake ever made in this case was by Eugenia to write it was an Editorial (posting it at all is up to her, we can disslike it all we want).
I’d love a feature to remedy this though, who know which other people are your heroes? A feature to allow filtering of what I want on my OS News ([ ] Editorials – [ ] Reviews , etc) would be super nice.
why do we bother? when all your hard work (yes, coding is hard) is rewarded by foul-mouthed insults then its likely to result in no more code ever being written.
linux is not ready for the desktop
and on some level it may never be. you cant expect things to be like windows, it doesnt work that way with linux and it never will. applications are (for the moment) written by developers for themselves and other developers for fun or home use. this means that if you can’t use it then you’d better learn quick.
all the developers i know don’t care whether linux makes it on the desktop, whether it takes windows ‘mind share’ or not. its only people like the trolls on slashdot or the clueless looking for press (which seems to include this site, recently) who say linux is ready.
to link up with another article; i think its great that freebsd isnt getting any press. it means that they avoid hassle from those who dont have enough of a clue to make a sensible comment.
to eugenia: you are a developer and you write applications so you understand that this kind of criticism isnt constructive and its only going to be demoralising. then the pace of app development is going to go from slow to nil.
We have the people like Eugenia (and me) that say “This guy is my hero,” not for his language but for his stating things as they are in general, those of us who have an understanding of what this guy is taking about (regardless of the foul language, which is not present in as high a percentage in his other articles)… and then we have all the responses he already predicted he’d get (and does get) to his several “Real world Linux/Unix” articles (I recommend reading several of them as he is totally “on,” despite having reached his max gross load like me, being no longer able to vocalize on this topic without swearing about it… because clearly so few people listen to rational talk anyway and those that do are, just as those of us who speak-out, labeled as unhelpful whining complainers, and then marginalized as idiots and ignorant “lusers” by those who think they know better but are in fact arrogant and ignorant geek techheads or wannabe geek techheads or are just playing the part because it makes them feel bigger).
Does anyone ever convince anyone else that they’re right? In over 200 posts (more when you count the fact that this same topic is covered on a semi-regular basis), has any one person learned anything new? If not, I say all us complainers and all you zealots should just give up right now. But you first.
Big Al’s right. The replies are more telling than the commentary.
Linux won’t be ready for real people until Developers and Linux enthusiast stop blaming users for usability problems.
Jason should have said it more broadly:
“Computers won’t be ready for real people until Developers and Computer enthusiast stop blaming users for usability problems.”
Those of us that know Windows and use it “with ease” are still not real people.
Oh look… I just wasted my time again… yippee
This all depends on who you are, and what you need.
It’s ready for my desktop.
It’s ready for my wife’s desktop.
It’s ready for my kids desktop.
It’s ready for lots of people’s desktops.
It may not be ready for YOUR desktop, but that doesn’t mean it’s “not ready for THE desktop”!
wonder if he ever thought about upgrading XMMS and installing the SMPEG plug-in to quickly and easily play back MPEG video?
Linux is ready for the desktop but only if you have the patience of job. This reviewr’s comment regarding media playing is right on the mark with my experience. Yes there are packages out there, but installing them requires that you install 16 different libraries which are dependencies, many of theese dependencies have dependencies of their own. Why not just INCLUDE these prerequiste files IN your rpm/tgz ave the compiler determine if they need to be installed or not and act likewise? Windows, MACs, BeOS .. you install binaries files.. and they WORK! Installing a program isn’t the all day dependency treasure hunt linux offers. You click a program and it installs. WHAT a novel concept! I really love when installers don’t recognize when you actually DO have the depencencies needed, btu the installers thinks you don’t. Granted you can force no dependencies with RPMS from teh command line (ha ha screw u linux I DO have the dependencies) btu again this is not something one should HAVE to do to install a program.
Linux has come a logn way. It’s actually useable my someone like myself now, but installing new software is still a ngihtmare, it has a LONG way to go before it’ll replace XP or my macintosh
It may not be ready for YOUR desktop, but that doesn’t mean it’s “not ready for THE desktop”!
i agree entirely. it has been my only desktop for four years and i had to fight to keep it that way in my new job.
“ready for the desktop” was used in the sense that many zealots and press people use it. i’m not sure what the criteria are, but linux will never satisfy them and i wish they’d go complain about OS X or something…
if youre willing to put in some climbing time on the linux learning curve then you’ll be greatly rewarded, as i have been, aitvo has been and many others have been.
You thought OSNews was a site that will take any and all Linux crap? That it’s a “yes Linux” site? Well, it’s not. Slashdot is more like it.. or it was! As you could have noticed, Slashdot has published the same rant/editorial, so why don’t you go there and complain?
The funny thing is to imagine these Linux worshippers as they grudge over this runt: “I will never ever publish any software for these incompetent users! I will never visit OSNews! Ever! Not even Slashdot (some Slashdot comments said that Jamie Zawinski is right!), I will only talk to other Linux worshippers like me! The world will crumble without me…”
Heh heh… poor bastards.
Anyway, here’s the Slashdot comments at 5:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=51786&cid=0&pid=0&startat=&thre…
This rant/editorial may very well be a turning point in Linux on the desktop. Not because now Linux developers might start giving a damn, but because those who tried Linux and were frustrated KNOW they are not alone, and that it’s NOT a SHAME to not be able to set up xine to play s SVCD.
I’m an electrical engineer. I write embedded
software for a living. Linux is not too complex
for me. But what this guy has to say about that
software is right on. It’s crap and more people
should be honest about it.
I could very much relate to the author’s frustrations when trying to get things going in GNU/Linux. However, there are two major points that just can’t be ignored in this article that make it crap.
1) Using an ancient distro (in GNU/Linux term, it is)
2) They point you at an RPM that installs apt, the Debian package system! Yeah, that’s a good idea, I want to struggle with two competing packaging systems on my machine just to install a single app.
apt-get has RPM support, meaning you are not using DEB packages in RH. Geez, even I know this and I consider myself a newbie.
The main selling point for me using RH8 is apt-get. Sure, I have to download it and install, which takes all of 1 minute. It has made package management incredibly easy and reliabe, and have never had any issues. I also downloaded and installed RealPlayer, which works great. DVD playback with OGLE is flawless, with a couple tweaks of course.
Bottom line though, ALL distros have room for improvement, but it’s a work in progress. If you are going to critize, do your homework before posting an article like this and write like an adult, not a 15 y/o kid.
How can RedHat Linux 7.2 be ancient? RH 8.0 has been released only a few months ago, do you expect everybody to immediately switch to it? (is this RedHat’s secret plan to be profitable? Do you work for RedHat?)
“It’s ready for my desktop.
It’s ready for my wife’s desktop.
It’s ready for my kids desktop.”
Would it be ready for your wife and kid’s desktops if you weren’t around to help them with problems? Be honest here. Could they have delt with Linux by themselves?
I find that a lot of the time when people write “is Linux ready for the desktop?” articles, any time anything goes wrong for them it’s a huge, horrible failing of Linux. Well, guess what? In Windows lots of things go wrong too. It’s not like Windows is this wondrous operating system in which everything works all the time without fail. A coworker of mine has a WinXP box that reboots unexpectedly 2 or 3 times a day. He’ll just be sitting there typing an email or something, and it’ll reboot. Needless to say, I use Debian at work.
I’ve also had tons of problems playing videos in Windows. Some people have mentioned WMP having problems with DivX and it’s really true – very few DivX files play properly in WMP, even when they play perfectly in Totem/Xine. You have to download special codecs or plugins to make them work in WMP, and these are not always easy to install. Sure the “official” DivX codec is easy to install but it doesn’t play all files, you have to scour the web with Google to find obscure codec packs to play some files. Windows has tons of other problems, too – which I won’t go into here – but I bet if somebody wrote an article about Windows on the desktop, they’d encounter problems too, and if they slammed Windows for every tiny problem they encountered, people might start thinking Windows isn’t ready for the desktop either.
Despite all this, I do actually agree with JWZ on some things. The Xine UI is pretty crappy. MRLs don’t make sense. Skinning everything is not the best idea. But the Xine lib (separated out from the UI because I think even the developers realise some of this) is pretty good, and allows much nicer players (like Totem) to be built on top of it. As far as text in the XTerm goes, give me a break. Launch it from a menu if it bothers you so much. Or redirect the output to /dev/null. Or something. Sheesh.
Mario,
Distros are far from perfect, things will be changing rapidly for some time to come till they gets things right. I used RH7.3 and couldn’t get anything working right on my box. RH8 and Suse8 worked like a charm for me.
If you have the time to write and post a lengthly flaming pile of crap, then you have the time to update your distro. I don’t expect anybody to do sh*t, except shut their f***ing hole and stop bitching about free stuff. Hundred of distros out there, choose one, and quit your whining….or use Windows/Mac.
Just a few points.
1) JWZ was a great contributor to the open source/free software world, he was one one of the people who authored Lucod Emacs and a very important programmer for the commerical netscape of days long ago and perhpas the most important person in the move of Netscape to release and open-up its code with the foundation of mozilla.org, which although it took longer to come to fruition than JWZ had the patience to bare, was the single biggest and most important step in introducing the real value of open-source software in the hitherto(at least since the late 70’s) propietary world of software development.
2) JWZ is <sarcasm>really somebodey who has a lot to say about good UI’s </sarcasm> hell he helped write Lucid Emacs, which we now know as xemacs, a <sarcasm> trully wonderful example of gifted UI development</sarcasm>. He is a great programmer, but his track record on UI stuff, is well somewhat lacking, probably becuase as a programmer he never cared about the UI, he wa a serious hard-core programmer working on the innerworkings of complex functionality far beneath the UI level…
3) JWZ hast the right to rant about whatever he wants, and this does not reflect on his intelligence, but it does reflect on his jaded cynicsm, to which is also entitled.
4) His critque of Xine is not completely unfounded, but largely misplaced. Yes the GUI for Xine is horrific and extremely misleading and confusing. In fact the GUI looks good, it is just that this appearance is outright deceptive, for Xine does not work according to the metaphor upon which the GUI is based. It is not a question as to whether the metaphor is the right one or not, but whether or not it is self-consistent. It is also under very heavy development and is still very much beta and there is a break between the xine-lib, xine-ui and xine plugins with every release, which further complicates such issues in that they are released relatively independent of one another.
5) His critque of mplayer is also not entirely unfounded. But mplayer is far more powerful than other player software period, regardless of the platform. The old Gtk-based interface and theme-based implementation of the GUI make it somewaht cumbersome and often quite obtuse. ITs GUI simply ignores the WM in which it is being run, which on the one hand makes it WM independent, but on the other hand makes it stand out like a sore thumb because it doesn’t fit into any of the particular WM’s particularly good. This is changing, and will probably be resolved in the near future. Prgrams which contradict how the WM works within which the GUI app is running makes for a frustrating user experience.
6) His comments about gstreamer and its library requirements(most importantly GNOME2) are simply premature. The architecture of gestreamer is perhaps one of the greatest architectual advance in the world of linux media, but it is scarcely beta quality, in my book it is stiol in alpha stage. In fact it is so unstable right now that rhytmbox has dropped using it, in favor of xine-libs, until it has been stabilized. When it gets there, and it most definitely will, and remeber it is a very young project, it will rock the linux world- it is scheduled to become a standard part of GNOME 2.2 and the folks KDE are likely to use it as the basis for KDE’s mulitmedia apps, saying goodbye to the abortive noatun legacy.
7)JWZ’s rant about RPM’s and his mistaken assumption that he would have install to the debian package management system in order to get gstreamer to work, is simply a reflection of his impatience and cynicsm and nothing more. He refused to do his homework and got all rowled up over nothing.
8) Redhat 7.2 was and is a difficult and controversial linux distro release. Firstly it used the worst release of GCC which ever was released, making it very difficult to support for developers and causing endless headaches for end-users. Secondly it predates the biggest shift in library requirements(gcc and glibc) which has taken place in Linux since way back in the early 90’s, analogous to the rift between kernel version 2.2 and 2.4. All majore distros have since made this transition, albeit most are still in the middle of this tradition which has introduce wierd, complex and difficult to manage incompatibilies. When the transition is completed everythng will be for the better until the next MAJOR transition, and in one sense the transtition which is now on going is comparable to thte transition from win95 to win98 and on another level to that from win98 to winXP. Many distros are now in the winME dilemna- trying to open the door for the future of linux and trying to present maximum backwards compatbility- and this is the source of depencdency hell which has been quite accute in the last 1 and 1/2 years. Taken together the move from kernel 2.2 to 2.4 and gcc 2.95 to 3.2 and glibc 2.2.5 to glibc 2.3 – this is a shift on the order of complexity of going from win3.1 to winXP……
8) nobody has written to date THE book on how GUI’s should work and look. THE GUI does not exist. Some GUI’s are much better in somethings than other GUI’s, wich may be better in other things. NO GUI has a perfect track record. The conventions which currently exist are based on metaphors developed at XEROX back in the late 1970’s with zero input from users, for there weren’t any users, it was developed in labs by tech designers given the freedom to play around. The GUI of tommorow will probably not remind us much of the current Winbloze GUI, and demanding that linux GUI programmers confomr to the “standards” of the winbolze world is the death of linux and the death of GUI advancement.
The beauty of BEOS’s GUI was that it was different, why does everyone want the linux GUI to be the “same”. Admittedly there has always been a lack of consistency in GUI apps for linux, but this time is passing, and KDE apps and GNOME apps are bceomming very self-consistent respective of their WM environments, and Redhat 8.0 has carried this to the next level making GNOME and KDE consistent with each other. Consistency is important, self-consistency is far, far more important, and that means adherance to the metaphor being used, upon which the GUI is based.
In linux you have a GUI superimosed upon on an utterly non-grpahic metaphor, which makes it quite awkward. MAC OSX solves this “problem” by burying the underlying syystem to such a degree that no one must deal with the underlying system, and this is great for some and frustrating for others. Eventually the metaphors used at the system level in linux will begin to change, it has been trapped in the world of UNIX metaphors, which JWZ hates above all else. Whether they will change in a way more commensurate with the metaphors appropriate to GUI’s remains to be seen, and remains unlikely as long as that developer community represents a really large chunk of linux users.
I wonder what prevent average Joe to move to linux. In my case I write a lot of essays and handins and I can’t find any word processsor for linux that is as convenient to use as Word. Ok it craches sometimes but at least it do what I need. Inserting footnotes and styles in an OOo doc. is not as easy as in Word. I hate the non standard API that OOo is buildt opon. Look at this image [Screenshot: http://www.beeblebrox.net/rh81/gnome_office.png] it does not look very appealing and the GUI is slower than normal GNOME/GTK app’s GUI’s
“Would it be ready for your wife and kid’s desktops if you weren’t around to help them with problems? Be honest here. Could they have delt with Linux by themselves?”
Initially, no. Now that my wife has used Linux for a number of years, when I purchased this laptop she loaded it with RedHat Linux before I even got home from work!
BeH.
“and I can’t find any word processsor for linux that is as convenient to use as Word. Ok it craches sometimes but at least it do what I need. Inserting footnotes and styles in an OOo doc. is not as easy as in Word”
When you started using Word, you had no idea how to insert styles and footnotes, you learned to do so using Word, now it seems to you as if this is the natural and best way to do so. Then you try another word processing program and find that it works differntly, therefore it appears to work less naturally and consequently not as good. Yet this does not say anything about OpenOffice. It does say smething about your habits and what you are used to. Yes there is a learning curve when it comes mastering styles in OpenOffice, I need probably 20 minutes to get the hang of how OpenOffice works, now when I use Word, I find it to be un-natural, go figure….
“it does not look very appealing and the GUI is slower than normal GNOME/GTK app’s GUI’s”
OpenOffice does not use the WM’s widgets, it uses its own, this does detract from its aethetics, but not from its functionality. The OpenOffice programmers chose this route because of then current state of cross-platform available widgets. Upcomming release of OpenOffice will be able to take advantage of native widget sets and will seemless integrate into the WM environment in which it is running. I am eagrerly awaiting its integration in GNOME2 and this will happen sooner than later seeing that SUN has adopted GNOME2 as the WM choice for its linux/unix workstations. Font rendering in OpenOffice is already on par with Word in Windows, and with Xft2 it is *actually* better….
Mozilla had much of the same problem, it used to use its own widgets and did not fit into WM particularly well and font rendering was not very good-now Mozilla can take advantage of GTK2 and Xft2 and it really, really rocks, patience is something which often pays out in spades, for those who don’t jump the gund judging things finally, which are still in the process of being developed. Most criticism of linux GUI apps is directed at beta, if not alpha, level projects. Yet beta in the linux World is usually better than version 2.0 or 3.0 of any standard product, at what levele of version iteration is Microsofts current Word ? Compare Word 1.0 to OpenOffice and Word looses hands down, no comparison. Compare Mozilla 1.3a with Internet Explorer 1.0, compare it with 2.0/3.0/4.0/5.0/5.5/6.0 and the latest offering from Microsoft- Mozilla is making much better progress much faster and is already light years beyond where IE was prior to 6.0. And remember IE is only as good as the propietary plugins which it supports, Mozilla cannot and does not support all of these propietary plugins, but the new mplayer plugin in conjunction with Flash 6.0 and adobe acroreader resolves %95 perent of these issues, leaving Mozilla 1.3a on par, and in someways far superior to the very latest IE.
Of course OpenOffice is slower than other GNOME/GTK apps, it is also something like 50 times bigger than most GNOME/GTK apps. I had always used the binary install of OpenOfffice before and I too found it quite slow to load up and sometimes very slow to respond. Two Weeks ago I decided to compile it myself(or rather let Gentoo’s portage do it for me
). Now I find that it is over three times as fast and very responsive, go figure. Madrake 9.0’s OpenOffice is actually quite fast and looks better than on many other distro’s- the Mandrake folks put a lot of time and effort into optimizing the build, prelinking it and they worked on the appearance of OpenOffice.
I have helped at least 20 people I know switch to OpenOffice, most of them being Windows users used to Word. I have yet to hear any complaints. Admittedly the linux printer support is not as good as Windows for many printers, but that says more about the propietary printer drivers and lack of linux support than anything about linux. Yet Hewlett packard and epson printers are very thoroughly supported under linux, and again when it comes to professional publications nothing comes close to the typographic support offered on *NIX systems.
The newest version of Abiword, which uses GTK2, which is still in beta stage and is consequently not yet %100 stable(albeit it is already %90-95 stable), is lighting fast to load, fits perfectly well within GNOME2 and has fantastic font rendering. Give Abiword a shot in about 2-3 months time and try it out. I always looked down on Abiword previously its font support was horrific and it was very, very ugly. But the version I am running now, which I repeat is not quite “there” yet, is really, really impressive.
In terms of trully powerful text processing systems linux has everything on all other non *NIX-based systems beat hands down, in case you ever move beyond simply writing small term papers and hand-ins. (read Lyx, LaTeX, Tex)I am working on my doctorate now, and you couldn’t pay me to try to write it in Word. Word is simply useless once a text get beyonds a certain level of complexity. However I am still waiting for a GTK2 or modern QT implementation of Lyx, at which point I will be more than satisfied…..
Free software solutions are for the most part not products, they do not have production deadlines and are not subject to product standards and should not be judged by them, and of course they also do not carry the heavy price tags of products….
iwbcman:
Thanks, I will try out all of your suggestions. When I earlier in 2002 did my work under linux i ised AbiWord but I guess that I had bad-luck entering the game in the middle of a dependecy hell. I do not think that I will use redhat nest time i “switch”(R)
Sorry, can’t do that. I am afraid that you’re going to see more and more of these kind of observations, in the future. People just aren’t putting up with crap.
I just tried AbiWord, and it still doesn’t render correctly even the simplest of documents. And get this: if you resize your view, you are thrown back at the firstpage of the doc! How “cool” is that… Apparently, for Linux StarOffice is still the only game in town.
I’m debugging form-posting in Konqy and I don’t think anyone will actually read all these comments anwyway >:)
I am not a techie. I just want the operating system the world runs on to be open source. To that end I run linux. Installing things is often difficult for me and most of the time I fail. But, recently I was able to get MPlayer running. The trick I think was to install the software for code developement for x86 before trying to install MPlayer.
MPlayer is nice. The default install is supporting mpg, mpeg, avi, wmv, asi. Everything but rm and it too is supposed to be possible. Linux is not perfect but it is getting better and has been getting better for the two years that I have used it. I think it will be the operating system the world runs on.
I use Microsoft at work and have trouble all of the time. I never have trouble at home with my linux.
A linux preacher
Hi, nice to see you here.
i’m quite suprised that this guy, this self-obsessed, self-important and rude guy, is someone that you considder to be your hero.
not that i hold this against you, i am simply dont agree with the idea that his article(rant) is worth the bandwidth it’s transfered in.
The GPL is a programmer’s idea of freedom, not an end-user’s.
GUI-driven desktop software aimed at end-users is about Freedom: the freedom to get stuff done with a minimum of fuss. “Free Software” advocates have repeatedly shown that they do not value this freedom in any kind of way. Anyone who petitions Free Software developers to give end-users the freedom they need (including usability professionals with years of experience in making interfaces easy to use) are met with the utmost hostility and are told “Free Software does not entitle you to a usable interface”.
If Free Software people choose to conduct themselves in this manner and do nothing but oppress end-users on Free Software platforms like GNU/Linux, that is their perogative. But when one considers that these very same people who are oppressing end users and denying them the freedom to get things done with their computers are the very same people who are who are clamoring for this very same software to be used in schools and governments to replace proprietary platforms that give end-users the freedom to get work done easily, this situation becomes inexcusable.
the usability and interface of free software is improving all the time, well, at least looking at the latest Linux distros versus the previous version, use of GTK2 and GNOME2 for the desktop really makes the user experience far more pleasant, and i’m sure new versions of KDE have also made great improvements(i’m afraid i’m not a fan, but if it works and it’s what people want then i’m not against it), if people in the free software world did nothing but oppress the end-user then no one would ever reach 1.0, no one would ever write installation scripts, no one would ever release binaries, things still aren’t as easy as they could be, but give it time, improvements will be made, and if so many people feel that there’s a problem why do they do nothing about it but complain, why don’t they get involved, go to the communities and project leaders and suggest improvements? if they still get no help and/or get an RTFM then sure, make some noise about it, but to download development software and complain that it’s not complete enough!
“on whether your drivel gets posted and linked to.
I quote: ” What are these fucktards thinking???”
This is a meangingful review? Good Lord…….
My time is better spent reading opinions from people who can say them without resorting to provocative profanity.”
i have to agree, i’ve seen /. trolls making more sense while using better language.
This time I’m even using valgrind. Valgrind is a very nice tool btw.
I agree with the author. Linux on desktop is like a rose in the ass. Beautiful and fantastic, but painfull…
“why do they do nothing about it but complain, why don’t they get involved, go to the communities and project leaders and suggest improvements? ” I tried to do that, regarding a usability issue in Mozilla. I even went through the hell of Bugzilla to report the bug. A guy even confirmed the bug (but apparently he’s not in the special “elite” group that can decide if a bug really exists or not), and yet, to this day NOTHING has been done regarding the bug.
The current solution to “RPM hell” is to not use RPMs. Period. Download the stable source and compile it using the familiar “./configure”, “make”, and “make install”.
I figured this out a long time ago, and now everything just works.
Compiling from source may not be something the average Joe Computer User wants to learn, but for sys admins deploying Linux in a corporate environment, this is no sweat.
Take a look at KDE 3.1: It is very well designed, very integrated, and very functional. Is Linux ready for the desktop? With KDE, I think it is.
Match metaphor with terminology. Any HCI or human factors student is taught this in the first several weeks of class.
Yet KDE refuses to use the word “folder” instead directory in things like file dialogs, despite the fact they use the metaphor of folders for directories.
The KDE “fucktards” have not done anything to fix this in, what, five years? Seven years? For crying out loud, Apple had no problem matching metaphor with terminology 19 years ago on a machine with 128k of ram and an 8mhz processor. They used the word “folder” in their file dialogs. So what’s the holdup, huh? Why is it taking KDE so long to do the simple stuff?
I actually went on the KDE usability list and asked them to change this inconsistency in the interface. They considered this not an important issue and blew me off. I’ve therefore earned the right to call them “fucktards” if I wanted to. But I much prefer to call them Kernigheze–they who have no place on the desktop.
I have no problems with Video under Linux and I use Real Player and MPlayer, maybe he needs to get just a little bit more Linux experience. Or better yet read the help sections.
“So I should solve the problem of “crappy GUI” by replacing it with “no GUI at all?” I should use the program only from the command line, or by memorizing magic keystrokes? Awesome idea.”
Ironic comming from someone propagating a version of Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift with a fairly crappy GUI.
Hmmm I have no problems with Mplayer but of course I’ve been using Debian…