“Desktop Linux is almost soup. We only have a few items left on the short list. Will we do it? If history is an indicator, the answer is yes.” Read this article at LXer. Read more for a short list of my personal needs before I could say “yes, I can switch to Linux or FreeBSD full time”.In this order:
1. A *reliable* graphical FTP client. gFTP is buggy (I almost buggered up some osnews ftp files once while trying upload using drag-n-drop), Nautilus/vfs doesn’t cut it, and KBear looks really ugly and uneeded busy (and hasn’t been updated for over a year).
2. Windows Media & QuickTime. Sorry, but I need my regular dosage of movie trailers. Real Player works on Linux, but I need QT and WMV/WMA too (and please don’t suggest the windows-codecs package for use with VLC/Xine/Mplayer and their browser plugins as these hardly work with what’s out there).
3. Audio & Video support for AIM/iChat, Y! & MSN in Gaim or Kopete (I need a multi-protocol app to handle these). I have three webcams here, I gotta use them. Gaim-vv is still alpha quality, and it isn’t really part of Gaim’s official line.
4. Alsa needs to fix their architecture and/or drivers to automatically include a software mixer if the hardware doesn’t have one. There are a gazillion of PCs (and especially laptops) out there with Intel/Via AC97 onboard sound cards that don’t support hardware mixing. For these machines, Linux will only serve sound to one application at a time. Using the “dmix” software mixing plugin only satisfies Gstreamer & ESD apps, XMMS and Mplayer (all after tweaking their default settings to use the new “default” virtual Alsa “device”), but there are so many other apps that are not configurable as they use their own OSS/Alsa backend that simply won’t even load sometimes, or just won’t play any sound (mind you, the “aoss” trick only works with Real Player).
This situation is disgraceful considering that we are in 2004. This is not 1993 with Windows 3.1 and Sound Blaster, people. The Alsa Project should find an automatic solution to this huge problem that degrades the Linux experience down to the floor. Remember, these Via/Intel on board sound cards are everywhere these days. At least 2 out of my 8 PCs here have the problem with Linux (which is not a problem at all with Windows/BeOS btw). Update: I couldn’t help myself and emailed the Alsa guys about it.
5. A good home video editor. Kino is closer than others, but still not there yet, plus it’s easily crashable.
6. A simpler interface for Gimp. Something like PaintShopPro’s. Trying to do some basic image editing with Gimp is a nightmare. PSP’s and Photoshop Element’s interfaces are much more intuitive for simple stuff, Gimp’s is simply not.
7. Easier wi-fi/bluetooth configuration and ability to easily “create networks” with them (share internet connection with other wi-fi or bluetooth devices). Currently this is a lot of hard core unix command-line work on any distro. Even Mac OS X only makes it easy for Wi-Fi, but not for IP over Bluetooth.
8. Library developers should not break their APIs too often. There’s nothing more nerve wrecking than trying to satisfy deps by compiling them, and realize that your app doesn’t compile because it needs this or other specific version of a library/header. Yuk.
9. Better and more reliable ACPI support. Currently my ATi-based laptop does not awake with any distro I tried (and recent kernels with supposedly “fixed” acpi).
10. Better PalmOS and PocketPC synchronization software that work with the latest models and software (I got a new Clie). Something like “The Missing Sync” available for Mac.
Your needs may vary…
“You are missing the point and you don’t understand the problem. The mixer I am talking about is from a lower level. The Arts mixer will only work for arts apps. If I load xmms, or real player, these would still not work.”
You can wrap any app, including xmms or realplayer, with artswrapper and they will automatically work with arts. This is how the applications are automatically launched from the kde menu or quicklaunch buttons so a user need never worry about it.
“I hate konqueror more than anything in this world. It’s lets-do-it-all.”
You misunderstand konqueror. It follows the unix philosophy of small programs doing one thing well. All konqueror is is a graphical terminal, in which various other programs can be piped: whether khtml, the file browser, kword, kwrite — any kpart, essentially.
Thus, rather than monolithic programs like Gnome generates, kde programs don’t duplicate code, and one app handles everything regarding one task, so that any improvements made go everywhere automatically — all the benefits of the small-program-one-task paradigm.
So konqueror is the opposite of monolithic behemoths that say “lets-do-it-all”: essentially it does absolutely NOTHING.
Anyway, since ftp is a kioslave, it’s not that konqueror is KDE’s ftp client, so much as ftp is transparently accessible throughout all kde apps. You can open, edit, and save files directly from an ftp server in any kde app, whether kedit or Quanta or Kolourpaint or what have you. The whole desktop is an ftp client, as it were. The same for SSH and samba and the rest.
Why on Earth does it have a C++ parser in it? If the GNU guys had written GCC as a set of libraries rather than a bunch of command-line programs, KDevelop could have asked a GCC library to make it a nice syntax tree.
Get a clue. It’s not KDE’s fault that Stallman is an asshat and explicitly insisted that the parsers not be ripped out into a proper library.
The value of code completion is huge because it’s 2004 and API are huge. Would you rather be searching through freaking webpages or books or have a nice little popup along with an associated documentation popup.
The value of a full-blown parser gets even more interesting when you look at the nifty things that IDEs like Eclipse and IDEA can do…like refactoring (very tricky for C++ though).
The value of code completion is huge because it’s 2004 and API are huge.
I agreed with that on my original post.
”
Get a clue. It’s not KDE’s fault that Stallman is an asshat and explicitly insisted that the parsers not be ripped out into a proper library.
”
stallman does not have a say over technical stuff on gcc. this explicitly agreed upon during the egcs merge. stop blaming people for what you dont know and name a single compiler which has a parser as a seperate library?
Well, I guess that we won’t see “reliable” ftp-client (and I mean pretty modern app, not a cli thing) or anything else until developers start to make money from their apps – it’s obvious – if you want to sell your app, it should be competitive and “free” apps, well you get what you pay for
Why they’re free? Because no one would pay for it.
GCCXML is a step in the right direction. Pyste uses GCCXML to autogenerate Python wrapper for C++ projects, and it works well. Perhaps KDevelop can use it too, when it got more mature.
It’s true that GCC team doesn’t want to decouple frontend and backend for political reason, but decoupling frontend and backend is indeed a hard problem in itself without politics.
Why they’re free? Because no one would pay for it.
That’s too harsh. I’ve seen lots of shareware on Windows that are equally bad when it comes to usability, and user orientation. The other way around, there’s FreeSoftware that rocks.
In general, developers have other needs than simple users. They develop for themselves, and that’s all, probably.
Paying for development according to user wishes would probably improve the situation. But beware: This doesn’t imply developers need to sell a software package / application.
“GCCXML is a step in the right direction. Pyste uses GCCXML to autogenerate Python wrapper for C++ projects, and it works well. Perhaps KDevelop can use it too, when it got more mature.
”
this is a huge hit on performance and I dont think it will really work in a mature way
then you’ve either got a sound card that does hardware mixing, or an arts / esd setup that *actually works* (in which case, you’re probably lucky enough you should enter the lottery :>)
ah, I see you know about arts – well, my problem with arts and esd (and I expect Eugenia’s too) is that on a very basic level they’re FLIPPING BROKEN. They just don’t *work* half the time, and they’re horribly ugly solutions in any case. I agree entirely with Eugenia; it needs to be engineered into ALSA transparently. It’s the only sane solution.
someone finally mentions the need for a device manager
I always found one of the most troublesome areas of the linux desktop was getting those darn fonts to look “right”. I still have endless problems with ugly fonts popping up here and their, whether I enable antialiasing, disable it, enable BYTECODE_INTERPRETOR.. whatever…
Is the bytecode-interpreter the same thing as auto-hint in /etc/fonts/local.conf? Because once I turned that on I really couldn’t complain about fonts on linux looking like shit anymore.
In fact, for starters, it doesn’t work at *all*.
I just sold off one of my machines to a friend because I am about to move, therefore, I made a clean install of W2K, but this applies for XP as well, more or less:
So I install W2K, easy.
1) Sp4
2) Chipset driver (does mom + pop know about that at all?!)
3) IE6 redistributable to save time D/Ling
4) Install network driver for Realtek via USB stick, ouch
5) Install Firewall !!! before…:
6) Getting online for remaing patches
7) Install DX9c from redist. package
8) install graphics driver
9) Install Sun Java
10) Install Macromedia Flash
11) Install Firefox
12) Install FTP Client
13) Install burning app – be always sure to get the latest Nero first – more D/Ling
14) Install Antivirus
15) Install printer driver
16) Install Scanner
Now it’s defrag time, then Image-creation time. Did I mention 520.000 mandatory reboots inbetween? This takes 2.5 hours. And I am not even finished.
Why do people still claim Windows just works whereas for Linux, they have to go download drivers for world+dog bla-bla…? The opposite is true.
I am using W2K myself most of the time, but I have several Linux installations as well. You don’t have to do much of the above for a SuSE, except for the online update.
If you did all of the above, then yes, Windows will work very good. But I am trying to educate people for years know and there doesn’t seem to be much of a learning curve – I keep getting the save questions over and over. How do these people mess up their systems? Never happens to me. Windows does many things – though “just working” is not one of them for sure.
That part didn’t make any sense to me. The concept of ‘downloading modules’ on Linux just doesn’t apply – if it’s not in the kernel your distro gave you, you probably can’t download it anywhere. If the distro knows the hardware in your system and knows what the appropriate module is, it’s probably already loaded it! Why do you need a device manager to tell you?
Mandrake already has harddrake2, which lists the hardware you have and can pop up little configuration applets for anything you might conceivably want to change (like ALSA instead of OSS). That’s all Linux really needs.
[whining]The FTP client doesn’t look nice[/whining]
Now thats very important. Top priority. Nautilus and Konqueror handle FTP just fine just like Explorer does. Searching on Freshmeat gives 75 FTP clients. There has gotta be one over there which is ‘visually appealing’.
Here, see for yourself
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=client&trove_cat_id=89§ion=trove…
Freshmeat is by no means complete these days so also check e.g. Sourceforge.
`KFTPGrabber is a graphical FTP client for KDE. Its features include TLS support, FXP transfers, OTP passwords, ZeroConf support, and more’
http://freshmeat.net/projects/kftpgrabber/
http://images.freshmeat.net/screenshots/49074.png
I don’t see whats wrong with that…
Theres not a reasonable demand anyway
1) The admins don’t use it to admin their servers (FTP server with SAN). Geeks are fine with e.g. NcFTP.
2) The casual users are fine with a Explorer-like integrated FTP client or clicking on a casual download link from WWW. User never needs a full blown FTP client for that.
3) Whats left? Warez kiddies? Who cares for them…
How about this? It doesn’t compile;
In file included from kftphowlthread.cpp:10:
kftphowlthread.h:18:18: howl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from kftphowlthread.cpp:10:
kftphowlthread.h:75: error: `sw_discovery’ does not name a type
kftphowlthread.h:76: error: `sw_result’ does not name a type
kftphowlthread.h:77: error: `sw_discovery_browse_id’ does not name a type
kftphowlthread.h:78: error: `sw_salt’ does not name a type
kftphowlthread.h:83: error: `sw_result’ does not name a type
kftphowlthread.h:93: error: `sw_result’ does not name a type
kftphowlthread.cpp: In member function `virtual void KFTPHowlThread::run()’:
kftphowlthread.cpp:28: error: `m_howlResult’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:28: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in.)
kftphowlthread.cpp:28: error: `m_howlDiscovery’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:28: error: `sw_discovery_init’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:28: error: `SW_OKAY’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:35: error: `m_howlSalt’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:35: error: `sw_discovery_salt’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:41: error: `howlBrowser’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:41: error: `m_howlId’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:41: error: `sw_discovery_browse’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:51: error: `sw_ulong’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:51: error: expected `;’ before “msecs”
kftphowlthread.cpp:52: error: `msecs’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp:52: error: `sw_salt_step’ undeclared (first use this function)
kftphowlthread.cpp: At global scope:
kftphowlthread.cpp:64: error: `sw_result’ does not name a type
kftphowlthread.cpp:107: error: `sw_result’ does not name a type
make[4]: *** [kftphowlthread.o] Error 1
make[4]: Leaving directory `/home/eugenia/Desktop/Downloads/kftpgrabber-0.5.0-beta1/src/misc/howl ‘
make[3]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/eugenia/Desktop/Downloads/kftpgrabber-0.5.0-beta1/src/misc’
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/eugenia/Desktop/Downloads/kftpgrabber-0.5.0-beta1/src’
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/eugenia/Desktop/Downloads/kftpgrabber-0.5.0-beta1′
make: *** [all] Error 2
Please note that I DO have Howl on my /usr/include/howl/
Aesthetics certainly do improve useability. People simply prefer good looking stuff: if they have a program that looks nice, and one program that looks bad, but they both do the same task, then most people will certainly go for the better looking one. That program may not be truly better on useability; but the aesthetics do attract more users so for those people, it’s more useable than the “ugly” program.
And other than that, useability and aesthetics are completely subjective issues. For example, I find BeOS’ standard decor to be beautiful; most others will disagree with me. What does that mean for BeOS useability? Does that mean that people who like that decor do not find it any more useable?
It’s beyond me why noone has been able to write a full featured FTP client for linux… I need FlashFXP functionality
Gotta try wine I guess..
Please note that I DO have Howl on my /usr/include/howl
Yet it is unable to find the header.
kftphowlthread.h:18:18: howl.h: No such file or directory
How about specifying /usr/include/howl?
I edited the header file that includes howl.h. The problem is that the howl package itself (latest stable version) is badly put together. Howl.h asks for salt/salt.h instead of howl/salt/salt.h and so it can’t find it’s own files. No worries though, I fixed that.
KFTGrabber dies later during compilation on when it can’t compile a plugin anyway (nothing to do with howl).
“Sorry, but it’s more of the same. They simply added more previews for the plugins. … Please, don’t take me for an idiot, I FOLLOW the Unix software scene more closely than you think.”
I’m not taking you for idiot, but you are definitely missing lots of new things in The GIMP. If you haven’t noticed all of usability improvements, you must be using The GIMP from time to time only. I see no other reason.
I know it’s mean, but I have to say that most Linux distributors are lazy. The Dmix thing mentioned earlier is a prime example. Lets break it down.
– Some sound hardware can handle more than one sound at
once.
– Some hardware can’t.
– It is probably possible to detect this capability, it
is definitely possible to compile a list of chipsets on
which hardware mixing is supported.
– Dmix allows most hardware to handle more than one sound
at once.
Armed with these facts, even a weak minded individual such as myself is capable of deducing that it’s already possible to use Dmix in circumstances where the hardware doesn’t support mixing.
Why then, are distributors not already doing this? Other operating systems have supported software mixing for a very long time. I get the impression that they are waiting for the authors of the sound drivers to add the capability as another message suggested.
They won’t be hurrying, because there’s already a solution to the problem, and the distributors as a general rule don’t have the resources to get it done themselves, those distributors that do, for the most part aren’t concentrating on multimedia.
So why aren’t the distributors, armed with at least as much knowledge about the situation as I have working on a solution. One that’s probably as simple to implement as writing a shell script?
No Linux distributor I know of is building to a specification, where they say “our operating system will support x and y, and if we can’t pick it up for free then we’ll make it ourselves”, it’s more like they’re saying “what can we bundle with our OS, so we can add another bullet-point to our list of features?”
I don’t know if this is a symptom of competing in a market where it’s hard to distinguish yourself from the competition or if most (if not all) Linux distributors just don’t have what it takes.
Most distributions still use arts or esd instead, as these work more universally when they work at all. As Eugenia says, some applications talk to ALSA directly and don’t let you control which ALSA device they are outputting to, so you just can’t make them work with dmix. Mandrake, for instance, runs all sound-producing applications that don’t talk to esd or arts natively through a wrapper script called soundwrapper, which pipes them to either arts or esd depending on which is running. It’s not like the distros don’t try, it’s just that there’s no truly satisfactory solution available.
Guess what, Linspire is planning to use JACK low latency sound server on top of aRts. So all supported apps will mix their sound nicely.
I swore I wasn’t going to get involved with these types of arguments, and on most of these sorts of issues, I really can’t be bothered…
Except for the sound one.
Now, both my workstation, and my laptop have hardware mixing soundcards, so everything ‘just works’. It doesn’t just work for my parents. It doesn’t ‘just work’ for other people at work with AC’97 cards. It doesn’t ‘just work’ for people who want to play mp3s with xmms while they play Quake3 on their onboard sound cards.
The solution to the problem (DMix) is sitting right in front of us. Make it auto-detect. Hell, if the drivers advertised the maximum number of channels supported in hardware, I could have 32 channels of hardware mixed goodness, and infinite channels of software mixed goodness when everything gangs up on my soundcard. If I have the misfortune to use a computer that doesn’t mix it for me in hardware, I’d like the stupid thing to automagically* turn on software mixing.
—
Also, I keep noticing people saying ‘well it works for me’ or ‘I don’t see the problem so ‘obviously’ it’s not really a problem.’
You do not represent the user base. Nobody does.
However, as a demographic – a large porition of people have soundcards that don’t hardware mix, and don’t know how to make them hardware mix, and will appreciate the benefits.
And, *more to the point, the people who actually care about the performance loss from software mixing on non-hardware-mix sound cards will know enough to turn it off manually.
—
You should never do anything the computer can do better than you.
Is the bytecode-interpreter the same thing as auto-hint in /etc/fonts/local.conf? Because once I turned that on I really couldn’t complain about fonts on linux looking like shit anymore.
Sort of. The bytecode interpreter generates hinting, but the bytecode coming with some truetype fonts is encumbered by patent issues. So the auto-hinting code was created to generate hinting for any font not relying on its bytecode. In theory I suppose that the bytecode-generated hinting should be better, as in exactly as the authors of the font wanted it, but usually the autohinting does a pretty good job.
For details, have a look at
freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html
Usually I ignore stuff like this, but this time I just had to reply.
In my experience mplayer is one of the best if not THE best video player out there.
I have yet to find a video I was not able to play using mplayer. And as far as trailers are concerned, I can play them all using the mplayer plugin for firefox. I just finished watching the star wars trailer and all of the incredibles trailers. WMV is no problem either.
Perhaps you should research first if you are experiencing problems with a certain program and ask other users on their experiences, before posting an article where you define a personal experience as global fact.
P.S.
Take a look at these ftp clients and see if they take your fancy:
ftpcube
nvemftp
Eugenia, you are a troll.
“Please, don’t take me for an idiot, I FOLLOW the Unix software scene more closely than you think.”
Then please don’t take all of the incredibly clever open source developers for idiots. Case in point:
“I couldn’t help myself and emailed the Alsa guys about it.”
I’m sure they’ll love that. Some clueless person coming along and demanding that they do things her way. Because, you see, they are idiots and have never thought about this before. In fact, the subject has never even come up, and they’ll be glad you pointed it out to them. It’s not as though this subject has been discussed at length by people who know what they’re talking about and who have come to a conclusion.
Anyway, to continue this site’s tradition of generalised, unjustified statements, I’ll say this: Eugenia, you “just don’t cut it”
Ok, as always people here are divided in 2 sections:
the ones who sacrifice control over ease
the ones who sacrifice ease over control.
Problem is: a computer, IMHO, should make things easier, relief you of some work, and, today, allow you to watch the contents of the net fast and clean.
Windows does this; simple, easy, quick.
Linux needs “solutions”, like proprietary codecs, improvised composition of softwares and so on…
Again, I used Linux as a Desktop for 8 years, and am thouroghly dissatisfied with it; I read peopel say “video is nmot important in IM”, or “a/v editing is not needed”.
Well, you may spend your time tweaking and vi-editing, but millions of people do *love* to *easily* edit their filmed children/girlfriend/family/holiday, they love seamless integration between Graphic apps and printing system, and loads and loads of people *love* and *need* to *see* the person they are IMing with; I don’t know if you all leave near the people you love, buyt if you don’t, then it’s simply great to be able to see someone you miss.
I don’t want to turn on my computer, but I want to resume-from-ram, quick, easy, webbrowse, edit movies, do graphics, and have great on-the-screen rendering (jut compare font rendering in MacOSX or Win with the one of Linux…).
Like me, millions of people out there; we all love easy cd burning for music,easy tv-watching and easy webchatting, not because we are stupid, but because we have better things to do in our time than fiddle with the unfriendly environment of a computer.
Now, if I was a sysadm, or a network adm, I’d go for Linux, or maybe Solaris or who knows what.
But at home, Win and MacOS can’t be beaten; ever heard about *real* games, for instance? or *easy* and immediate vcr-like functions (not using mplayer from a command line).
Linux is far superior in terms of flessibility, and that’s about it.
To play, to do serious graphics, or amateurish or serious editing *without* wasting weeks in configuring and learning how to cope with all teh things that are missing, you just go with one of the commercial platforms.
That’s the happy or sad reality.
I’ve loved and tried to spread Linux for years, now it’s time to say to my friends: get what best suit your needs.
After all, we buy the tools we need for a job right? Or do we go buying a hummer to tighten a screw and then tweak and fiddle with teh hammer until it can do that, and then go around saying “look, my hammer is better than yoru screwdriver, ’cause I can make it match all screws”.
I think this is not so wise.
Well, never thought I’d be supporting Desktoplinux, but this statement is just completely false:
(jut compare font rendering in MacOSX or Win with the one of Linux…).
Font rendering in, say, Ubuntu (my distro of choice these days) is no less than in Windows or Mac. My guess is you haven’t even taken a look at them to compare them.
You don’t ever have to specify this if you’ve set up dmix correctly, unless an app have somehow brokenly hardcoded the wrong output device.
>>mplayer is able to handle windows media
>
>No, it’s very poor. And Mplayer plugin would crash on the >Apple’s Star Wars II trailers.
Well, I’m currently viewing the Star wars III Trailer in quicktime 6 format, within Firefox, using Mplayer an Mplayer plugin. It works fine. Try again…
“time the developers realized this”
And what makes you think that the huge group of VOLUNTEERS doesn’t realize this?
Why not pitch in and do something about it?
1.) This is important. Nautilus/Gnome-vfs fucked up my pictures because it uploaded them in ASCII mode – how braindead.
2.) All formats work for me with win32codecs. Of course, this is a semi-legal or illegal (depending on where you live) solution, but it works. It’s up to the vendors to improve the situation.
The browser plugins do suck however. I never managed to make mplayerplug-in play anything, and i could never find the xine plugin.
4.) Never had any problems myself. Sound Blaster Live!, Alsa modules, alsa-oss. I also installed various Linuxes on computers with on-board chipsets, and I onlx had to set up dmix additionally. But I see that many people are having problems with ALSA. Maybe it’s just Gentoo being too user-friendly to give the “real linux experience”.
5.) Wait, wait, wait… It can only be a few more years. Donate to Kino development.
9.) This is going to become very difficult without hardware manufacturers adhering to ACPI standards. They all have bugs in their BIOSes.
Since this problem is practically non-existent on Windows, I guess Microsoft is spending a lot of money on QA, and that they are more willing to implement something incorrectly just to get it working, rather than blaming the hardware manufacturers, whereas Linux developers are interested in keeping everything clean and correct (similar to the well-known dual boot “bug”, which was in Windows and not in the Linux kernel or GRUB).
#1 – kill the console
average user shouldn’t even have to know what a console is, let alone ‘make’ stuff. There should be an option to do everything with the GUI, thats part of choice as well, using only the GUI.
#2 – Package management
A single packaging system through all the distros is required, 95% of users will not touch Linux before a proper packaging system is implemented. This means, windows style two click installers. No consoles, no bullshit.
Everything else will come by itself after these two things are done. However this will never happen.
“KFTGrabber dies later during compilation on when it can’t compile a plugin anyway (nothing to do with howl).
”
What error, what plugin, etc…
Tried a binary? How about one of the other 74 clients?
most of these things should improve.
Note how, since changes by Linspire and Cyberlink, DVD playing has vanished from Eugenia’s why-on-earth-doesn’t-this-work list!
#1 is being worked on. Already quite a few tasks that used to require dropping to a terminal can be done through X. Some things, like X configuration, updating of video drivers, etc have been discussed on the X.org list in the last few days. Right now my mother can use linux without ever seeing a console. While not as far along as MacOS X on this matter, Linux is getting there.
#2 Unless you devise some way to keep anybody who doesn’t agree with you from making a distro, this will never happen.
Windows style double click installs are already reality with some distros. ROX uses Zero Install style techniques (drag and drop to install), although the software available is extremely limited. To install something universally you do still need the root password even with all those, I don’t think thats likely to change in the future, although per user install should be possible. UIs for Portage, Apt, etc, all either already exist or are being worked on. There’s also autopackage which is still on the horizon.
A decent DC application in linux is very welcomed.
Valknut is not yet there. plus is made with qt
It is an excelent analogy of the Linux Desktop situation, however there are a few things about drivers that I would like to point out. There are already 2 relevant companies that offer Enterprise Desktop Linux, and a free Linux distribution that is offering a product with very long release cycle: Debian. Debian is harder to install and use, but it might be worth it to save money. I don’t wanna go there right now.
In regards to drivers. Linux will always be alittle bit behind as far as drivers are concerned, as long as hardware companies refuse to release good native Linux drivers. I don’t care if they keep them closed source, it’s their right. While Red Hat might not include them, in case a massive number of HW companies will release native drivers, because they stick to the GPL, and Free software licensing, I know for sure that Novell (and SUSE for that matter) will. And it makes allot of sence. The downside of closed source drivers would be that in case they are broke or make the system unstable, there is no easy way to fix things, except to wait for the vendor to release a new driver. In the meantime, kernel developers have to waste a big chunk of their time writing OSS drivers, which I think sux. HW manufacturers wont spend their time on Linux drivers unless Linux Desktop will capture a large market share, I would say that it needs at least 25%. To do that, Linux commercial Linux distributions (for the desktop), need to release quality products and maybe follow some of the guidelines in this article.
Commercial software companies need to release products for Linux, and for that matter they would need a unified SDK that would work on a universal basis for all distributions.
Just my 2 cents.
Now hasn’t this turned into a nice argument on how to build the best bikeshed.
If I recall, AYTTM allows webcam viewing and broadcasting.
http://ayttm.sourceforge.net
No audio yet, though.
“(jut compare font rendering in MacOSX or Win with the one of Linux…)”
OK, I will. In Linux, it’s much better than Windows, and equally as good as OS X. How’s that?
Eugenia, did you even read the article that you linked to before you editorialized? You are doing exactly what the investment bank did. “Helping us out” by creating a random new crucial requirements list every six months. Half the items on your list are just wacky from the corporate desktop user standpoint. What corporation is going to reject linux because gFTP is ugly? Because packages are hard to install in Arch Linux? Direct photoshop support may be necessary for some but where’s the big corporate outcry for more Gimp useability?
I’m glad you test out various OS things and appreciate that you send bug reports where applicable. However this editorial was just out of place and not helpful.
Michael
“I don’t want to turn on my computer, but I want to resume-from-ram, quick, easy, webbrowse, edit movies, do graphics, and have great on-the-screen rendering (jut compare font rendering in MacOSX or Win with the one of Linux…).
Like me, millions of people out there; we all love easy cd burning for music,easy tv-watching and easy webchatting, not because we are stupid, but because we have better things to do in our time than fiddle with the unfriendly environment of a computer.
Now, if I was a sysadm, or a network adm, I’d go for Linux, or maybe Solaris or who knows what.
But at home, Win and MacOS can’t be beaten; ever heard about *real* games, for instance? or *easy* and immediate vcr-like functions (not using mplayer from a command line).”
BTW, though I think a lot of Eugenia’s grievances are legitimate, I think this is overstating the case. I’m not a sys admin or a network admin. I can’t write a line of code. (Except in Commodore 64 BASIC…) But the PC in my living room runs Linux, and I use it to play movies, rip and burn audio CDs, sync with my audio player, browse the web, use IM and read my email. The only thing I *had* to do in the console to make this work was install the Nvidia drivers, which is a pretty idiot-proof process and well documented by nvidia. I also added plf sources for urpmi and installed non-free codecs and dvd libs, which you *can* do from a GUI but most people don’t. That’s really not a lot of work to do.
“Since this problem is practically non-existent on Windows, I guess Microsoft is spending a lot of money on QA, and that they are more willing to implement something incorrectly just to get it working, rather than blaming the hardware manufacturers, whereas Linux developers are interested in keeping everything clean and correct.”
Nope. The Linux developers try just as hard to make incorrect implementations work; it’s just a harder job. Laptop manufacturers install Windows on their machines. So they make sure their ACPI implementations work with Windows; if necessary, they write specific drivers and either preinstall them or supply them to Microsoft for inclusion in Windows. Do you think they CC: the acpi4linux guys? Heck, no. They’re working blind. It’s hardly the same job.
“WinXP has NEVER let me down. All its MS apps and third party apps for it that I use, they ALL work more than fine.”
So not only have you never ever had any malware, never had XP kick you out of an app (“we’re sorry but windows needs to”), never had Windows crash nor any problem with Windows of any kind….would you honestly say that all these things are the user’s fault? That securing the systems and making sure it’s stable are not Microsoft’s responsiblity but that of the user and Third Party software companies? Would you say that if a great many Linux users find that it works “just fine” for them, they are wrong, deluded, lying, confused?
You say you’re a geek, you like Unix, but you’ve had little but criticism for BSD (“Freebsd is a disappointment”) and Linux (you think patching the kernel is a sin…”Slackware rules, Mandrake sucks, Fedora sucks”, etc.). You say it’s your job to evaluate because you run OSnews, but isn’t evaluating about being subjective, neutral, un-opinionated? If you’re going to run a site called OSnews instead of called “WhyWindowsisbetterthanLinux.com”, shouldn’t you be un-biased?
What was it, just last year that you told us to all go out and buy Macs, and but your main machines is still a Windows box, isn’t is?
Some people in this thread just want to lash out at you, but I’m trying to ask reasonable questins and get some real answers because some of this just doesn’t make sense.
the uploading in ascii mode bug in gnome-vfs is fixed in 2.8.3 thankfully.
The sound system in Ubuntu HoaryHedgehog will be using polypaudio:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DesktopSeedProposals
http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/polypaudio/FAQ.htm
this will be a solution to the AC97 problem
What’s amazing is that this information is available but nobody found out. Maybe you should start paying attention to what’s really going on at the scene instead of complaining all the time ?
IMHO the Ubuntu developers are very open to ALL desktop linux problems compared to other distros. They are making a solution rather than just putting 1.000 packages on a CD.
Also, why did so many comment on Eugenia’s problems ?
The article is much more interesting. The small office / Home Office area is more important than finding a good ftp client.
Also, I think that Eugenia will always have a list of “linux problems” to be fixed. Linux will never be there for some people.
Nice read, Eugenia, though I find myself disagreeing on some points.
Mostly, I agree though.
2. I use Arch (like you do, sometimes.
) and using the Arch mplayer setup, I have much more success playing vids than I ever did in Windows. And no, I’m not an idiot. Mainly highly compressed divx or xvids often came with problems in windows. Browser integration isn’t somthing I’m in to for my movies, though, so…I can agree. .movs work great for me, though, as do wmvs. Maybe I’m just lucky with the files I try to view?
4. This sounds like a good idea. I’ve had issues in the past where mplayer’s volume adjustments are reflected in xmms…annoying!
6. I actually have grown to like the GIMP. But I do agree that the processes to get things done could be a bit more streamlined. The GIMP is one of my favoritep pieces of software, though.
9. I agree. I mean, there are ways to continue technological advancements without breaking your API. Especially if you’ve planned well. As far as I’m concerned, this should (almost) NEVER happen!
I emailed this to a few friends of mine with the following comments. I believe my comments could also be made here.
After reading this article I got the feeling the firms he was dealing with should just work with what they want and that is Windows. I agree with majority of his points; but a firm has to ask themselves why move? Is it money motivated? Training? Security?
I am a big Linux fan, but I think people are unreadily looking for Linux to replace what they have but don’t have an idea on why they want to replace it. Linux is “free”, but do you sacrifice usability for price?
Linux works great for me as a user; Laptop is strictly Suse 9.1 and nothing else and I use it daily, but is it a complete windows replacement for Corporate users? At this time I do not think so, however here is how I would deploy Linux. I would use the IBM Workspace on Demand approach. I would use it to make TFTBoot clients for manufacturing devices: no hard drive complete network boot. I would also use it as a more secure ICA platform for those who need “Microsoft” products. To me that would be the best means of deploying it while keeping TCO down and Microsoft compatibility. Also, corporations need to petition IBM to port Notes over to Linux. This would give them a viable competitor to Exchange. For that matter, Lotus should port over their whole Smart Suite office suite to. I find it “Office Like” and 10x better than Star Office/Open Office.
Also, why is Apple never considered a viable replacement to those wanting to get off Microsoft Windows? They have Microsoft office, network browsing, and majority of the stuff that these firms are looking for and recently been awarded the most secure operating system on store shelves due to its BSD roots.
Jim
hey, i feel your pain.
I have installed Flashfxp via wine in both Fedora Core 1 and 2 (havn’t tried it in 3 yet)
It works well, a bit buggy regarding fonts but I can live with that. Why do I use flashfxp instead of gftp ? imiplict ssl is a nice option, and one of many that I just cannot see in gftp.
flashfxp screenshot here
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1069
cheers
anyweb
This is like a breath of fresh air and a large dose of menthol rolled into one compared to the utter vitriol we’ve had on this subject.
3.Interoperability with Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000.
8. Compatible Windows Media player Codecs.
I think we know that’s not completely possible, so what you do when you have the ear of these companies is do what Microsoft does and tell them that their choices are wrong – but subtly. They quickly come round. There is an art to doing it, especially when you are the smaller player.
There’s an opportunity there believe it or not….. If you can’t get WMP to Linux (and why would you want to?) give people something else
.
This is a market segment that Microsoft serves effectively and which helped that company as it moved into prominence in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Any system seeking to gain market share needs to address the basic requirements of the Small Office / Home Office demographic.
Very true. I don’t know where the hell this enterprise market is. It must be on a Ximian whiteboard somewhere…..
The Linux printing system works poorly and requires seasoned system administrators to set it up and maintain it. It does not work with all applications.
True. There are good front-ends, but getting a PPD file and driver that supports everything that Windows does is still a problem even for supported HP printers. You need to be able to install printers easily. Ironically, this could be made even easier for Linux the way CUPS is designed and it should be noted that printing (especially networked) is just not completely trouble free in Windows, but the feature support is there.
Broader WiFi card support needs to be introduced to Linux. WiFi card support for the large and important group of laptop users hardly exists.
True, but that has to work natively. Refusals by companies to open firmware doesn’t bode well, so reward the companies that do. If you create a situation where people have to be favourable it’s amazing how they come round.
If the major Linux desktop companies plan to succeed in their endeavors, they will have to learn to work together or die.
I think I’ve mentioned this before as well…..
The Window will close in the not too distant future on the Linux desktop – no pun intended. The Linux desktop could fail if companies continue to pilot programs and conclude that it’s less trouble to buy Microsoft. Everyone loses in that scenario.
Extremely true. I’ve said this before as well.
We will know, because the next major releases of the Linux desktop should hit at the end of the first quarter of 2005. In the mean time, some Linux desktops should sell between now and then. But who will buy them?
2005 will be make or break – real thinking will have to occur next year or it will never happen. Companies selling desktop Linux will have to learn to satisfy real requirements. Making a clone of .Net that will never be on a par with what Microsoft has and dreaming up the next toolkit and programming technology does not qualify, as much as some idiots who post here and elsewhere like to think that it is.
Linux desktop companies will have to build on technology that works now, and is good enough and at the very least has the potential to be better (or is better) than what people already have. This totally procludes certainly Mono and probably GTK as well. The only development tools that cut it are Java on the server application side and Qt on the client side. People are going to absolutely whinge about that, but how often can you say “We’re getting better”, “Next generation Avalon Tookit 1.0 released” or “Next Generation Avalon Toolkit 1.1 released with work starting on 2.0” without having seen the depth necessary to create what everyone else is creating?
Not everything will be 100% free for everything because that isn’t always practical as we have seen. Why on Earth do people think that companies like Novell, Suse and Red Hat exist in the Linux world? Because development still needs to be funded. As long as the GPL can be respected and people can make sensible business models out of it then there is a way forward. If it’s free it will be done, and if it can’t be done for free it will be done otherwise.
This is terrible desktop usability, and this is why the mixing thing should be fixed ASAP by the alsa project, in a really transparent way.
Agreed. This is much better handled at a low level.
How about this? It doesn’t compile;
You’re missing the point here. In the context of this article who’s going to compile? How many would even know what FTP is other than you can open it in Internet Explorer or Konqueror or Nautilus or Firefox when you need to, which is essntially what matters? IE isn’t a great FTP client, but people just use it. I’m afraid you’re a minority here, even amongst power users as people simply just click on an FTP link.
For example, writing some text on a new gimp document it’s overkill. And I have to use layers, even if I don’t really need to. It’s things like that where PSP shines over usability. It’s just simpler.
For many things the GIMP is a nightmare. The attitude of the developers isn’t all that great either. Also, would you even get away with putting an application called the GIMP into some companies? Sounds ridiculous as we are used to it, but it won’t to someone who has only heard desktop Linux.
For example, writing some text on a new gimp document it’s overkill. And I have to use layers, even if I don’t really need to. It’s things like that where PSP shines over usability. It’s just simpler.
Is that better done by free software a a bundled commercial bit of software on top of free software? That’s the bitter pill to swallow.
ALL the other times (and ever since that incident), WinXP has NEVER let me down. All its MS apps and third party apps for it that I use, they ALL work more than fine.
Why bother using free software then?
1. I am a geek, I also like unix, so Linux is among my interests. 2. I run osnews, it’s my “job” to try out and evaluate everything. #2 is consequence of #1.
Not looking terribly good, is it?
I’m just glad to see someone complaining. And I really do mean it.
I’m a longtime windows user, about 6 months ago I tried to switch over to linux. I wanted linux to be there so badly, I tried so hard to make it work, I spent a lot of freetime reading everything I could. But linux just wasn’t there, and I honestly don’t think it ever will be. I could talk about why it isn’t there yet, but other people are doing a good job covering that, so I’ll explain why “Linux on the desktop” won’t be realized.
The Linux community has a problem. It needs to realize this. Acknowledging the problem is the first step. Most of the people in the linux community refuse to do this. Instead you just sit around and you say things like “well, I like GIMP better than photoshop, so to hell with you”. Hey, look, you guys are the ones who say “linux on the desktop! yeah!” and when it doesn’t happen, you ask why. And when someone tells you, you lash back out at them.
I do graphic design and web development, and I’ve tried many times to make the switch to The GIMP. But I can’t! it just does not work as well, and if you think it does, then you’re in denial. I’d rather pay the money for Photoshop than try and deal with it, and no, it isn’t just me, its a lot of people. And theres a lot of other apps that are this way. You want linux to succeed on the desktop, but thats not going to happen if its not something people like to use. The “hey, its free!” line only goes so far.
I’m not saying Linux sucks. The various distros, and packages, and apps that have been created are an amazing accomplishment. Inspite of this its ok to say “Look at what we’ve done, its wonderful. But…” You have to have the “But…” at the end! If you don’t you start to get complacent, you think everything is fine and doesn’t need to improve. You become exactly like the IE/Windows using people you complain about so often. “It works well enough for me”, you both say that, but thats not a reason to stop.
Seeing the state of the linux desktop hurts me. I so badly want linux to make it as a major desktop player. But I don’t think it’ll ever happen. The community is too self obsessed and ego tystical.
Before any of you say “well why don’t you pitch in!”. I have. I donate money to free software projects on sourceforge and elsewhere, I report bugs when I find them, and any code that I write that doesn’t belong to my employer I give away for free. I do pitch in, but one person can’t do everything, the community needs to reform itself and work towards greater accomplishments.
So, what’d I end up doing in the end? I said to hell with it and bought a Mac. I couldn’t be happier.
Oae, I’m afraid that you have mixed up Linux developers community and Linux user community. Look through ypur posting attentively and you will see what I mean.
If I tell someone that GIMP works for me, it only means that it works for me. I don’t mean things like “GIMP is better than Phptpshop” or “You just don’t know how to use it”. I only mean that it fits my needs and I will be glad to have some extra functionality and usability in the future and I will be happy to help developers test/debug/whatever. And many people I know do the same.
There is no problem with community. There is a problem with people who think that open source developers owe them (while they don’t). I really hope that you are not one of them.
1. kbear seems fine to my eyes. Eugenia, you criticise the KDE environment because it seems “cluttered or busy” to your eyes, that’s fine. To others it’s fine. I don’t hear you complaing about the command line cos “it’s not pretty”. I personally don’t use ftp a great deal, but what’s so hard about using the good ole command line ftp utility? Works for me. Oh and Konqueror is quite a good ftp browser I might add. But then, you don’t like KDE. It most probably explains OSNEWS favouritism to Gnome users comments that i’ve seen in the past.
2. mplayer plays fine with the w32codecs package. asf, avi, mpg, mpeg, mov files all play fautlessly. There are some issues with enabling the plugins and integrating them with the web browser in use – but that’s not mplayers fault, or the codec developers fault either…that’s the browser developers fault. Please apportion the blame to the correct party. Realplayer is also a proprietary software package (unlike mplayer, xine etc). You seem to forget that a lot of people use Linux because they like the GPL and it’s morals. And that means not using proprietary software. I saw one of the posts that someone made and they hit the nail right on the head – don’t use that codec. Simple. Don’t use it if they won’t open it up. Apple still refuses to port QuickTime to Linux, a disgraceful act of anti competitiveness that should be thoroughly investigated by the US DOJ. But since the US DOJ is corrupt, it’ll never happen.
3. There are a few applications around that support it, not sure on how good they are in all honesty. Not something that tickles my fancy, but I agree, it may be a useful feature for others.
4. I personaly dislike ALSA, and think that OSS was a much better system, but that’s my personal preference. Alsa does bring improvements in many vital areas in regards to sound on Linux. But – instead of blaming Alsa for the problems with mixers, please – apportion blame to the appropriate people – the actual hardware developers themselves. They release their specs to Microsoft but not open source. Bitch to them.
5. Can’t help you much here, although i’ve heard good things about kino…
6. Gimp 2 is fine, in fact i’ve previously criticised the UI for photoshop – it’s truly horrid to a new user. GIMP is so much more nicer and uncluttered. It’s almost elegant and sexy. Just because PSP and Photoshop use certain interfaces doesn’t mean that they’re *right*. Photoshop has long been an overpriced, pile of crap, full of nice bugs and a very poor help system for the new user who is trying to learn it. There, I criticised one of the highly liked proprietary software applications, no doubt many will bitch and complain about my words. I’m not a heavy user of GIMP but it works for me, and it works well. version 2 is a huge improvement over earlier versions.
7. Bitch to the hardware manufacturers please. Look at intel – they won’t open up at all. Don’t blame the kernel developers, blame the hardware companies because it’s plainly their fault, and anyone else who argues with that is either stupid or blind to the heart of the real issue, or both.
8. This is an issue, but it’s a result of the way Linux implements library files. It results in smaller install package sizes for applications, and speedier actions as a general rule. It has both good and bad points to it, the bad point is issues with dependency hell. I note that you use Slackware and Arch Linux, maybe you should try Debian? The issues with those two distributions not having the packages that you want is really at their doorstep.
9. This is needed. It’s currently not very healthy, although slowly improving. The problem is that BIOS manufacturers don’t want to really talk to Linux kernel developers or reveal things that would make it a lot easier to implement ACPI on Linux.
10. Can’t help you hear, don’t use bluetooth or palm devices.
You really are very unfair on OSS – these applications are done by ordinary people, generally for free, generally in their own time and you really sound ungrateful. If these things really annoy you, then either build them and fix them yourself, or pay someone to do it. Period.
I expect this comment to get moderated down, or banned, so be it. Your rant wasn’t very fair, or objective and I needed to comment on that.
Dave W Pastern
She brings up several points but she is not running and refuses to run software that will fix her problems i.e. konq. She probably does not have linux certified hardware either. Also she uses distro’s which are not really aimed at the make it easy for me approach, maybe if she used Lindows, Lycoris or Linspire she could complain.
A comment on the original article: It’s nice to see someone addressing some of the serious lacks that Linux has if it is to become a serious contender as a desktop replacement to Windows. While Linux is great for geeks and people who, like me, like challenges. I’ve used Windows since 3.0 and am bored with it. I also wanted to see if I could truly do my work (yes, I work full-time on a computer from home) using all or mostly free software, and then perhaps switch off Windows for my business.
My experience so far has been mixed–some things work well, other things don’t. From a personal user point of view, Linux works pretty well. Some things are easier than Windows, other things are harder, but hey, you learn new things and adapt.
But when it comes to general use for business matters, I agree with the original article that Linux is seriously lacking. Support on a Windows network, though it can work in theory, is unreliable and takes a lot of tweaking. It certainly doesn’t work out of the box. Sharing a folder on your computer with others on the network should be as easy in Linux as in Windows–you shouldn’t have to edit an smb.conf file or run SWAT. An Active Directory solution for Linux is a must as well.
If a business is considering using Linux for their network of computers, they’re not likely to just throw out Windows completely and start using Linux. They might attach a Linux box to the network and see how it plays out first. So if Linux-Windows interoperability is not an easy, relatively hassle-free experience, then most SOHO’s won’t make the jump.
And I agree with the original author that SOHO is the key market for Linux. The OS that people have to use at work is likely to be the one they’ll use at home–because they’re used to it. (Of course many will try something else, but I’m speaking of the vast majority of people who are not so computer literate–not the osnews.com crowd). Linux needs to specifically target that market, with the tools to satisfy their needs, if it is to grow.
Some of the points Eugenia mentioned are important, and I agree aestethics is nice – but I disagree that those should be the priority. Win over the businesses, and their employees will use the same system regardless of whether it’s “pretty” or not. Lets get the rock-solid usability down first and then pretty it up. Having said that, I do agree with you Eugenia about the need for A/V IM support, better ACPI, and Palm sync (important for business users).
Oh, and mplayer-plugin works fine for me as far as viewing online Quicktime content/trailers.
(Running Firefox on Ubuntu.)
Not to add more fuel to the fire…but is there ANYBODY else here besides me that much prefers the look of KDE to the look of GNOME? Simple shmimple, KDE just looks much more polished (and not by a Corporate Polishing Squad like GNOME, but by a team that cares more about *individual* people) to me.
Of course, aside from the looks, I hate the whole philosophy of GNOME (sorry Eugenia). Simple != Good IMHO, especially when in the case of GNOME it’s simple to the point of simplistic. The world (and the computer!) is complex; hiding the complexity doesn’t make it less so, and only makes things much more limiting. It’s kind of like the old statement: “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If you are stuck in a pared-down GNOME, you can’t appreciate the sheer power available in GNU/Linux as can be accessed in KDE (unless you go through gconf, but down that road lies madness…). True I’m a power-user, but it’s us power-users that recommend stuff to newbies.
Also, an observation: People that, in non-free operating systems, are pre-disposed to Windows tend to like KDE better, and people that are pre-disposed to Macs (whether or not they own one) tend to like GNOME better.
I like and have used Macs in the past, but they have always seemed incredably limiting to me compared to Windows, albeit part of that was application availability that isn’t really Apple’s fault (well, except that maybe they didn’t try to court developers enough). Nevertheless, part of it was the “feel” of the OS itself. I actually liked OS7-9 better than OS X; OS X tries to be too trendy for itself IMO.
I think that both the developer and user community is to blame. There are plenty of users who are logical and have a good head on their shoulders, and you appear to be one of them.
I have no problem with someone who says “The GIMP is fine for me and what I do”. Thats fine, and I can accept that. The problem comes when users or developers say “The app is fine, YOU are the problem”. I’ve seen this happen with OSS before, theres a lot of people wanting interface improvements in The GIMP for instance. Maybe not even major things, just smaller options, and some streamlining of commonly done things.
Will I use The GIMP if stuff like that gets implemented? Maybe. I’m not saying the things that I would want are what the developers need to do. I don’t believe they owe me anything. All that I’m saying is they should at the very least consider these things if they want “Linux on the desktop” to become a reality. There are plenty of users who will give up, feeling rejected if they’re told that features that are important to them are worthless, and that if they want it they’ll just have to do it themselves. Again, this doesn’t mean the developers have a responsibility to do this stuff, but if they’re looking to target the market of photoshop users, you have to consider it.
As an analogy, you can’t write a book in english and target it at a country whose primary language is something else, and expect it to become huge. You can’t just say “we want you to read our book, but you have to learn our language”. If you want the audience, you do have to accomodate at least certain things. Its not your responsibility, and you don’t owe it to anyone, but if you don’t do it, then understand thats why your market is limited, and thats why you’re in the position that you are.
Theres a reason more people are moving over to Mac and OSX. Theres a reason I did it. The developers, even the OSS ones, seem to care. A lot of users are sick of feeling rejected. I gave up on Linux because despite all these goals and claims of usability, you were still expected to go to enormous lengths to get shit working. The devs don’t owe me anything, I don’t expect them to make those changes, but I and many others won’t use Linux unless those kinds of things come about.
I know full well OSS developers owe me nothing. When I donate money to a OSS project I usually do it based on what it has achieved so far. Sometimes if a project looks promising i’ll throw in some money, and in those cases, yeah i’d like to see some concern for the users. Hell, I’d help code the features I want, but my abilities are limited, I’m just not very good at C++, C, or Java, which most of the apps are written in one of those. So I do what I can.
I’m not complaining for my sake, I have an OS and a machine I love. OSX is everything I wanted it to be. I’m complaining for the developers, they seem to want something, a larger userbase, but they don’t seem to understand how to get it.
Its also important to realize that Complex != Better. Installing things on linux right now is retardedly complicated for most apps that aren’t available via your distro. Does this give you more power? Maybe, you can compile things exactly the way you want them. Is it necessary for most users? Absolutely not. When something is too complicated it tends to drive new users away, and I think largely thats what Linux is doing. Its gotten better sure, but it still has a long way to go.
Some people accuse OSX (sorry to bring it up again) of being simple. And yes, in some ways, it is. However it is also quite tailored to the power user. If you need the power it is usually available, and if you just don’t feel like messing with it, then you don’t have to.
Some developers need to realize that simplicity and power are not mutually exclusive.
> I’d rather pay the money for Photoshop than try
> and dea lwith it, and no, it isn’t just me, its a
> lot of people.
Why do people always make this claim: “Linux is not ready for the desktop because I don’t like Gimp’s UI”. Desktop readyness is not about individual programs, it is about foundations. A working video foundation (which X arguably is), a working sound foundation (ALSA has some problems as this thread shows), a stable and usable API for SW development (Gtk, QT etc are already or almost there) and so on. When these pieces are there (and the user base grows a bit), it suddenly makes business sense for Adobe & co to port the programs that so many people are complaining they can’t live without to Linux.
Once (or if) this happens free software people can use their programs and other people can buy/warez the stuff they need and everybody lives happily until the next OS paradigm shift (to Hurd or what have you).
(Anonymous who did the first post on this subject here)
I actually agree with the first part of your post. Some parts of Linux are just frustrating, powerful or not. <rant>Constantly-changing ABIs are one of them. I’m a firm believer that the major binary-oriented distros (such as Mandrake, SuSE, Red Hat/Fedora, and Debian) should get together with GCC developers (of which Red Hat employs a lot via Cygnus) and agree on a *stable* ABI and file-system structure (LSB, anyone?) so that developers can compile on one distro and have it run on *all* distros unmodified. If the GCC developers say that impedes progress, tell them it’s fine to change the ABI once every few years or so, so long as they announce it well in advance to give package maintainers time to compile a new version, or build in backwards compatability (ala Windows, by far the best with that; it’s amazing to be able to run a 1987 program unmodified in Windows XP when you think about it; try *that* with a Mac, not to mention Linux!). Then, any Linux distro which uses the standard libraries and LSB file structure will be able to use a package made for any other distro, and one of the major complaints about Linux will be nullified.</rant> There *is* also a thing as overly **complicated to be sure, but forces tend to be moving to the other extreme (at least if OSNews commenters are any kind of representative to the Linux crowd), at least as far as UI is concerned, which is why I’m a KDE fan, as it’s bucking that particular trend. That doesn’t mean non-UI parts of Linux aren’t in serious need of simplifying.
As for OS X, it may be powerful in some ways, but it *is* oversimplified in others; when you can’t do simple things like turn off certain toolbars or sidebars in the Finder (at least in 10.3, which my gf has), something’s wrong. Those kinds of choices should be in the hands of the users, not the developers. Oh, and my gf, an ardent Mac fan (and non-techie), thinks that things have gone downhill in OS X. Safari and wireless were super-buggy in 10.2 (but she doesn’t like the look of Firefox, so uses Safari instead; go figure), and she doesn’t like the look of 10.3 compared with 10.2 (hence the Finder complaint). OS 9, for her, was better, but a lot of apps are no longer available in 9, so she was forced to go X. Would it add *that* much complexity to allow a user to choose between Pinstripe and Brushed Metal on a system-wide basis (she prefers the former)? Or to let users configure the Finder and OS in general to their hearts’ content (perhaps even with an “Advanced” prefs tab)? I think not. That’s the sort of thing I mean by it being possible to go *too* simple in the interface when the underlying technology isn’t.
**Although complex != complicated; from the Zen of Python:
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
(by Tim Peters; I really do like Python over Perl, as Python really is more beautiful besides being less complicated IMHO; GNOME is both uglier and IMHO more complicated than KDE, although the latter is debatable and the former is a matter of taste.)
Windows is complex, but not complicated.
KDE is both complex and complicated.
GNOME is extremely complicated (CORBA and Bonobo anyone? Look at the hodgepodge of libraries…), moreso than KDE IMHO, although not complex.
Mac OSX at least strives to be both non-complex and non-complicated, although being a *nix implies some level of complication by itself.
GIMP is just one example. Theres many other applications. And arguably, I think it is about the applications, and not the foundations. Everytime I try linux I leave it again for the same reason, the apps just aren’t there. The theory and the foundations are wonderful, but I can’t get the things done that I need to get done with the foundations. I need something there to use.
I think this is another part of the problem, and part of the reason the apps suffer so much. Everyone is so focused on the foundations, that the actual apps and implementations don’t get the support they need, and it shows.
I agree that there does have to be people there developing the foundations, improving them, and working on the low level stuff, but you also need a layer of people concerned with translating all of that into something usable and pleasent. Linux won’t be ready for the desktop until it has more applications people can stand using, and installing the apps on their machine doesn’t require that they cancel their weekend plans.
Aesthetics certainly do improve useability. People simply prefer good looking stuff: if they have a program that looks nice, and one program that looks bad, but they both do the same task, then most people will certainly go for the better looking one. That program may not be truly better on useability; but the aesthetics do attract more users so for those people, it’s more useable than the “ugly” program.
Not really. If 2 programs works the same, but one is more pretty, then yes, people will probably go for the one with the best looks, or the cheapest, or the one with the prettiest box, or the one with the coolest name. But this has nothing to do with useability, but more to do with marketing.
There are things that are much more important. Is the icons easily distinguishable? Do they do what people expect them to? Can they easily find the functionality they need? Are things they have to do often too cumbersome? Even something as simple as which button has focus per default in a dialog can have a pretty big influence on a workflow. (And defaults are very important, and i think KDE for instance has a lot of work to do on those, but it is hard as every time you want to remove something from a toolbar people shout up)
Now the program that is ugly *can* be less useable. It could have icons that was hard to tell appart (in kmail, the check mail, reply, and forward icons looks virtually identically), or some part of it might draw too much attention, and hence be distracting. But so could the pretty one. But my point is, if one of them have this problem, then the programs aren’t equal.
So looks are important, but to say bad looks == bad useability is wrong, it is just not that simple.
And other than that, useability and aesthetics are completely subjective issues.
To some degree, yes. A lot of it depends on what you are used to, which means inventing new strange interfaces are usually a bad thing, since it will screw up predictibility. But there are certain general rules that you can apply, such as Fitt’s law, and its many deritives, and Hick’s law, and others. But most importantly, follow a set of common interface design guidelines as closely as possible.
For example, I find BeOS’ standard decor to be beautiful; most others will disagree with me.
I find the classic MacOS to be very ugly. And programs i use at work, such as NetVault, BackupExec, all Motif programs, which is basically all solaris programs, are all, in my oppionion, butt ugly. Some of them i have useability problems with, such as in NetVault i can’t even sort the data it displays, not even the windows version can do that. I might not be able to sort the lists, but i can filter them, but the filter dialog unfortunately wont fit on my screen. I can’t save filters either, so those have to be recreated time and again. Now that actually makes my day harder, while after a few minutes of use, i no longer notice the look.
> You really are very unfair on OSS – these applications
> are done by ordinary people, generally for free, generally
> in their own time and you really sound ungrateful. If these
> things really annoy you, then either build them and fix
> them yourself, or pay someone to do it. Period.
Open your eyes to the bad world outside:
This, exactly THIS, is what the normal user won’t do. They’ll not pay anyone to fix it, nor will they learn to code, they’ll instead use the product that already works.
I appreciate the work OSS developers do, and I’d be annoyed if others did not appreciate the work I have contributed to OSS projects myself.
But be it fair or not, the flaws are there and users will mostly avoid the flawed product.
> Desktop readyness is not about individual programs,
> it is about foundations.
No it’s not about foundations either. It’s about the whole thing, that either works or doesn’t work. Good foundations are important to developers to get the thing working. Users don’t care about foundations.
I will agree that OSX is oversimplified in some areas, but I find those areas to be very few. In OSX, if you girlfriend does not like the sidebar on the finder in 10.3, she can click the white pill shaped button in the upper right corner. all of the toolbars, and the sidebar go away. Some things don’t need an advanced configuration dialog, I’m really not sure what other options you’d want to access in a file manager. As for the appearence there has been a lot of debate about the change from 10.2 to 10.3, and while I do much prefer 10.3, I don’t think it would hurt for them to allow some theme selection or customization. Although part of the reason I like the mac is that it all looks so good that I don’t NEED to mess with it. I don’t have to spend time looking for themes, and icons, and messing with color settings, it just looks good. There may also be the issue of the interface guidelines for OSX apps. They’re designed with those in mind, switching around themes with different spacing could cause problems.
Now i’m not trying to turn this into an argument for why people should use OSX, I mention this in the context of the convorsation. I think that konqueror for instance has a few too many options. You are able to largely customize everything you want though, which I do like. however sometimes its hard to find what you’re looking for.
I do agree with you that customization and advanced menus can be a good thing. It just needs to be organized well. Theres plenty of OSS apps that force you into things too, and won’t allow you to customize them. I’d have to load up KDE again and look around for specific examples of the apps that come with it, but I can think of some other ones. While GAIM is not a KDE app, it is a much used OSS app. I tried to customize the message window, to make it more space efficient. I didn’t need large borders and a “send” button. But I couldn’t turn any of this stuff off. Its been a couple months since I last used it, so if this has changed then ignore this particular complaint.
OSX is by no means the perfect OS. But its the best example i’ve seen so far, and very often it highlights how you can have something that is very powerful, yet on the surface seems simple. Linux needs to learn some things from this for it to gain a wider audience. Both Linux and OSX have their issues here. The difference is that with Linux we have more power to change it. I’ve tried to take a stab at some Linux GUI coding, but i’m pretty poor at it. And since I don’t know how the rest of the OS and other apps for it will progress, I don’t want to spend time coding for an OS where the only apps I’ll want to use are my own.
I definately agree with you on the package issue, that needs to be handled.
As for one final point “Windows is complex, but not complicated”. I’m not quite sure how you mean this, but I would say that windows is simple in what it allows you to do, but complicated in how it forces you to do it. I’m a very experienced computer user, but theres still stuff in windows I have trouble doing because of how simple I think it should be, compared to how complicated it actually is. Wanna setup a external mic? that is an exercise in pure pain, i know many people who’ve done it and they all hate this task, and its one example. OSX requires only that you goto system preferences, sound, and then the input tab. select the input device and adjust the volume on the slider.
You can definately make things harder by trying to make them simple, Windows has done this with things like its god awful find dialogs in XP, and Clippy. OSX usually manages to make things much easier on you. Linux just hasn’t tried to make things much simpler in the first place, but its still better than windows in many ways because under all that complexity lies a lot of power.
Linux has a chance to become something beyond amazing, an insanely powerful OS that is free and usable, customizable and beautiful. This is why I say all of this, not because I want to “prove” that another OS or piece of software is better, but because I don’t want to see Linux miss the chance of our lifetimes.
Very eloquently put. You’ve said in a few words what I tried to say in a few paragraphs.
I’m a developer as well, I do web apps, graphics, and occasionally some C++ or other languages where I work. I think its because I’m a developer that I feel that the OSS developers should understand why the users aren’t flocking to their apps, and why they won’t unless something is done.
The other programmers I work with are awful. Yes they can all code, some are quite good at it and most if not all of them are better than me. Yet I deeply hate the apps they have produced. They’re often buggy, ugly, and feature poor usability. I don’t even consider myself a programmer really, but I feel some sense of duty and pride in making those apps that I do create appealing to the eye, as easy to use as possible, but still powerful and reliable. I don’t do it because I have to, I do it because I feel a sense of wanting to. Sculptors don’t produce barely distinguishable forms and say “well, you can tell its a person, it gets the job done, whats the problem”, they make pieces of art because they are driven. Its the same with many other crafters, and I think code is crafting too.
Developers aren’t being fair to themselves when they say “hey, its just free software, what do you expect”. If you’re really that bad at what you do, and really care that little about it, why bother? why are you even trying to make something as complex as many of the linux apps are? The fact is I’ve seen many apps that have all the power of commercial programs, they just lack the polish, the usability. If you don’t honestly believe that what you can do is better than what is already out there, that the only reason for your program to exist is because its “free”, don’t you find that just a little bit pathetic?
I just realized that I didn’t make this obvious, the lower part was not directed at Morin. I agreed with what he said and that got me typing. It probably should have been a separate post. So Morin, please don’t take those comments and questions as being directed at you.
Sorry if I sounded like I was knocking OS X too much. It really is nice overall, it’s just not the panacea a lot of people seem to think (not referring to you of course); ditto with GNOME. Thanks for the tip on how to close the sidebar; it worked for her. She has one more question: How do you keep the Macintosh HD on the desktop from moving away from the upper-right corner? Hers seems to move around a lot.
Agreed about Clippy and the XP Find dialog, but neither is *that* hard to turn off (just a simple pref for the former, and TweakUI for the latter if you don’t want to edit the registry yourself, albeit TweakUI needs to be better organized; TweakUI is indispensable to remove some of Windows’ frustrations though). Windows has some pains, but they’re normally well-enough known pains that Googling will turn up hundreds of links to people that have fixed them. Not that Windows is perfect either by far, but is very usable after minimal tweaking. I haven’t run into any hardware problems myself in Windows, everything seems very plug-n-play and works out of the box for me. Then again, all I have are run-of-the-mill USB devices: a USB printer, a USB CD/RW drive, an external USB hard drive, and an external USB floppy drive. There are definately some things that aren’t intuitive when working with Windows, and in that, it has stuff to learn from the Mac, but it’s not too bad once you learn its quirks. (Linux has many more quirks than Windows at the moment unfortunately IMO; so much so you pretty much have to be a guru to get most distros up and running unless you’re really lucky with your hardware.)
I hope the best for Linux too. It needs to take the best from Windows and MacOS (both classic and X) in order to succeed. I just hope it can both appeal more to your “average Joe” user while not losing it’s core power-user hobbyist constituency. Perhaps locked-down GNOME at the office, Macified GNOME for the Mac fan and the simplicity-lovers, and KDE for Windows-exiles and power-tweakers is the best bet to satisfy all involved. Now if only Linux could solve a lot of its underlying structural problems (packaging, developers working on 50000 text editors but very few, say, digital-video editing applications, etc) and firm up its hardware support, perhaps the higher-level problems would be simple to solve in comparison.
No, I didn’t feel you were knocking OSX, I pretty much agreed with you on what you said. As for the hard drive moving around, this hasn’t really happened to me. I’d say have her make sure shes got the latest updates and or check out macrumors.com and osxhints.com to see if there are any threads on the issue. If not, she can ask there and some more knowledgable people can help her I’m sure.
Yeah some of the XP annoyances you can turn off, and often you can find solutions for them just by googling, but there are so many, and combined with the few you can’t turn off, I face quite a few every day. Over time it becomes more frustrating and it feels like the OS is fighting me, like it doesn’t want me to do what I want to. And I don’t mean customization things, just basic stuff. When you first install the OS it tries to give you a tour, hit the wrong close button and it pops up again on next exit. message bubbles start popping up out of the system tray, you click on them to make them go away and they come back later, so you have to find a way to go turn it off. You want to go change a setting you have to wade through dialogs and menus that want to do the stuff for you. I remember not too long ago I wanted to setup my net connection. I’m connected to a network and can get all my info via DHCP, linux and OSX realize this no problem. Windows pops up a dialog and says “so you wanna connect?” and then gives me a list of options, none looked like what i wanted and I had to wade through a bunch of crap just to get the dialog to go away so I could do it myself. It wouldn’t let me just say “go away, i’ll handle this myself”. OSX doesn’t do that, excluding certain customization things which are usually cosmetic, if I want access to a setting, its easy to get to. All of this comes down to polish, the settings you’ll tend to need are available. More unusual ones are sometimes available in an advanced menu, or through the terminal, and if its not available at all, it usually isn’t too bad because its probably cosmetic. Apple may not be very flexible in what you can do with the GUI as a user, but they are when it comes to functionality. Look at applescripting for instance.
I’m not going to try and say windows is totally awful and just doesn’t work, I think often people over exagerate out of zealotry. Windows annoys me, I can usually do the things I need to do, but I tend to become annoyed in the process. Over a couple years that annoyed feeling has built up into loathing. Windows still crashes now and then too, more than Linux or OSX tend to. Overall, I just hate the feeling of something actively fighting me like windows does. At least with linux if i can’t make something work it doesn’t feel like the OS is treating me like i’m an idiot.
I’ve generally not been a huge fan of GNOME, however I do appreciate what they’re trying to do with their human interface guidelines, and I applaud the effort. They’ve realized there is a problem and are trying to solve it. They may not be getting it right yet, but I’m willing to give them the time because at least they seem to be putting forth the effort.
On 2nd thoughts, if the US DOJ had any guts, they’d force Microsoft to port code to the Linux platform (Internet Explorer, Office, Windows Media Player, codecs, msn messenger etc). It would create a level playing field and still garnish sales for Microsoft. What would they have to lose? Well, how many people would buy MS Office for Windows when they can get it for Linux instead, which is a much more reliable and stable system. If you look at it, Office is a LOT more expensive than Windows itself. It’s a hook, line and sinker job folks, get them using Windows, then lock them into proprietary office applications.
The easiest way to start the ball rolling is for all government departments to migrate their data to open standards, drop Office, use OpenOffice and use open standards like .swx. You want to deal with the government? Fine, you need to be able to read .swx files. Sorry, your Office apps can only read .doc…oh well you can’t do business. It would be a snowball effect and force Microsoft to comply.
But – and i’ve said this many times in the past (and been moderated down because of it) – the US government is corrupt, and has no intentions of hurting Microsoft for monetary reasons. We have a case of the government not doing the right thing by the people, but instead covering it’s wallet.
Dave
Force MS to port apps to linux? Why only MS, why only Linux, why at all? What exactly is the legal basis for this? Why not force Linux devs to port all their apps to Windows either if you insist on fairness? Why not force Linux dev to port the kernel modules? MS to port drivers?
Sorry but this is simply nonsense. If there was a law that enforced portability, there’d be no way to write OS-specific programs. Basically, you’d enforce that only one OS may exist and by that stop any innovation. If there was such a law, Linux would have been illegal from the beginning since all Linux-specific programs aren’t portable and thus illegal.
But when it comes to general use for business matters, I agree with the original article that Linux is seriously lacking. Support on a Windows network, though it can work in theory, is unreliable and takes a lot of tweaking. It certainly doesn’t work out of the box. Sharing a folder on your computer with others on the network should be as easy in Linux as in Windows–you shouldn’t have to edit an smb.conf file or run SWAT.
1) You don’t have to edit smb.conf for that / run SWAT.
2) Why would corporations care for that? Who decides wether files get shared? Mostly, they’d get mailed if one or another needs one. For the rest, sharing is done in a network when it makes sense and guess who has to make sense on the network and servers?
An Active Directory solution for Linux is a must as well.
True, you can’t just use ‘any’ Linux distribution for the complete purpose of AD at this point. SUSE comes with replacements, RedHat will with some bought Netscape components which they’ll open source, and theres perhaps more but when you grab the distributions meant for casual users such as Xandros or Lycoris, then no.
Lots of disagreement. But if you examine any forum related to any OS “Sound” problems will be very apparent.
Is this not evidence that “sound” is a problem for Linux?