Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman on 20 years of Linux
i use linux at work and used to use it at home until i got a mac mini as a present. i actually like it that its so customizable and supports lot of filesystems. but im not gonna fool myself. its too fragmented and unreliable.
The open source community's anti-making money mentality is what's keeping most open source stuff from becoming mainstream. Android, for example, is mainstream because Google is trying to make money off of it.
To paraphrase Marc Faber: We're all doomed, but that doesn't mean that we can't make money in the process. Rabbi Lapin: "Let's make bricks!" Stephan Kinsella: "Say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake."
the number one thing linux needs right now is standardization. the other day i had to make install a utlity from source because there were no repositories. no normal user should or will do this. moreover i had to google and find out that i needed to install gettext, because it was giving an error.
you have half a dozen audio frameworks, 20+ window managers, poor driver support (esp. vid cards), the quality of app selection is subpar to windows or mac.
I can't run Unity on my desktop, yet I was able to run Ubuntu Netbook edition on everything and Unity worked.
I could go to the Ubuntu forums for help, but then I have to solve 2 plus 2 every time I do a search query.
I would rather have paid $50 for a license of Ubuntu that worked right out of the box.
garegin: the number one thing linux needs right now is standardization. the other day i had to make install a utlity from source because there were no repositories. no normal user should or will do this. moreover i had to google and find out that i needed to install gettext, because it was giving an error. you have half a dozen audio frameworks, 20+ window managers, poor driver support (esp. vid cards), the quality of app selection is subpar to windows or mac. I'm not so sure standardization is what is needed. If there are different people trying different things, then people can still learn from each other and see what works. If there are only very few projects then less of people's visions can be tried out at the same time. VforVoluntary.com | Youtube.com/Nielsio | Reddit.com/r/austrian_economics | Post Points: 5
Daniel Muffinburg: I can't run Unity on my desktop, yet I was able to run Ubuntu Netbook edition on everything and Unity worked. I could go to the Ubuntu forums for help, but then I have to solve 2 plus 2 every time I do a search query. I would rather have paid $50 for a license of Ubuntu that worked right out of the box. I much prefer Ubuntu Classic right now, with Avant Window Navigator, and with the bottom panel removed. Maybe in the next versions if things can be tuned more. You can select Ubuntu Classic when you log in (when you're asked for your password). VforVoluntary.com | Youtube.com/Nielsio | Reddit.com/r/austrian_economics | Post Points: 20
i'm using 10.04. its probably one of the best releases.
Official Nokia N9 ad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfE3B6L-Otw
(600K+ views in one day)
Nokia N9 MeeGo Smartphone - detailed hands on and walkthrough
Strictly speaking, the Nokia N9 does not run MeeGo as its operating system. It instead run what Nokia refer to as a "MeeGo instance". This is because during the development of the device that would become the N9 and Maemo 6, Nokia and Intel merged their projects, respectively Maemo and Moblin, into one new common project called MeeGo. Not to postpone the development schedule, Nokia decided to keep the "core" of Maemo 6, such as middleware components (GStreamer) and packaging manager (Harmattan uses deb not RPM), and integrate the user interface framework of MeeGo in Maemo 6. Nokia is dropping the Maemo branding to adopt MeeGo as to not confuse customers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9
While I agree that app compatibility is poor, the poor video card drivers are the GPU vendors' fault, and possibly Microsoft's fault for forcing standards that work best with Windows. Maybe they even pay nvidia and/or ATi money to not make good drivers for Linux.
I also don't think standardization has been a good idea, mainly because Microsoft's standards aren't that great IMO and they've always been behind.
I wouldn't be so hard on MS if they didn't abuse the Patent system. I always try to support opensource or whatever is not patented, even if it's inferior to what's patented
I think if DX hadn't picked up so much momentum, a lot of which was arguably due to the existence of IP, we'd be using a more programmer-friendly OpenGL (or something that replaced it) for games.
The video driver issue's a touch more nuanced - the AMD/ATI proprietary driver(fglrx) is targeted primarily at the workstation demographic and so isn't rigorously tested for desktop use(though this is changing). nVidia's are supposed to be better, but they've been known to reliably take out the system in some cases. The FOSS drivers are generally the most stable, if behind on 3D features and performance(AMD and Intel are both funding development of the FOSS stack).
I installed openSUSE on new harddrive. I was finally able to connect it to the Internet, after 6 hours of trying to figure out what is an "External Zone." Yay for usability.
EDIT: Next step: Figure out how to change the clock. It's 7:30 PM here... and somewhere else in the world.
EDIT 2: Figured out how to change the clock. Next step: Figure out how to change the screen resolution. Be back in a few... hours.
Doesn't Opensuse have a full control panel? I find what you're saying odd.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/linmagazine/4857296094/lightbox/
I see a Country/Region tab, and a Display and Monitor tab.
Not directed at you, but I thought this was hilarious:
Maybe it's because I am accustomed to Windows and Ubuntu. I'm still on the learning curve with regards to openSUSE and KDE.
I replaced openSUSE with Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop... and I am loving it! Unity is awesome. And the fonts are so much cleaner than before.
EDIT: And my printer worked right off the bat!!!!!!
If you like Unity but want to have something highly configurable (including placement), you could try Avant Window Navigator.
I'm using that under Classic mode (when you're logging in, and after you've selected the user, the option is at the bottom of the screen). There's no unity in Classic mode and it looks like regular gnome.
Using AWN, I've also removed the bottom panel, and I slide away the top panel, because everything can be done from the dock (has all sorts of applets, including main menu).
Anybody know of any stock/commodities/international/etc. tracking software for linux? It doesn't have to be anything opensource; it can be commercial software.
Not sure exactly what you're looking for, but from a quick search:
http://eddelbuettel.com/dirk/code/smtm.html
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Finance-Quote/
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Finance-YahooQuote/
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Stock+Quote?content=90695
http://gkrellstock.sourceforge.net/
faber est suae quisque fortunae
AGORA I/O - the liberty unconference
http://agora.io/laozi/schedule/
Sep 23, 2011
Stephan Kinsella - Open Source Agorism: Prosper Without Patents or Copyrights
Relates to:
Why Libertarians Should Use Freed Software (and other freed culture)
I'm all for open source, but most of the crowd is anti making money. Thus, they often fail when it comes to user experience. Case in point, having to use terminal to install software. Surely using terminal is the l33t and objectively correct and better way of installing software, but that type of thinking is what's keeping [edit: many] noobz/etc. from switching from Wintel and Apple.
Daniel Muffinburg: I'm all for open source, but most of the crowd is anti making money. Thus, they often fail when it comes to user experience. Case in point, having to use terminal to install software. Surely using terminal is the l33t and objectively correct and better way of installing software, but that type of thinking is what's keeping noobz/etc. from switching from Wintel and Apple. You're talking about the software, so by 'crowd' you must mean the developers (as opposed to the users). The Linux kernel development is done for 75%+ through commercial interests. All major application development is done by communities of usually some commercially backed programmers and the rest volunteers. Almost without exception, they accept donations, and many ask for donation subscriptions. A nice example is Ardour ('digital audio workstation'). They currently have 254 people with a donation subscription. They also have 'bug bounties' where people can pledge money to have specified problems fixed. Some users may be anti making money but it seems to me that by far most of the actual development is done with direct commercial interest and that the developing community is aware of the value of it. In the Linux Reddit, when companies join the open source club, it's accepted and understood as beneficial. The only time when it gets negative reactions is when it involves companies that historically acted against the interests of the community, and not because it's commercial per se. As far as installing goes, most of the big distributions comes packed with software, enough for a lot of PC users; it's Windows that doesn't ship with much. And most of the big distributions have large repositories allowing people to install all of the popular free software with a simple UI. So I don't see how there's any truth to your statement that hippie anti-money programmers purposely try to keep things difficult. Could some open source projects be more user friendly? Sure. But this will be spurred foremost by having a larger community. VforVoluntary.com | Youtube.com/Nielsio | Reddit.com/r/austrian_economics | Post Points: 20
I wasn't making a blanket statement, but I certainly was ranting. I've admitted earlier that using Linux, as a desktop OS, has gotten better. Also, my rant only pertained to desktop, not server or other non-desktop applications of linux. Desktop linux distributions are definitely getting better with regards to user experience.
I use Linux: Fedora. Bleeding edge with great security. Gnome 3 is a step forward in user interfaces.
I've recently been using Fluxbox for a GUI, which is extremely lightweight. I think I'm going to give Slackware a go next.
I use Windows for email at work (the email is on a MS Exchange Server without POP or IMAP turned on). I also run an engineering analysis program called ANSYS on Windows, because the company bought a Windows license... but, I use Linux for basically everything else.