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Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Sep 30, 2002 07:01 AM
from the reviews-in-the-news dept.
from the reviews-in-the-news dept.
Jon writes "Eugenia from OSNews is giving Red Hat 8.0 a run for its money. She posted a very detailed and balanced review for the new version of Red Hat, which aims to be a "business desktop". Very interesting article and discussion over at OSNews." Several people also sent in the stories from InternetNews as well as LinuxPlanet.
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A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:3, Informative)
You answered Mosfet's points very well. So far as I can see, all of the points made against RH on this one have been driven either by ego or misinformation. I use KDE, I dislike GNOME, yet I use Mozilla, and wouldn't consider using Konqueror until it works as well as Mozilla. To an IE user, Mozilla is *far* nicer. Though Mozilla does use GTK+, you're right in saying that it isn't really a GNOME app. The same goes for KOffice/OpenOffice. You could almost say I use the "toolkit" that RH8 ships with by choice, despite KDE giving me othe rdefaults. Man, I'm so awful, I'm just hitting on KDE
Re:A users take on Red Hat 8 and KDE (Score:4, Informative)
That's simply false. Red Hat host the site, but non Red Hat developers from KDE, Gnome and many other projects have contributed to many of its standards - eg, the Window Management specification that's supported by both environments and a increasingly large array of leightweight window managers.
2- about Qt+Xft, it's simple: they have shipped Beta Software. This is not good, and, unsurprisingly, they have done it for KDE, not GNOME. The same about VFolders. About this, RH's attitude looks very close to a (bad) fork.
Both the QT addons and the standard VFolder support stuff are a patch by Red Hat. Just like your distro doesn't ship a standard Linux kernel (most major distros don't). Yes, they'll be in future versions, but that doesn't mean that Red Hat 8 hasn't goen through extensive beta testing.
3- Mozilla uses GTK, you're apparently not aware of it.
GTK is not Gnome. Especially when its a backend for XUL.
4- About Mozilla & Konq again, you're making a small mistake. You say that Konqueror doesn't render properly web pages. This is false, for the simple reason that Konqueror can use KHTML or Mozilla, precisely, to render web pages.
Its not false, I'm assuming the default renderign engine of the software - which is a reasonable asummption to make as kmozilla isn't anywhere near as maintained as khtml is.
5- about changing default apps, you failed to notice that this will prevent interaction between apps when using KDE. Namely all those nice interactions between KMail and Konqueror and KOrganizer and Kaboodle, through KPart or DCOP, that most users point as the "added value", the "big plus" of KDE, are simply nonexistent if you use most RH default apps (simply because these default apps are not KDE apps).
Then choose a different app. Or better yet, standardize the interface. The bug isn't that peopel dare use applciation from other toolkits, the bug is that doing so often gives them a worse user experience because these application use nonstandardized mechanisms to interact with each other.
Also, don't fail to consider that _most_ users _will_use_default_apps_ that they are proposed
Good - Red Hat have taken some time selection good defaults and its nice that they showcase the best of what OSS has to offer.
because this is the attitude that years of microsoftian lobotomization has lead to.
No offence (I think your post is quite intelligent), but many people won't take you seriously if you use words like `Microsoftian'.
For all Linux newbies using RH, the mandatory conclusion if they try KDE instead of GNOME will be "KDE is crap".
By that same logic Gnome is crap, because they're missing out in Abiword, Gnumeric, and Galeon, in favor of non Gnome alternatives. Wait a sec. Abiword can't open, edit, and save MS Office documents reliably. Neither can KOffice. If a new user is given these defaults, anmd reasonably assumes they're the best the platform has to offer, the user may very well incorrectly l assume Linux is crap.
Thanks for your post. But I think what Red Hat's doing provides for a better desktop experience for end users. I love and use KDE, but no matter how hard the developers try, my platform is Linux - not KDE. I can and will choose the best apps avaliable to me regardless of toolkit. If that means those apps will miss out on some functionality because of that, the solution is to allow those non-KDE apps to integrate with KDE to the best of their ability - not to tell Red Hat that they should include a beta-quality office suite as a default because it uses the Right Toolkit.
The same goes for Gnome too.
Parent
gentoo (Score:5, Funny)
That's why i use gentoo.
It's so eleet it doens't even have an installer!
you just copy the stuff over by hand!
that just proves you have to be eleet to use it!
my mom got mad when i installed it on our dell in the family room but it's just cuase she's not leet!
you posers in the data centers running redhat on the huge server farms are pussies compared to my leet mp3 server!
uh my mom needs to get a recipe off marthastweart.com, gotta go!
keep it leet!
w3rd em up!
Eugenia Linux! (Score:4, Funny)
> Eugenia from OSNews is giving Red Hat 8.0 a run for its money.
Wow, Eugenia sounds like a cool new distribution!
The next Debian unstable (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
RH 8 is out (Score:3, Informative)
It's scheduled for release at 10:00 AM -4GMT.
No multimedia?? (Score:2, Informative)
Wonder what the are trying.... it is a real funny business decision, I wonder how many home users will really want a distro without those...time to switch to mandrake 9?
And the KDE hacking sucks.. those people have not even given them credits... all abouts have been removed... It is really unethicalxine is in (null) (Score:2)
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:2, Informative)
About boxes in programs should show information about the current program, not the toolkit it is based upon. About KDE should be placed inside the kde configuration tool, or somewhere accessible from the kde menu. Afterall, if your running kde apps under gnome, the about kde option may be somewhat confusing to people.
It would also be nice, if about boxes showed some compiletime configuration options and memory/cpu usage stats instead of just an advert.
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:3, Informative)
I made a few screenshots of the last RedHat 8.0 Beta installation that I did over the weekend and just to show that it DOES come with XINE:
Screenshot3.png [8bit.co.uk]
Well, they may have taken it out in the final version.
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:5, Informative)
We don't put closed source, or binary only software into the distribution itself, that's what keeps our distro fully GPL'd.
As for the decision behind not shipping mp3 players, that has more to do with the nature of mp3 patent licensing and royalty scemes. There used to be very clear terms allowing us to ship such things, but that seems to be changing, at least enough to put it in the gray area.
That said, nothing is stopping an end user from getting any of the software they are used to having on Red Hat Linux, we chose to err on the side of caution and not become someone's test case for litigation down the road.
On the other hand, try using Ogg Vorbis instead of mp3. It's not so encumbered with gray area, it's open and patent/royalty free.
Parent
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is definitely legal, but quite impolite.
OTOH, they sat still when Mandrake took their (was it 5.2?) distribution and started a new company. Perhaps they deserve some slack. (Yes, they had to allow it, but they were polite about it.)
Still, they *are* being impolite now. And I suspect that they will continue to be so. This is coloring my perceptions of them
Re:No multimedia?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Bluecurve kicks ass. . (Score:5, Interesting)
I just tried Mandrake's latest release on a dual Celeron 533 and a Tecra Laptop, both dual boot systems. I had the latest Redhat beta ((null)) and installed it right after installing Mandrake. No comparison. The Redhat interface looks much better, and the intergration of the menus is a much needed improvment. All of the program defaults make logical sense to me, as I use OpenOffice, Moz, and Evolution by choice.
I am waiting for the mirrors to update RH 8.0 like a Lion waiting for fresh meat.
Upgading from 7.3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Upgading from 7.3 (Score:2, Informative)
Something in the new version requires you to put in a single like about DDNS AD-HOC mode.
Other than that... smooth as silk
Re:Upgading from 7.3 (Score:3, Informative)
The installer will however tell you about any conflicts as a result of your custom packages, and if worst comes to worst, you still won't loose any data - the Linux packaging system will use your existing configs (and create [config].rpmnew for any config files from new packages) or back yoru existing configs up as [config].rpmsave if the config file format has changed.
Re:Upgading from 7.3 (Score:5, Informative)
Ahemm. Watch out, Apache 2.0 will bite you in the ass if you're not careful.
Null used Apache 2.0 as apposed to 1.3.26 in RH 7.3. So yer default config files are now somewhere else, and all of your carefully massaged virtual things are now nowhere to be found. It can be fixed pretty easy, just RTFM.
There are probably a few more "gotchas" but that one stuck out like a sore thumb.
Parent
Re:Upgading from 7.3 (Score:2)
More to the point, though, is that the GCC and underlying libraries may be radically different enough so as to make upgrading like that not work - what were the jumps in gcc from 7.0 -> 7.3? I can't remember.
RH8 for business - question then... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:RH8 for business - question then... (Score:2)
Re:RH8 for business - question then... (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, home users like to brag about how "professional" or "better" Photoshop is while the real professionals [sourceforge.net] use Gimp [gnomedesktop.com].
Face it, Gimp is good *enough* for most people.
Another write-up... (Score:3, Informative)
Pushing Linux desktop evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license? That is, the community has some peer pressure for acceptable software: using a free software license (GPL, LGPL, BSD), sharing code but with appropriate attribution, using open standards and tools (autoconf, etc), and so on. The openness of the community and this system of taboos have arguable produced better software and certainly gotten us closer to a free software world. Could the same pressure potentially lead free software application developers to enforce good GUI design habits as well as good programming habits? When users give feedback like the above that says "hey, your program may be cool, but you aren't following good UI design principles" and this criticism carrys weight similar to telling someone that they should use a free software license, then perhaps free software can really evolve past its geek-oriented roots to something that the masses can embrace.
Re:Pushing Linux desktop evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the biggest problems I have with the current UI is the inconsistent, confusing and bloated "Start" Red Hat menu. You are free to like it as much as you want, I just don't. What is the point of having similar menus all over the place?
Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license?
I think your point is a little off, by targeting "developers in the free software community". This is RedHat's distribution of GNU/Linux, and it sounds like the author's gripes would need to be addressed by RedHat. It doesn't really sounds like a programmers view of the UI, but the distributor's. I am not disagreeing with the author's point, just that the comments should be directed appropriately. If RedHat wants to put the same menu in 15 times in 15 different places, you can' fault the person who coded the menu.
Parent
Why Free Software UI tends to suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Why free software usability tends to suck [phrasewise.com]
Why free software usability tends to suck even more [phrasewise.com]
To address a few things mentioned in your post:
Wouldn't it be nice if developers in the free software community read things like this and took the criticisms to heart as seriously as if someone had knocked them for not using a free license? That is, the community has some peer pressure for acceptable software: using a free software license
Because Free Software is currently Freedom As A Programmer Envisions It. As the Free Software concept was nutured by Richard M. Stallman, a programmer, this is not surprising. Freedom As An End User Envisions In (also known as The Freedom To Get Stuff Done) has never really been considered by the Free Software community to be a Valid Freedom.
Funny you should mention, I'm currently drawing up a public license that enforces usability and goes after the people who've kept linux so very unusable.
The openness of the community and this system of taboos have arguable produced better software and certainly gotten us closer to a free software world.
I commonly hear this phrase "We've gotten so far on the server, it's only a matter of time before get to the desktop." Unfortunately, this statement makes the assumption that the same abilities, values, and methodologies that lead to success on the server do the same for the desktop. Linux has been doing so well on the server because people in the linux community were really good at doing server stuff. Unfortunately these people were the most absolute worst people you could have ever sent to do desktop stuff. 30 years of anti-newbie RTFM baggage, command-line junkihood, and having a userbase that entirely consists of programmers and sysadmins does not behoove the creation of high quality user interfaces. In contrast, the mac developer community has for 17 years put very strong values on consistancy and non-geeks being able to use the software. That's why they've been able to succeed on the unix desktop in 3 years where linux has failed for the last 7-8.
Could the same pressure potentially lead free software application developers to enforce good GUI design habits as well as good programming habits?
It's already been tried, and has been tried by people with very strong usability/HCI backgrounds. The response they generally get from programmers is "stop whining. If you want to fix something, you should learn how to code". Or sometimes you'll hear "Don't complain about what you get for free". Or "That's what you want, that's not what I want. That's just your opinion."
Or if a usability person criticizes a UI in front of a kernel hacker, the kernel hacker might say "I can't believe that people actually get paid to criticize the work of others" (true story).
When users give feedback like the above that says "hey, your program may be cool, but you aren't following good UI design principles" and this criticism carrys weight similar to telling someone that they should use a free software license
First of all, you have to be pro-active about creating good user interfaces. Users generally do not actively complain about specific application interfaces unless the interfaces are truly, truly, horrible. They will usually passively complain, trying to find execuses to use the program less, or unconsciously creating some workaround, or saying "I hate computers" around the watercooler. You won't get active feedback very often from users, so you need to actively watch them using your UI. So often what makes a UI unbearable is a bunch of little, annoying things that add up to one cumulative bad user experience. To catch those little things, you really have to watch the person using the interfaces. You should also do research ahead of time to learn (before you design the UI) to learn what the most common annoyances are. Unfortunately, most Free Software UI's are cranked out and *then* people try to do active damage control. Much like the world of commercial software, actually.
Another problem with your suggestion is that most of the current userbase for Free Software/OSS are the geeks who've been so clueless about good UI (and some of whom who think that HCI is a load of bull). These people adapt very, very well to badly designed UI's, often priding themselves on doing just that. They often don't take notice of the little, annoying things and are often not confused by ambiguous widget layouts or jargon-laden wording. When you consider these facts, it's not surpising why StarOffice gets such glowing reviews from the geek community. Assuming you manage to find a geek who gives you feedback about the UI, chances are he's not going to a suggestion that jives with all of what we've learned about HCI in the last 20 years. Just because you get feedback doesn't necessarily mean its usable feedback.
Hope I've answered a few of your questions.
Parent
In other news... (Score:2, Informative)
A dilemma (Score:2)
Redhat has some nice advancements in terms of integration of the UI and consistency for the look and feel of administration tools. So I should make the switch right?
Well, then I hear that the multimedia, plugins side of Redhat sucks hard. I started gathering some of the packages needed to make this better but my god there is a lot of missing things.
So I am at an impasse. Should I stay with a distro that is not aimed at my primary desktop or move to a distro that is but will take a lot more work to get functional?
Any ideas?
_______________________________________________
i386 Optimized (Score:2)
Then another buddy introduced me to Mandrake. Everything good about RH, but compiled for CPUs that were actually fabbed in the last 5 years. Ever since 1998, I have had a love/hate relationship with Mandrake. Not very stable (compared to RH), but at least I have the comfort of knowing that it is somewhat optimized for my system.
I still try RH releases. I love to see the work the guys have done. If I ever convert my office to Linux, I will reccomend RH. But why, oh why, can't the guys over there just update the compiler options. Would it really take that long to compile for i586? I know there are some people still running 80486 chips (esp in the embedded world), but why do they insist on keeping 80386 as a baseline?
Actually, I guess people like me are never really happy. I bitch at Mandrake for not moving to i686 as a base. In any event, my home box runs Gentoo now. Gcc 3.2, -O3, march=athlon, and whatever else I want to throw in there. I'm happy with my system, but I still look at RH 8.0 and their snazzy desktop/installer/awesome support, and wish they would take a few days to pump out an i686 ISO.
RedHat is 686 optimized Re:i386 Optimized (Score:5, Informative)
And anyone having run a few benchmarks knows
1) Compiling for Pentium sucks on anything who is not a true Pentium. On a PII/PIII and on the K6 (I don't have access to an Athlon or PIV) they are markedly slower than code optimized for the 386 and much slower than code compiled with -mcpu=i686
2) Using the -march=i686 allows gcc to use PII/PIII specific instructions but benefits are small (about 2%) respective to -mcpu=i686 so you throw away universality for little benefit. Mandrake uses -mcpu=i686 -march=i586 but gcc is not smart enough to use 586 instructions when optimizing for 686 so it silently reverts to plain -mcpu=i686.
3) For those packages where 386-only instructions don't make sense since they have perfoarmnce-critical parts written in assembler (kernel, glibc, sasl) RedHat ships packages specific to the PII/PIII family who are compiled with -march=i686 (full optimizations) and another set specific to the Athlon compiled with -march=athlon.
Parent
Good points. Here's a few more. (Score:5, Informative)
I'd also like to point out that I've done a bit of benchmarking gcc, and optimizing for a particular processor makes almost no difference on the vast majority of software.
The biggest win comes from flipping on -O3. Then if you can get away with it, -fomit-frame-pointer, which helps the register-starved x86, but keeps you from looking at stack traces and debugging crashed programs (or sending in useful bug reports). -fexpensive-optimizations have also helped a bit too, and for certain packages, -ffast-math can be big. -march=pentium2 makes next to no difference on anything I've tried benchmarking. -DNDEBUG is potentially good...seems like most production software is compiled with assertions enabled, when they're really intended for debugging.
The Pentium 1 sucked at running code compiled for the 386/486. This is why you got compilers like pgcc, a Pentium-optimized Mandrake distro, and lots of talk about architecture optimizations. With the Pentium 2, Intel realized that all software was not going to be recompiled for each processor (at least in Windows land), and did a really solid job of running 386 code.
So, as far as architectures go, the Pentium 1 is the odd man out. If you have a Pentium 1, it sucks to run any code other than stuff compiled for your chip. If you have anything else, you'll generally get very minimal gains from compiling specifically for your processor instead of for the 386.
Finally, most people don't actually care about the maybe 10% speedup they can get by recompiling software using optimization flags other than just -O2. They care about interactive latency. Look at Mac OS X. OS X is *hideously* slow, but it *feels* pretty fast because it has good UI latency -- it jacks UI priority and puts a lot of emphasis on slapping something on the screen that's updated as soon as the user does anything.
On Linux, here are the big culprits.
Jack the nice value of X from 0 to -10, if your distro doesn't already do so (take a look in top and see what it's running at). The nice value doesn't make it much "faster", but it does significantly improve latency, so you can get crisp edge-flipping and updating.
Turn *on* DMA and umasked interrupts (insert usual warnings about potential problems with *really* old computers having these on). hdparm -u1 -d1
If you're doing something that doesn't need low latency in the background, *nice* it. I run all compiles niced to 20. I can be compiling six or seven packages with no user-perceptable slowdown at all. Software that's always sucking down a little CPU in the background but still should be interactive (like lopster or gtk-gnutella) should be niced to 5 or so.
Make all your cron jobs run at nice 20 (crontab -e, edit command line to contain nice -n20). They have no reason to demand interactive latency, and you *do* need said latency for your UI.
If you run any servers on your workstation, they should run around nice 10. They need to get back to the user, but they shouldn't make your UI get unpleasant when they get hit.
Renice esd/artsd to -15. If these don't get CPU *right away* when they need it, your sound will break up. Frankly, I dumped esd/artsd, and got a sound card with hardware mixing (ALSA
Use a decent window manager. Sawfish is incredible if you're an edge-flipping maniac like me and like zero edge resistance. Why? Sawfish is actually not that *fast*, but they've compensated for that fact, which makes them beat any other window manager I've seen at edge flipping latency. Sawfish doesn't block other app redraws when edge flipping until it's redrawn its titlebars, as other WMs do, so you get much faster redisplay of app windows. Beautifl design.
Finally, I've had good experiences with redefining HZ in the kernel. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of using the X11 architecture is that anything going to the screen has to wait for a context switch -- first, the app tells X to display something, then we wait until X is active and actually display it. This isn't a huge deal unless you have a bunch of processes that all want CPU time, and you have an app or X that's blocking on I/O (say you've paged out an app). Then your ten compiles, and the lowly default 100 HZ in the x86 kernel mean that it takes a full tenth of a second just to move from the user app to X. If the app is displaying a big pixmap that has to be paged it, it has to draw a little bit, start paging the thing back in, draw a little more...it's I/O bound and yet it isn't gettting a chance to keep the ATA bus saturated. Jack HZ to 1000 or 1024 and recompile your kernel, and you should notice slightly better UI latencies (NOTE: at one point, this caused oddities in some libc call lke usleep or something, and made a couple games run too fast...I don't think this is an issue any more).
Other wins: Use mozilla 1.1 (much faster redraw than 1.0), use an up-to-date version of gtk2 (wow, the version RH is packaging is much faster at rendering aa text than the old snapshot I had from Ximian), use the blisteringly fast rxvt instead of the slow gnome-terminal or konsole. Use gnuserv mode in emacs/emacs -- that way, you open a *single* copy of emacs and then just open new windows in it. Opening files is about 50 times faster.
After following all these tips, you can play with Linux the way it was meant to be seen.
Parent
Missed Points in the review (Score:2, Informative)
RH 7.x users will love this distro.
Myths: KDE/Qt is broken. My favorite KDE
The new scheduler is not mentioned, but this really improves the snappines of the desktop. Windows and dialogs move, open and close really quick.
KDE has a really good printer setup mechanism with CUPS. (IMHO should be the default for RH - LPrng is a PIA)
Bluecurve in the shipping version is really quite smooth and easy on the eyes. You can see a lot of work was put into making fonts readable everywhere.
Most importantly, this has a great many of the tools needed to slip Linux into the corporate enviroment. I would not suggest any Linux distro to Windows clients until seeing this.. This is the most important part of RH 8.0
The best line from the entire review... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod me down as flamebait, call me a troll, do your worst. But...
I've been saying this for a long time. If you want to keep Linux small, and only accessible to the enlightened (read that as "Lucky enough to know how to code, or content to run no exotic new hardware) few, then ignore that statement.
Wanna play in the business world? Read this article, and understand why she's dead-on with her complaints.
XP, for all that it's produced by Microsoft and has security holes, DRM issues, and privacy problems, works out of the box. It has been rock solid in EVERY implementation I've done. I can give my Mom a copy of XP, and she can install it and run it. She won't have to worry about having java support, or plugins. I will not have a call from her in the middle of the day complaining that she can't install an application because she hasn't met her dependencies. This is the "Mom-Test (tm)", and XP passes.
Just because I don't run it, doesn't mean that I don't respect it.
Linux just gets better - just as Windows had to (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows has had many years to garner the market share and see trends in development to adequately support their users. With this comes innovations such as the driver management system, streamlined interface, overall stability, self-maintaining (semi), and a united Win32 SDK. Through these innovations comes revenue - with revenue comes research and development.
These features are taken for granted considering they are relatively "recent" or modern innovations, even in the Windows world. The rock solid reputation Windows has is as a result of many releases - much feedback (largely from the corporate space). The driver model used in the NT-based Windows releases was pretty good in Windows 2000, but is considered even better in Windows XP because it comes with so many drivers pre-installed. No one would have ventured to make the claim with regards to stability and flexibility with Windows NT 4 and, God forbid, Windows 3.1 and Windows NT 3.x. Apple touted its MacOS as a vastly superior model to Windows - Microsoft simply learned to put the "good stuff" ("lessons learned" from other operating system offerings) in with its own product and, voila!, we have stable (for the most part), easy to install and use, and widely support Windows releases. Microsoft may not be saintly in its operations - but in a business sense, it is extremely smart to give people something to suckle on - easy to take and get used to. Believe it or not, it is what the majority of bipeds want.
Software innovations come about from much trial and error. Linux is breaking out of the stages of its infancy - catering only to those willing to take the dare and challenge of migrating from a Windows world to a UNIX world. But times are changing, and Linux is changing with it. People who can describe the average Linux distribution in 1995 will tell you that hardware support was hit or miss - and if it was a hit, it often only was a partial (never a bulls-eye).
Personally, I feel that Linux has made HUGE strides towards that perfect operating system for any niche. If you consider how long it took Microsoft's Windows line to fully mature - Linux is ahead of the game. Businesses will just need more time to listen to feedback and implement those features that people can suckle on - and using Microsoft and Apple as references with regards to their own products is a great start - they obviously figured something out to appease the masses.
Members of the open source community (users, developers, and companies) need to pay close attention to the desires of the community as a whole. Many of the projects that make up Linux (and other open source operating system offerings) have the ability to receive feedback to make the project better. Griping is one thing - channelling the gripe to the write email address is better for the whole. The applications that make up Linux thrive on contributions (ideas, source code, and comments [good/bad]). The more feedback - the better the product.
The capabilities in Linux are there - the opportunities for Linux just need to be taken advantage of - users, developers, and companies alike.
Parent
Red Hat is void of multimedia, but there is hope! (Score:3, Interesting)
This should fix most if not all problems with Red Hat and multimedia.
Possible reason why KDE unhappy (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a comment I made on another list:
I doubt if the changing of the themes and such was the problem. I would not lose any sleep over single vs double-click or a few icons and bitmaps. This would not justify Bero quitting and claiming that KDE was "crippled". Part of the real problem, ironically, is that the changes Red Hat made ARE merely skin-deep. This is exactly what the KDE project is not.
A perceptive Slashdotter earlier saw that the problem was not in the superficial reskinning, but in the integration. KDE is not about being yet another window manager, but was meant as a holistic answer to the desktop problem. A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior. You will see the same file dialog (with URLs and bookmarks), print dialog, toolbar editor, font chooser, color picker, help infrastructure, address book, and predictable cut and paste. Sharing of components means familiar behavior throughout, such as the file manager embedded in the file open dialog or the image viewer embedded in the file manager. When you open a file, the dialog remembers the bookmarks and frequently used directories you used in other KDE apps. In other words, the KDE experience provides a uniformity, familiarity and predictability that goes well beyond mere theming or toolkits. This is good for beginners.
Red Hat has in effect substituted other apps for every major KDE app. The KDE apps are not gone, but they are less visible. This means that a typical Red Hat user will install "KDE" and never run a single significant KDE application. What you get is the usual jumble of X apps doing their own thing in their own way. Apps do not remember your favorite colors, your print settings, your favorite directories. It's the familiar X desktop: a Frankenstein collection of apps stitched together by superficial skinning, but not quite fitting together. "KDE" is reduced to being an oversized, slow window manager: nothing more. It is not really KDE. Why would anyone want to use that?
For pros, the best-of-breed approach is the status quo. IMHO, a beginner need not start this way. The default KDE apps may simply be good enough, with the common UI and infrastructure compensating for the individual weakness. Sure, a deliberate decision can be made to pick a better app, now or later. But this should be done with the concious knowledge that this goes "off the KDE ranch", that the various integration, uniformity and usability improvements of KDE will not apply. Starting off a beginner with a best-of-breed approach leaves him with the usual Frankenstein collection of disintegrated apps, all unalike. I.e., this is the status quo that KDE was supposed to fix. Trouble is, Red Hat will not let KDE be KDE.
Why Red Hat won't beat windows on the desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
For awhile now, I've seen lots of people saying they think this distro will make it to the desktop seen, and now RedHat 8.0 is aiming the "Business Desktop". I find it hard to believe that RedHat will accomplish that anytime soon.
I work as the systems administrator for my company, and let me tell you one thing about real companies, "THEY DON'T JUST USE MS OFFICE". Almost all major companies have some sort of ERP solution (Enterprise Resource Planning). Over at my company we use Lotus Notes, but some other companies use SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards... Now you know what all these ERPs have in common? The user applcations are ALL BUILT FOR WINDOWS. Some of these companies, like mine, might run Linux (RH) on their servers, but I would never switch my users to linux just because RH 8.0 has a new cool UI with OpenOffice.
For linux to make it to the desktop seen, companies like Oracle, SAP, Lotus, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards will have to start supporting linux in a serious way. If they can provide apps that run on Linux and that can connect and properly function with the accounting system, the accounts receivable system, the inventory system, the CRM systems and so on, then Linux will be able and probably even beat windows in the desktop market.
But I don't see how that's going to happen. I've done lots of research on my part to try and find an ERP solution for my company that can run on linux. But I haven't found anything. Whether it be an OSS or proprietary solution, client-base or web base soltuion, I wasn't able to find anything with the power of SAP or any of these ERPs to run my company's Information System.
If you do know of an application, let me know!
Re:Why Red Hat won't beat windows on the desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
I work as the systems administrator for my company, and let me tell you one thing about real companies, "THEY DON'T JUST USE MS OFFICE". Almost all major companies have some sort of ERP solution (Enterprise Resource Planning). Over at my company we use Lotus Notes, but some other companies use SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards... Now you know what all these ERPs have in common? The user applcations are ALL BUILT FOR WINDOWS. Some of these companies, like mine, might run Linux (RH) on their servers, but I would never switch my users to linux just because RH 8.0 has a new cool UI with OpenOffice.
For linux to make it to the desktop seen, companies like Oracle, SAP, Lotus, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards will have to start supporting linux in a serious way. If they can provide apps that run on Linux and that can connect and properly function with the accounting system, the accounts receivable system, the inventory system, the CRM systems and so on, then Linux will be able and probably even beat windows in the desktop market.
I'm inclined to agree with you - in order for the linux desktop to really make it in the business workplace, there need to be Linux clients for the major ERP applications. Now if you have total control over your own workplace machine and Lotus Notes is your only sticking point against moving to Linux, then format that harddrive now. Lotus Notes runs really very well on Wine these days, and while the performance isn't quite as snappy as I would like, it's certainly good enough even on an old cranky PII400.
I live in hope that we might see a Lotus Notes client make it out into the wild in some shape or form. I think Lotus might be surprised at how many development shops would welcome the flexibility to run Lotus Notes on a Unix-like platform rather than being limited to Windows platforms only.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
A fair review (Score:5, Interesting)
That said the review seemed pretty fair to me. She's write in saying multiple menus or counterproductive. I mean either include an app under the main area or don't include it. There should NOT be duplicate subcategories on the menu. Can you imagine if Windows XP shipped with the Acessories menu listed twice?
Second, regarding multimedia. If its multimedia abilities are as castrated as she's says, that's a big negative against RedHat 8.0. I still can't believe and MP3 player isn't included. As if that lets them off the hook for years of including an MP3 in every RedHat release?! Now Out of the Box multimedia is broken, which won't stop me, but will stop the average user who has never used linux before. There should dam well be a single button you click that restores MP3 ability. Making a user try to figure out how to get MP3 back into XMMS is NOT user friendly.
Lastly while obvisouly most people are not running at the resolutions mentioned in the article, having something as basic as being able to change your refresh rate ala Corel linux should be standard by now. It actually quite pathetic that its not.
Anyway, I'm downloading it now so we'll see how it goes. The one thing I am looking forward to is decent fonts for once. If they get that right I can probably forgive the other things.
Her comment on MP3s shows a lack of understanding (Score:3, Informative)
The second point about Be doesn't apply to RedHat either. The licencing on BeOS was such that if you paid for it then you couldn't redistribute it but if you didn't pay for it then you could. This is allowed by the mp3 licence in that they are only interested if money changes hands and at that point they want some. This allowed Be to buy the unlimited mp3 licence and be done with it.
RedHat can't do this because they can't restrict the redistribution of the software without being in violation of licence and so can't distribute it at all. Also they can't buy the unlimited licence because that is not transferable and only applies to them (so others can't redistribute their distribution, back to square one).
The author seems to think RedHat is in a pretty good financial position and if they are to stay that way then they can't trust the good intentions of PR people and walk into legal minefields and get their arses sued off when it turns out the PR people are full of shit (a rarity but it does happen).
Re:Very interesting quote (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:The 2 best distros (Score:4, Insightful)
Firstly the review advocates Windows users not bothering to switch unless they absolutely have to, but also the FUD about Linux + Apache being insecure due to the (now patched) OpenSSL vulnerability was ridiculous. Sounds like a MS shill to me...
Then, to cap it all, advocating choosing RH7.2 over RH8.0 was ludicrous. The reasoning goes along the lines that 7.2 has been in development longer than 8.0. WTF? That doesn't even make sense.
I've downloaded 8.0 for my home network and installed most services, and it all works fine for me. Whoever wrote that article doesn't know what they are talking about.
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Re:The 2 best distros (Score:3, Interesting)
My laptop is a Compaq Armada D500 (PIII 600/w 128Megs of RAM). The system seems to run a lot faster under XP than it did under RedHat 7.2 or SuSE 8.0. Even compared to when I had a custom compiled kernel and apps on it. The wireless PCMCIA worked with no need to grab drivers (my Windows 2000 experience on this laptop) or recompile anything. All apps load quickly. The suspend feature works exactly as expected. The environment is much more organized and task oriented. Etc... The bottom line is that Linux distro makers can't rest on the old laurels (Linux is more stable, secure, you can tweak the code, etc...) and ignore the MS camp. Take a look at what Windows is today. I mean a REAL look. Most of today's Linux distro's are great alternatives to Windows 2k, but they leave something to be desired when compared with Win XP.
I have been forcing myself to use XP here at work for the past month and it really does blow most Linux distros away in terms of a basic work environment. The only problem I've had so far is that I can't get under the hood and tweak as much, but I haven't found that there is a need to either...
As far as your experience goes, what make/model of laptop were you trying to install Windows XP on? That could be the key to understanding why it didn't work.
I still won't use it at home, not because it isn't as good as Linux, but because I can't afford it and the licensing sucks. Joe User doesn't think that way though...
Re:Check your mirrors... (Score:2)
Re:Why 386 instead of 586? (Score:2)
Take a look at the
Now, you may ask why they would want to support ancient hardware? Well, the sad truth is that rich kids (that is to say, people who can afford a good machine) who buy computers to dual boot Linux for real work and Windows for games aren't the only people who use computers. There are many in the wealthy countries (US, Europe, Japan, etc) who need to be able to re-use old hardware and even more in the developing world. Red Hat is a great OS choice for many of these people, and as it becomes entrenched in places like South America, it becomes the choice of schools and small businesses too, which will eventually become Red Hat customers for support.
Re:Why 386 instead of 586? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot grammer! (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought that too, at first. I thought that some of the mistakes she made sounded like English wasn't her native language. So instead of choosing to be a smart ass and make some "clever" comment about it, I chose to educate myself. I looked up the info on the author (by simply clicking on her name at the top of the article). She is Greek, so English isn't her first language. While it isn't perfect English by far, it got the point across. In the author's own words:
I am Greek and english is not my native language. We do OSNews for fun (however, OSNews takes most of my time every day), so if you have a problem with my spelling and grammar either a) do not come back (spare us and save your time too) b) send me a proofread version of the article in question. Whining about something I can't radically improve overnight, is not an option.
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Re:Slashdot grammer! (Score:2)