Desktop Linux Summit Highlights 416
mo writes "The Desktop Linux Summit has just concluded in San Diego. There were a number of exhibitors, including Novell, AMD, and Mozilla. I've put together a summary of some of the more interesting announcements and booths at the conference. Highlights include a Linux-only 3D game, DRM-free music services, and a new Asterisk GUI."
great timing (Score:2, Interesting)
Switchvox! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Games. We need more Games (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux...mainstream? (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh I DO hope.... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's been a while since I played with Lindows/Linspire 4.5 and I can't remember if that ran as root by default or not. Can anybody confirm ? I really hope that they've not made that mistake as 'Average Joe' mentioned above won't know its "bad"...
Re:Linspire Trying Too Hard to Mimic Apple? (Score:0, Interesting)
Direct rip off an iMac 2 icon aside, looks like Windows 95 to me. Linux needs to attract good designers as well as coders. Unfortunately that isn't going to happen.
What you have with Linux is situation a bit like the old days of people writing games on the ZX Spectrum, i.e coders doing both the code and graphics. And most coders don't know shit about art. Hence why they are trying to reproduce GUIS and desktops that were barely cool 10 years ago.
Re:Linux...mainstream? (Score:3, Interesting)
LOL, it certainly seems to be difficult for the likes of you, but that's probably par for the course
introducing methods even the most basic of PC's from decades ago possessed (ie. Video Gaming).
Wake up rip van winkle - we've been gaming on linux for years, and sad to say, you were asleep and missed it all. For a gentle heads-up, see doom 1/2/3, quake 1/2/3, ut 2000/2003/2004, RtCW, etc etc...
Re:Switchvox! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hey I've got some ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, different toolkits and DE will still exist but they aim to standarize stuff to increase interoperabiltt between DEs; from stuff like common configuration files, proper metadata support, menu files, and trash can management to more complex like drag-and-drop between tookits, control embeeding and (finally) proper clipboard functioning.
This has the potential to end a lot of nightmares for program instalation and interoperability, no matter for which desktop you write them.
Most major desktop enviroments are embracing the Freedesktop specifications: KDE and Gnome among them. XFCE 4 deserves a nod too for being one of the most FD-compliant desktops available.
Why should I switch to Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a fairly heavy Windows user. For about 90-120 minutes a day, I check email through Thunderbird, browse some sites with Firefox, chat on Gaim and XChat, and download my daily dose of Mercury Theatre[1] with Azureus. I use Sygate Firewall and AVG Anti-virus, and I rarely have a problem.
Why should _I_ switch to Linux?
[1] Mercury Theatre is in the public domain, so this isn't a warez-related post.
Re:Games. We need more Games (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you actually tried Suse? I can't speak for the other majors, but Suse already offers everything you describe.
Secondly it would be important to ensure it has a sigificant representation in the student workstation pools of educational institutions from primary school upward.
Yeah, because that worked so well for Apple!
Seriously, this is really a non-starter. Good PR, but that's about it. Apple already learned this the hard way.
Kids don't make $1000 buying decisions, adults do, and they tend to get what they use at work. That's why when I was a kid every school had Apples, and every business and home (except teachers) had PCs.
Which is why Microsoft donates computers and software to schools all over the place, they get to look like philanthropists while securing their market share.
I challenge you to walk down the street and find 10 people, at random, that think "philanthropist" is a word that could be used to describe Microsoft. Seriously, MS has a huge image problem, and has for years. They need to be doing that stuff.
Linux has an image problem, too, but it's not the sort of problem that can be effectively addressed through philanthropy. I mean, if that was the case, we'd already be there, right? Which brings up the potential PR issues with "donating" something that's already free...
I'm not saying we shouldn't be doing these things, I'm just saying they aren't the big deals people like to make them out to be. The bottom line is: get it on the business desktop, and the rest will follow. IBM and Microsoft proved this already.
Yes, even games.
Re:Hey I've got some ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
GNOME has the control panel, with the most common things you might want to control, plus the configuration editor, which is a similar to the Windows registry editor except that the back end is simple text files instead of a binary database that's easy to corrupt. I think this split makes perfect sense; for "power users" you can really get in to the fine details with the configuration editor, and for normal users the control panel is all you need.
Older versions of GNOME had the config stuff poorly organized, but I'm quite pleased with the pre-release GNOME 2.10 I'm using with Ubuntu.
Tell the freakin developers to make GOOD intallation binaries and keep them UP TO DATE.
This is why I love Debian. Note that Ubuntu is based on Debian. Package management is easy.
KDE vs Gnome wars: put an end to it.
Sorry, but no one appointed you Dictator around here. The guys who want to work on GNOME are going to keep doing it, the guys who work on KDE are going to keep doing it, and none of them will ask your permission first.
Since both GNOME and KDE are increasingly adopting standards from freedesktop.org, they increasingly interoperate well.
If you are responsible for a bunch of computers, you are free to pick one or the other and go with it. My computers all run GNOME.
Re:Why should I switch to Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Switching to linux for you isn't necessarily the thing to do if the system you have right now works fast with no interuptions/pauses and doesn't crash. I doubt you would notice much difference if you did an install of Fedora, all the same programs would be there, gaim, firefox, thunderbird...all FOSS.
For some people, the switch really wouldn't bring them anything. Its the people who do what you do, but instead use IE, Outlook, Aim (with WeatherBug!). They are the ones having their computers crippled by spyware and viruses. They are the ones that benefit by a usable Linux Desktop.
Re:Hey I've got some ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
I always figured it should end up something along the lines of Carbon vs. Cocoa (GTK vs. Qt). The look & feel should be uniform, but coding with different languages, APIs, event models, etc. should be supported. There really needs to be a definitive UI guideline summit that would provide a uniform user experience regardless of the underlying development environments.
Linspire Trying Too Hard to Mimic Apple?-Hinting. (Score:1, Interesting)
Fonts are a vector format. Now ask yourself: why do fonts have "hinting"? Why is it SVG doesn't?
Driving Simulator - Help Wanted (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out our image gallery [motorsport-sim.org] for a look at the shadowing capabilities we're taking advantage of. If you or anybody you know are C++ gurus and have a love for driving and/or Open Source Software please consider lending a hand. Say hi on irc... irc.boomtown.net #motorsport
Re:Why should I switch to Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
Even though you don't use them, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express are still on your system, and they still represent a non-zero level of vulnerability simply by existing. Additionally, Firefox is still vulnerable to some kinds of spyware and such when it's running on Windows (don't know about Thunderbird).
I've been a Linux user for over 5 years now, and finally made the switch for good about 2.5 years ago, and I couldn't be happier. These days I have to be paid to deal with Windows. A lot of that is that the more I learn about *nix, the more I realize the way MS decided to do things is stupid and wrong, but that's obviously very subjective.
I think the thing I miss the least is the regular reinstalls. Windows just seems to gum itself up after a while, and needs to start over on a clean slate every 6-12 months or so. Obviously, I haven't had the same experience with Linux.
Ironicly, I actually had the switch kinda forced on me. When Suse switched from Lilo to Grub, my very nice SGI USB keyboard was suddenly unsupported (in Grub, it worked just fine everywhere else, even in the BIOS). This meant that I couldn't make selections in the boot menu, which made it a serious PITA to dual-boot. I considered my options, and told my wife she was now a linux user. Her only question, literally, was "how do I log in?" (suprised the hell out of me. She is, shall we say, non-technical, and had no prior Linux experience).
Anyway, since all the apps you use are either available or easily replaced on Linux, you really have no reason not to switch, other than, perhaps, some fear of the unknown. You have no reason to be afraid, though. There are lots of people out there who are willing to help you through it.
My recommendation is to buy yourself a copy of Suse Pro. it's about $90, so you're not going to save yourself much over XP Home, but it comes with excellent printed manuals, just about every app you could want, and their setup/admin tool, Yast, simply rocks.
Re:Coding in Parallel (Score:2, Interesting)
JWZ made some very scathing and accurate comments about mplayer (and other OSS media playing software) years ago, and for the most part his opinions are valid still. How many 'mortal' end users were involved in the testing process for these apps? Was their feedback taken into account when developing the UI of the app? Of course, dealing with people and their criticism is not terribly fun, which is why it usually requires paying developers to put up with it.
I mean, for goodness' sake, Apple's paying for all the usability testing and whatnot.. Just steal everything they do, and have lots of 'advanced' preference modes and CLI stuff for the geeks.
With regards to your sarcastic take on KDE and Gnome, they are totally different DEs with different approaches, architecture, and language choice.
These really need to be Cocoa and Carbon. That is, it shouldn't matter what env I run in, I want all my chrome to be correctly rendered and behave identically. As an end-user I shouldn't have to give a goddamn how the app was developed, in C, Java, C#/MONO, P(erl|ython), etc. It should all look and feel consistently, clipboards should work as expected, etc.
fd.o really needs to be about declaring an agreed-upon supported foundation of libs for GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE, preferably by integrating the libs while having the APIs remain familiar and functional to their existing developers.
Re:How the hell did you leave out OpenOffice.org? (Score:2, Interesting)