LinuxPlanet's Year In Review 100
LinuxPlanet has a year-end review discussing their picks for favorite linux software in several categories, from window managers to time-wasters.
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LinuxPlanet's Year In Review
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If all else fails, lower your standards.
Dangerous... (Score:3, Funny)
However, it's good to see that I'm not the only one heartily sick of 'linux on the desktop' stories.
Re:Dangerous... (Score:1)
Come on! Does anybody still use a machine that's too slow for emacs? My PowerMac 80 MHz used to run Emacs in Linux very fast. Does this guy still use a i386?
Re:Dangerous... (Score:5, Funny)
dep's quote [linuxplanet.com]: "I admit that this is on a low-end machine, an Athlon 1.2-gig with 768 megs of memory and a G-400 vid card with a paltry 32 megs."
Re:Dangerous... (Score:2)
Re:Dangerous... (Score:2)
Everytime I run across a slow or sluggish program the solution is always to get a faster machine. Perhaps a 1.2Ghz Athlon is obsolete. If so, then my 1.33Ghz Athlon must be obsolete as well, or will be by the end of the week. Well screw it! I'm tired of chasing after other people's standards. If the software won't run on my system it's cheaper not to buy that software than to upgrade the CPU.
Re:Dangerous... (Score:1, Insightful)
It has applications that are too slow for a 80Mhz machine.
And Sawfish? (Score:4, Funny)
+1 Funny on the MQR standard (Score:1)
*laugh* I have no points and I must mod.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. As far as I know there is no truth to the rumour that "MQR points" will be phased out in favour of the euro.
+1 insightful, if i had any mod points. (Score:1)
I demand a recount! (Score:4, Redundant)
TANJ! [optushome.com.au]
Take away his geek card! (Score:1)
Well, anyone that can't beat Minesweeper and carry on a conversation at the same time should have his geek card revoked and banned from writing about Linux!
:-)
GACK! (Score:2)
I hope Michael Hall doesn't mind my pointing out that he's completely unqualified to make such a comment, as Debian's just as fast as anyone else. Anyone who's actually bothered to visit the Debian website would know that there's not just one but three different branches of Debian Linux development; it only seems to be behind if you use Debian stable, which is behind by quite a bit because...well, damn it, go check the Debian web site if you don't know.
Damn it, and I bet Michael Hall gets paid to write about Linux.
Re:GACK! (Score:2)
I would bet that he reads over 50 linux articles every day including Saturday and Sunday. He basically posts every single article on linuxtoday.com.
I was pretty glad when debian started the testing distribution. After the testing distro was created there wasn't as much need for Progeny.
I use unstable myself, but I realize that a lot of people aren't comfortable updating as many programs as I do as often as I do. These people would be more happy with frequent stable releases.
Can I encourage you to grow a thicker skin?
Re:GACK! (Score:1)
Big time kudos to the Debian developers from this grateful user.
Re:GACK! (Score:1)
Perhaps the bleeding edge Debian gets released just as fast as all the other distros, but but stable Debian is what counts. If Debian unstable is supposed to be the mainline branch, then why is it called "unstable"?
Debian stable is what counts, and I expect quicker results from a constipated tortoise than from Debian stable.
Re:GACK! (Score:1)
Re:GACK! (Score:1)
Still, stable releases is usually what counts if you compare distributions. It simply is unfair to compare a stable version with an unstable version, and so you have to decide upon one type of versions across the board to compare with. If Debian has a disadvantage on such comparisons then it is too bad for Debian, but not an excuse for invalidating comparisons of stable versions of distributions.
And, by the way, I have yet to see any proof that the quality of "testing" should be equal to the stable versions of other distributions.
Year in review? These are carved in stone. (Score:1)
By the way, favorite distro back in 1995/96, and still my favorite in soon-to-be 2002, Slackware.
Re:OS/2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, how many people still use OS/2? Sure, it was a good concept, and from what I hear, it worked very well. But even the people that I've talked to that used OS/2 religiously now tell me that it's being left far behind, and they can't keep on using it because of their advancing needs.
Now where's the stereotypical-linux-zealot-hate there?
Re:OS/2 (Score:1)
Re:OS/2 (Score:1)
It seems that IBM finally understood that their marketing department is ugliest collection of coneheads on Earth, which, together with the usual business practices from Microsoft, laid OS/2 behind in the big desktop boom of the early 1990s.
So, they stopped trying to sell OS/2 the joe home user, and started selling to big enterprise places, where IBM already had one heck of a market share since the mainframe era, and the name IBM actually means something.
Currently IBM ships OS/2 under the "eComStation" name. They're just not worried about calling it OS/2 anymore: the concept OS/2 was meant to be - the true unleashing of 32-bit GUI platforms - just wasn't filled in by OS/2, it was filled by Windows and Mac OS. (it was meant to have look-and-feel coherence with Motif too, but that's another tale)
Last but not least: while the article calls OS/2 a dead horse, it's a decent operating system over which IBM has full control and can tame to its purposes whenever needed. Example ? Remember those big, bad ass S/390 machines IBM sells and which we love to say "they run Linux!" ? Ever managed to see a demonstration of one of those in a LinuxExpo or other exhibit ? The software in ROM that manages the virtual servers (each running a separate copy of Linux in its own VM) is OS/2 and WPS. (actually it's a one-board-PC with OS/2 in ROM that plugs in the S/390 VM control slot (not sure of nomenclature here) and manages the VMs.
Left or right? Yes! (Score:1, Troll)
"So, Dennis, which do you prefer, 7Up or the rancid milk?"
"Well, at first I thought 7Up of course, but the rancid milk has some really interesting tang to it..."
And, of course, he'd probably answer "yes".
KDE biased (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many reasons why every kde app developer wants to get their app withing the base distrobution! First your app suddenly gets installed on (insert total kde desktops # here, some big ass number compared to said developers app downloads). Second you app then gets checked over many other developers as they are checking out the new kde app and because they are coders looking at your work they can provide good bug reports to quickly fix the problem. You application is quickly changed to conform to the rest of the desktop, making your application more pollished. The translation team will go through and convert your application to X (insert supported # of langues here) languages and you don't have to go out and find someone to do it for each language. Your Makefile etc worries are over as you no longer have to worry about then anymore (other then setting up your own Makefile.am, but if you can't do that then you still have some work to do before you should even think about going to kde's cvs) Also you can go and download just about any iso and there will now be a good chance that your app is sitting there. Now wouldn't you want to be part of this?
Second the windows manager debate page didn't have too much oomp to it. (more on this in the next paragraph) I think the major reason with this is because people don't want to think of them as seperate items, and with kde it simply comes with the desktop and works. (I am not currently up to date on gnome, but last I readup I think they are doing the same thing of a gtk based simple window manger that just works and ditched e). So other then e or some desktop that can only afford twm there isn't much to say on this.
Kmail, Konq, kword... A pattern here? Yes! The pattern is concistancy which I am surprised they didn't mention anywhere in their article (other then the corel dude, but that wasn't this type of consistancy). The applications look similar, behave similarly etc. The biggest reason I hated Netscape was how it did copy/paste differently then all the rest of my application. The reason I love Konq is similar. It does everything I need and looks the same as the rest of my applications and behaves the same. (this goes along with my own development of Kinkatta [sourceforge.net] as an aim client for kde ) Things as small as that they all use the same "cut" icon in the end make life easier. You get anti-alias working for qt and suddenly all of the kde app have it, no getting it working for each app (cough mozilla cough). The like bobs_big_blue_theme? Go ahead and put it on. If you have all of 1 desktop then you don't have to worry about some apps not having it (besides xmms, but it has its own theme anyway). So I think one of the real reasons that these applications won is because not by themselves, but as a group they make something bigger and stronger.
-Benjamin Meyer
Uniform look&Feel ?? (Score:1)
So I think one of the real reasons that these applications won is because not by themselves, but as a group they make something bigger and stronger.
Funny thing to say. When I used Gnome I wanted everything to be look like GTK. Now I don't use a desktop environment anymore, just IceWM, and I couldn't care less about the consistency of the looks of the apps. You recognize a "cut" icon anyway if you see one, whether it's Qt or GTK or anything else (although some toolkits are just plain ugly, but that's a matter of taste). Anyway, if you don't stick to one toolkit, you have a lot more apps to use.
That is not to say that the desktop environments can offer some great advantages, but I have yet to see them.
Re:Uniform look&Feel ?? (Score:2)
-Benjamin Meyer
Re:Uniform look&Feel ?? (Score:2, Insightful)
I spend my share of time on the help desk where I work (small office, we all do time). And I can't imagine the headaches that would arise if each user had a slightly different setup. The keyword for businesses is consistency. Everybody gets the same thing. For home use, pfft, I don't care. But if I have to remember that Joan uses a customized sawfish install while John uses Gnome with gmc instead of nautilus, multiplied by 200 users, I'll go nuts.
These users are the ones where you have to remind them which button on the toolbar is the one to check their e-mail! Got to love academia.
Re:KDE biased (Score:2)
You're right about the KDE bias. I think the outcome would be bit different if all of them had actually tried Galeon, Evolution and Abiword, as an example. I know a lot of people (that have tried both) prefer Evolution over KMail.
To me this "review" was more of "what I've accidentally heard about and bothered to use" instead of an actual review of several carefully chosen contenders. I think it was unfortunate that it was labelled as a "review" since that gives the outcome more credability than what you'll find if you actually read the article.
These guys need to get around more (Score:2, Interesting)
For instance, they did not mention Mandrake [linux-mandrake.com] except when talking about the Sims. Mandrake kicks ass though IMO SUSE [suse.com] comes close.
The window manager choices were also sparse. Lightweight WMs like Sawfish [sourceforge.net] and IceWM [icewm.org] weren't mentioned. Everyone knows about Gnone and KDE, how about telling people about the WMs they don't know about?
And when it comes to text editors, no new ground was broken. What about FTE [sourceforge.net]? It is the best cross-platform (Linux, Windows, OS/2 and others) editor I have come across: full-featured yet relatively small and easy to use.
Jeez, it seems that *anyone* can start a Linux site these days!!!
Re:These guys need to get around more (Score:2)
To me this "review" was more of "what I've accidentally heard about and bothered to use" instead of an actual thorough impartial review of several carefully chosen contenders, which is what "review" means to me.
i18n (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not saying about translation. For example, word processors which cannot process their native letters (like Hiragana, Kanji, Hangul, Arab, Thai, and so on), editors which cannot edit their native letters, window managers, which cannot display their native letters on the window titles, and so on. Thus most of softwares are useless so far. Therefore, we cannot choose softwares in the viewpoint of personal preference but we have to choose softwares only because these softwares can handle our native languages.
In such world where we can use a limited subset of free softwares, there were a few remarkable softwares released this year. Vim 6.0 with multibyte encodings support (Unicode is one of such encodings), Emacs21 with locale (LC_CTYPE) sensibility, and so on.
I hope in the end of next year the "subset" of softwares which can handle multibyte characters will be increased considerably and I will be able to join this type of discussion!
Here goes... (Score:1)
distro: Debian
text editor: mcedit (the midight commander editor)
browser: Netscape/Mozilla, lynx
time-waster: festival speech synth
mail client: mutt
fav project: I've never been to the projects
Dead horse that needs to be shot again: The music industry
Biggest and worst news is Sep 11, and best news is Woody is frozen
Re:Here goes... (Score:1)
distro: RH 7.2
text editor: pico
browser: Mozilla 0.9.7
time-waster: running Slackware
mail: kmail
Re:Here goes... (Score:2)
desktop: KDE 2.2.1
distro: Mandrake 8.1 Gaming
text editor: vi/Kate. Depends on where I'm at.
browser: Konqueror 2.2.1
time-waster: Tie between KPat Grandfather and pysol Beleagured Castle
fav project: Tie between OpenOffice / Transgaming
My picks. (Score:2)
Distribution: RedHat - they have been consistent.
Text Editor/Word Processor - KDE Advanced Edit with ABIWORD (love it) and Star Office 6 BETA following on.
Favorite Browser: Netscape 6.2.1. It does just about everything. Browse, Mail, News, AIM (though I have to include Mozilla for which there would be no Netscape 6), and LYNX for CLI.
Fav Time Waster: Return to Castle Wolfenstein - Linux MP Client.
Favorite Project: Linux Standard Base - may it flower and be implemented quickly.
Dead Horse that needs to be shot: Linux is not ready for the Desktop - this is utter nonsense. KDE is already more functional and useful than Windows' GUI.
News:
Biggest: LSB 1.1 ready for public review.
Best: Linux 2.4.
Worst: 9-11 with the Republicans taking office running a very close second.
Well, those are my picks...
What's with all the "award" shows? (Score:4, Insightful)
To quote the Wolf from Pulp Fiction: "Let's not start sucking each other's dicks just yet." There's still a LONG way to go before I recommend desktop Linux to any regular PC user.
Re:What's with all the "award" shows? (Score:2)
You obviously didn't read the article before you posted.
They're not talking about recommending it for consumers. At all. They even say that it isn't there yet on the desktop, especially for business use.
This wasn't meant to be a Linux Desktop article. It was a "Best-of-2001" article, like every other publication on the face of the planet is doing. They just happened to focus on Linux, since, well, that kinda is their focus. Would you complain if a fashion magazine ran a "Best Styles of 2001" article? The deal is that people like to recap what happened in the year, and other people enjoy reading it.
Re:What's with all the "award" shows? (Score:2)
It's because, no matter how badly Linux/Windows/Macs suck (and they all DO suck, for differing reasons), there is always SOMETHING that is best of breed for a given platform. This gives the advocates something to cheer about, even if they don't deserve to do so. Think Linux sucks as a desktop OS ? Wait, it CAN'T, if there is a "best spreadsheet" and "best desktop", can it ???
favourite time waster... (Score:2, Funny)
linuxplanet.com reviews....oh wait
vv
Word processing / Text editor (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, come on. Maybe next we can compare Mozilla to a telnet client. "I like the way that Mozilla renders the web pages with colors and images, while he seems to prefer the way he can actually see the html and perform the layout in his head..."
Weird people.
galeon, debian and antialiasing (Score:1, Interesting)
"Thus far, Konqueror represents this the best, because of (here it comes again) the anti-aliased fonts. I mean, this isn't rocket science, people."
Galeon in debian unstable has antialiased support. Same holds true with mozilla also. Does it prove both of you are wrong? Name a distribution which has antialiased binary available for galeon... Debian unstable is more stable that any of the redhat releases
Abiword (Score:1)
on the best text editor/word processor category.
I downloaded the latest
I was amazed with how good it is.
Someone who is used to MS Word will feel quite
at home with it (squigly red lines under mispelled words and all).
It is a Word clone, which happens to be by far the most popular word processor in use today.
It would be a good tool to migrate Windows users to Linux (don't have to pay hundreds or get an "underground" copy of Office to be able to do your homework).
Heffel
KWord beats emacs...WTH? (Score:2)
I really don't see how almost any word processor can beat emacs unless it comes from not learning the emacs editor capabilities. Now...emacs isn't rocket science. But it does take longer than 30 seconds to learn. However, to make things easier fo you...I would like to share some emacs features you may not be aware of.
English Spelling Completion Yes...this means for them long words that you aren't sure of the spelling for you just need to type M-[tab] and emacs will complete the word for you.
Dynamic Abbreviation At any time in a buffer while typing in a word, you can hit M-/ and emacs will look for all the whitespace delimited words in all the open emacs buffers and complete it for you. I find this most useful when you have a path that you repeat all the time such as /usr/share/local/bin and you need to type it again, just hit /us and then M-/ and the entire path would be completed for you.
Excellent Documentation I think emacs has excellent online documentation--probably better than KWord and probably rivalling any program documentation in the free software world. When in emacs, just hit C-h i and cursor down to the word emacs and hit enter. From here you can learn about all these advanced text-editing and word processing features. Emacs, of course, has as-you-type spell checking M-x flyspell-mode, macros, and syntax highlighting.
Context Sensitive Help Perhaps not what you would expect, but emacs gives you documentation in almost anyway you may need it. C-h m tell you about the current mode; C-h k will tell you about what a certain key does; C-h a is like the apropos command at the shell and will search the emacs documentation for what you enter at the prompt.
iso-accents-mode Never quite know how to type in them European accents? This mode makes it easy. For resume (with accents over the e's) type in instead r'esum'e and emacs will make the change for you.
Of course, these are only some of the features of emacs. There is plenty there to be discovered. Each user may only want to memorize a subset of the features he or she uses and be productive with it. Keys can be rebinded and simple to complex customizations can be made in your .emacs.
Of course I don't have to tell you how many platforms emacs has been ported to or that emacs can be invoked from the GUI or from the command line.
Can anyone please explain what features emacs is missing and how KWord can compete with these powerful emacs commands?
Re:KWord beats emacs...WTH? (Score:2)
KWord doesn't interface with my other GNU apps either...
and what do you think a word processor is other than "something like MSWord" ?