<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Shlomi Fish <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:shlomif@shlomifish.org">shlomif@shlomifish.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Hello Ely,<br>
<br>
please reply to the list (or don't reply at all.).<br>
<div class="im"><br>
On Mon, 19 Sep <a href="tel:2011" value="+9722011">2011</a> 09:52:04 +0300<br>
Ely Levy <<a href="mailto:elylevy@cs.huji.ac.il">elylevy@cs.huji.ac.il</a>> wrote:<br>
<br>
</div><div class="im">> Hi,<br>
> You might want to take a look at:<br>
><br>
> <a href="http://www.hboeck.de/archives/787-The-sad-state-of-the-Linux-Desktop.html" target="_blank">http://www.hboeck.de/archives/787-The-sad-state-of-the-Linux-Desktop.html</a><br>
><br>
> Or one of the other million posts on the web about it.<br>
<br>
</div>A million posts? Did you count them?<br>
<br>
And this post is kinda long.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> Linux desktop is a mess, from video support (no ogl 3 even)<br>
<br>
</div>By "ogl 3", do you mean OpenGL version 3? All the video files I throw at VLC<br>
or mplayer just work, but I admit I'm not an OpenGL power user (which is 3-D<br>
graphics for games/etc. and not particularly related to video playback.).<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div>Video playback actually works well on Linux. Unless of course you wish to view your new blue-ray video.<br>OpenGL acceleration is used by various of applications these days. From 3D effects on your desktop, to rendering graphs using Matlab.<br>
One could also add the general poor state of the Linux graphic stack, but let us assume that gallium and wayland will reach production level quality during our lifetime.<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">
> sucky sound<br>
> support (pulseaudio has it's share of bugs and alsa is way too limited)<br>
<br>
</div>I never liked PulseAudio and always disable it. What's wrong with ALSA?<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div>PulseAudio provides a few important features, the two most well known are<br>controllable per-application volume levels and providing a cross platform API.<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">
> Lack of programs (Most of the program are not in the level you can give a<br>
> simple user e.g. normal sound/video/flash editor and so on).<br>
<br>
</div>I admit the situation with Video editors is a problem, and I don't know about<br>
Adobe Flash editors (I don't really like Flash). But my father had no problems<br>
coping with Audacity ( <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/" target="_blank">http://audacity.sourceforge.net/</a> ) on Windows, and I'm<br>
using it for various small tasks too. What do you find is lacking with it?<br>
<br>
I should note that I'm also skeptical about how many people ever edit sound,<br>
video or Flash.<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div>Audacity are very lacking on effects and other features required for a hobbyist power user.<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">
> The programs which are around don't play nicely with each other.<br>
<br>
</div>How so?<br>
<div></div></blockquote><div>Very hard to create a smooth experience between all the different toolkits. <br>They all behave differently and lack a common look and feel. <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div> <br></div></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">
> Freedesktop<br>
> is so busy in not deciding on any standard that it changes<br>
> utility programs every 2 days and never document any of them.<br>
> (policykit/udisks/upower/dbus? who say what to who?).<br>
<br>
</div>Well, I'm a little overwhelmed by this myself, but it otherwise seems to work<br>
and not be a concern of a user.<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div>If you are talking about the PC home market then yes. The user admin his/her own machine.<br>And if changing a policy requires dealing with one of the many XML files that resides on the system these days,<br>
I can see how that person will want to move back to windows:)<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">
> Sucky unicode<br>
> support/sucky nonstandard bidi support.<br>
<br>
</div>1. Why do you think that Linux's Bidirectionality support is non-standard?<br>
<br></blockquote><div>There are too many implementations of the Unicode standard, each is doing things a bit differently.<br>There are also a lot of situations that the standard doesn't cover at all. Look at the different Bidi behaviour<br>
between KDE/Gnome and Openoffice. Sadly I no longer remember the bug report numbers by heart.<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
2. Why do you think that Linux's Unicode support is bad?<br>
<br>
It's been a while since I recall having a significant Unicode problem with<br>
Linux.<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div>You mean once you ignore the various c programs, perl scripts and pre python 3 programs, which weren't <br>written with unicode in mind? Have you ever tried porting a wxwidget program to use unicode?<br>
The situation is a lot better if you strict yourself to QT/GTK based programs. But still there is a long way to go... <br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">
> Lack of normal office suite.<br>
<br>
</div>Well, by this card, the only "normal" office suite around is Microsoft Office<br>
(which only runs properly on Windows), and all the alternatives are much<br>
lamer. Many users will be perfectly happy with OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div>The users are know are complaining about the lack of presenter Hebrew support and bad Hebrew import from word documents.<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">
> Lack of<br>
> production quality voice/video over ip client.<br>
<br>
</div>Do you mean SIP or something like Skype?<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div>Yes, something like skype on windows, not the shadow of a skype that exists on Linux.<br>And please don't offer me to use ekiga unless you actually used it and saw how lacking it is<br>
on performance.<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">
> For programs things are even<br>
> worth, nothing that compared to xcode or visual studio, million of gui<br>
> interfaces, no debugger with good interface or profiler (oprofile is way<br>
> too complicated unless you are a linux savvy).<br>
<br>
</div>Well, many programmers (including me and many people I interact with on IRC) are<br>
perfectly happy developing on Linux using command-line tools and non-IDE<br>
editors. There are also Eclipse, KDevelop, Anjuta, etc. that some people like<br>
and also see:<br>
<br>
* <a href="http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/resources/editors-and-IDEs/" target="_blank">http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/resources/editors-and-IDEs/</a><br>
<br>
* <a href="http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Devtools/ides.html" target="_blank">http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Devtools/ides.html</a> (also see the comment at the<br>
bottom).<br>
<br>
I should note that XCode is primarily useful for people developing using<br>
Apple-blessed technologies, and that MS Visual Studio is not much better in<br>
this respect.<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div>Which one of the above mentioned got a good debugger/GUI editor integration for c++?<br>Which one of the above can handle OpenCL kernel without crashing?<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">
> Every new technology takes<br>
> years before it get open source support (try finding normal opencl utilities<br>
> on linux) and I can continue for days.<br>
><br>
> And please spare me all that hardware people fault or everyone like<br>
> microsoft. If there is one good thing apple did, it's making this excuse<br>
> void.<br>
><br>
<br>
</div>Well, companies can create dedicated hardware where Linux works well.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
<br>
Shlomi Fish<br>
<div class="im"><br>
--<br>
-----------------------------------------------------------------<br>
Shlomi Fish <a href="http://www.shlomifish.org/" target="_blank">http://www.shlomifish.org/</a><br>
</div>List of Portability Libraries - <a href="http://shlom.in/port-libs" target="_blank">http://shlom.in/port-libs</a><br>
<br>
There is no IGLU Cabal! None of them could pass the Turing test. But strangely<br>
enough a computer program they coded, could.<br>
<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - <a href="http://shlom.in/reply" target="_blank">http://shlom.in/reply</a> .<br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br>Just sharing my experience,<br><br>Ely<br></div>