Linux is ready for the desktop!

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Sep 18, 2011, Tzafrir Cohen wrote about "Re: Linux is ready for the desktop!":
> > 	4. Conveniently view photos of the grandkids (e.g, with Picasa).
> 
> Have you looked at Digikam or Shotwell?

One day, I will. At the meantime, I really like Picasa, and beside its
unholiness (based on a Windows program and wine), it works very well in
Linux, free-as-in-beer (and comes from a company that does no evil ;-)),
and not hard to install.

> > 1. I had to install all sort of allegedly illegal software which doesn't come
> >    with Fedora, but is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for any modern user. This includes
> >    mp3 playing and video playing with various codecs.
> >    I didn't find Fedora's pretense that this software was somehow optional to
> >    be comforting.
> 
> Who are you and what did you do to Nadav Har'el?

:-)

I am the same Nadav Har'El who has legally bought hundreds of CDs and
DVDs, and now believes that he has the legal right to play them to his kids
on whichever new technology appears and wherever he goes.

> You knowingly installed Fedora with its policy (of not getting sued by
> patent trolls). Debian and OpenSUSE have basically the same approach
> here.

I agree. I never claimed that Fedora sucks. Quite the contrary - I said
that if you just add the missing pieces to Fedora (and I suggested that
either your computer seller, or your son-in-law, should do it for you),
you can end up with a very good desktop system for "ordinary" users.

> One technical point: I'm not really familiar with how this works in
> Fedora, but in Debian there really aren't that many "crippled" packages:
> all Gstreamer-based packages just need a few extra gstreamer plugins
> from a separate package. Anything that uses ffmpeg/libav (which is,
> well, basically everything) will use all the new codecs once you
> installed a copy of it from Debian-multimedia.org . Those two cover most
> common things, IIRC.

To "uncripple" the packages, I basically had to add two new repositories
(rpmfusion for most things, livna for just the decss package), and then
to install about a dozen packages. I don't remember the details (I obviously
looked them up on the web), but they are not really important - my point was
just that 1. It's possible (and you end up with a powerful multimedia desktop),
and 2. It's not something a newbie can really do himself, and a newbie would
really want someone else to do it for him.

Nadav.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                    Sunday, Sep 18 2011, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |From the Linux getopt(3) manpage: "BUGS:
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |This manpage is confusing."