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"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it.""Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it."Posted Aug 29, 2012 11:42 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876)In reply to: "Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." by njwhite Parent article: Look and feel lawsuits, the second time around
> If success means having lots of proprietary software available, you may be correct. But I'm not convinced that that's a good goal for us to be pushing towards.
Do you see something with the complexity and breadth as, say AutoCAD, being developed and maintained by the free software community?
> Diversity of approaches is a wonderful element of free software. I love that I can run any number of weird and wonderful window managers. My housemate, who has a Mac, feels pretty frustrated by the lack of options for workflow there.
Great. My mom doesn't know what a window manager is, she knows how to touch icons on an iOS device. She will even be confused as hell if you'd give her an Android tablet or phone. My dad is more computer-savvy, he switched from Windows to OS X three years ago. Changing from the Windows UI to OS X took him some weeks to get used to. He doesn't want to switch a window manager. In fact, 99% of the population does not care about this stuff.
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"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 11:59 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
> Do you see something with the complexity and breadth as, say AutoCAD, being developed and maintained by the free software community?
Something like a kernel ? Or an optimizing c compiler ? Yeah, there aren't any with such a complexity.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:48 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
> Something like a kernel ?
And then look at the list of kernel contributors, and realize how many of them are employed by companies to which it is collectively worth billions of dollars, because it sells them hardware.
This model translates to a high-end CAD program how?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 14:34 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
Then you forgot to exclude people employed by companies from the free software community.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 16:10 UTC (Wed) by andrel (subscriber, #5166) [Link]
Much like the kernel, a high-end CAD program is software that enables one to sell billions of dollars worth of hardware.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 15:26 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
AutoCAD has more lines of code than the kernel AND gcc taken together. Projects of this size simply don't happen without large companies backing them.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 20:06 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
I find it hard to believe that AutoCAD has more than ten million lines of code, that is how many lines the linux kernel has. The complete KDE desktop, with a web browser, PIM suite, network infrastructure, multimedia manipulation programs, etc., has six million lines, and it does have more function-points than AutoCAD. The six million lines figures is, incidentally, the approximated size of the gcc suite with all the architectures and languages.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 21:02 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
LibreOffice is 12MLOC, and it still has only a fraction of MS Office's functionality.
And Photoshop and AutoCAD are about twice that size. Each.
Yes, proprietary programs are THAT big. Good luck in getting community to recreate them.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 22:07 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
> Yes, proprietary programs are THAT big. Good luck in getting community to recreate them.
Before we get too carried away, let's not forget that having small, well designed programs, is a wonderful thing. I don't doubt that AutoCAD has many useful features, but I do doubt that it could possibly need that magnitude of code to do what it does well. It's been a long time since lines of code was considered a measure of greatness (I hope). Would you say that the newest version of LibreOffice was worse than OpenOffice a year or two ago, since they've been removing and refactoring code?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 22:59 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Yeah, sure. GIMP is fine for casual photography and image processing. However, when you need AutoCAD then you really NEED it. Quite often with other proprietary tools built on it.
Amount of code is not an indicator of quality by itself, but it's a good indicator of project's scope. Consider LibreOffice, for example. Even all the recent refactorings and code removals haven't made a dent in its size.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 13:55 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
A good fraction of AutoCAD users would find that FreeCAD was sufficient for their needs. Big programs like this are sustained by a lot of history and vendor and ecosystem lock-in. Not least the close control of the DWG format by AutoDesk in that case. It's hard to break that sort of control network in much the same way that's it hard to get $everybody off their Windows desktops due to powerful default effects and network effects. If a critical mass is achieved then it would be perfectly possible to maintain good CAD/BIM software _and_ it would be cheaper and more flexible for everyone involved. I am still hopeful that that will happen one day, but it's true that it's _much_ more likely with helpful corporate input.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 20:28 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"Yes, proprietary programs are THAT big."
Um, why are you convinced that's a good thing?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 21:33 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Because of lots of functionality?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 1, 2012 12:58 UTC (Sat) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
Take a look at Blender then (no, I'm not saying it does the same thing as AutoCAD).
Blender is a _seriously_ competitive piece of 3d software which includes advanced 3d modelling & sculpting, powerful nonlinear animation features, a complete video editor, compositor, more than one very capable renderer, a game engine, various physics simulations...and so on... and the development community doesn't even seem to be breaking a sweat. Very little "big company" presence in the development either.
I call out your nonsense about large complex projects, the open source community and line counts.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:04 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
> Great. My mom doesn't know what a window manager is, she knows how to touch icons on an iOS device. She will even be confused as hell if you'd give her an Android tablet or phone. My dad is more computer-savvy, he switched from Windows to OS X three years ago. Changing from the Windows UI to OS X took him some weeks to get used to. He doesn't want to switch a window manager. In fact, 99% of the population does not care about this stuff.
My comment was targetted at you, as an interested developer.
As for those who don't know or care about stuff below the surface, that's why we have things like Gnome, KDE, and XFCE. And more importantly distributions to tie everything together nicely. It has been my impression that they're generally doing a better job of doing this than your experience, for the few 'end users' I help out with such things. But I freely admit it isn't an area I'm as familiar with.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:17 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
> My comment was targetted at you, as an interested developer.
Sorry for misunderstanding. Indeed, for developers I agree, some choice is good. And I do like Xmonad more during programming than Aqua (or whatever OS X's window manager is called ;)).
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 16:14 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Great. My mom doesn't know what a window manager is, Nor mine. Yet she happily runs XFCE on Debian Squeeze without knowing what a window manager is.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 17:04 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I assume you maintain the box for her? Like, if she buys a printer or a webcam, or runs out of disk space?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 18:03 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I set up the box and I do maybe 10 minutes of system administration every couple of months, mostly consisting of "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" My mother is completely incapable of doing any sort of system administration on a Linux box. However, she's equally incapable of maintaining a Windows or a Mac OS box, so there's really no difference for her between Linux and The Others.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 18:46 UTC (Thu) by ThinkRob (subscriber, #64513) [Link]
My mother's got a similar setup, so I can answer this:
> I assume you maintain the box for her? Like, if she buys a printer or a webcam, or runs out of disk space?
If she buys a printer or a webcam she does what she did when she had a MacBook: she calls me and says "How do I set this up?". I suspect this is what many parents do with their technically-adept children.
(Actually, in my mother's case I didn't have to do any of that when my parents got a new printer. The printer supported ZeroConf, her laptop automatically found it and printed with no configuration. But that's not a typical example, since I doubt most printers are networked...)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 16:32 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> My mom doesn't know what a window manager is, she knows how to touch icons on an iOS device. She will even be confused as hell if you'd give her an Android tablet or phone.
Have you tested this? It's not like the Android UI is some alien setup (like my XMonad setup); it's still a "click what you want" kind of deal. From what I could tell, the icons were different, but everyone seems to like naming (default) apps generically (Mail, Browser, Messenger, Phone, etc.).
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 17:06 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
> Have you tested this? It's not like the Android UI is some alien setup
My dad has some other touch devices, including an Android tablet. She couldn't really use it, probably only after repeated instruction. She's smart, but it's a combination of lack of experience and impatience. We have tried to teach her Windows and Linux before, but it she lost interest quickly. It was only after we gave her an iPod Touch that she started using e-mail and the web.
> From what I could tell, the icons were different, but everyone seems to like naming (default) apps generically (Mail, Browser, Messenger, Phone, etc.).
Surprisingly, she doesn't look at the text underneath the icons at all, just at the icons. Besides that, the home screen would probably not be the biggest problem, it's the layout of the apps she is used to.
I think that Android and iOS are on par wrt user-friendliness. It's just that for some people a switch is not as for us ;). Despite all the downsides of smartphones and tablets (locked bootloaders, no keyboard, etc.), it does make computing a lot safer and easier for many people.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 17:16 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
I suppose it's more of the "computers are black magic and I can't possibly hope to understand them" mentality that blinds many other people. I wonder how much the One True Way(s) that come from Redmond and Cupertino cause this effect.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 22:30 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> Do you see something with the complexity and breadth as, say AutoCAD, being developed and maintained by the free software community?
The real point being: how to attract Autodesk to port AutoCAD to a Linux desktop? Or Adobe to do the same with Photoshop? Etc.
If a serious company like Red Hat would do with Linux desktop what they did with Linux server, then there would be a chance. Of course, the same subscription recipe probably won't work on the desktop. So, a system like Microsoft's, where OEMs and ISVs are directly courted is probably the way to go. These people need to have stationary targets (support, API/ABI, etc.) for significant amounts of time, or they won't come on board.
Of course, before any of that is done, a serious attempt at desktop defragmentation is required. Current situation there Gnome is going on tablet tangents and causing even more fragmentation will only hurt such an effort.
Somehow, Linux kernel guys are successfully navigating re-merging of many side projects back into mainline. No such luck on the desktop yet...
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 23:19 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I think the key difference is that the Kernel developers see their job as providing a service, and they are Ok with there being many ways to use the service (and will tolerate there being multiple ways to provide what is essentially the same service if there are legacy users)
But the desktop people see their job as providing an "experience" and so when they need to build/brand every application with their stamp, and expect that everything needs to be integrated into their toolset.
Microsoft and Apple don't try to provide every app the user will ever need, why do Gnome and KDE think that they need to do so?
Users accept that some windows apps will look a bit different from other windows apps (especially when they are from different companies), but Linux "experts" proclaim that the slightest difference in how an app looks (and therefor what graphics toolkit was used to build th app) is critical and requires that the entire app be re-written
Linux Desktop people need to figure out how to do less in their Desktop Environment, not more. Identify those things that really must be integrated, and then carve off all the other apps to let them develop (or fail) on their own. The fact that each DE has it's "official" browser is silly. Nobody uses it, they all use either Firefox or Chrome (or possibly Opera). E-mail clients are in the same category. They should not be part of the DE, they should be separate apps (possibly developed by some of the same people), and if they are good, people will use them, even on different desktops. If they aren't good, they will die and people will use good ones.
If we started treating the desktop this way, the idea that some of the apps may be proprietary software would be less of a drastic change. People would be used to running apps from different sources on their desktop.
And since developers would be used to having apps run on different desktops, we would have fewer people running around in a panic over how 'hard' it is to have one app that will run in many places.
the sad reality is that most users actually work this way right now. They are running apps from many different sources today, and many of these apps are NOT 'integrated' into their desktops. Many people are using proprietary apps on their systems (especially in corporate settings), and the biggest problem with using a different distro is not "it doesn't work on that distro", but is instead "we're afraid to try it on that distro as it's not listed as being supported"
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 23:49 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
From your mouth into desktop developers ears. Hopefully!
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 6:51 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
"Microsoft and Apple don't try to provide every app the user will ever need, why do Gnome and KDE think that they need to do so?"
Because when KDE was started, there were no apps that could properly work together, that would obey desktop-wide settings and so on. These days, some of those projects have died (often to the displeasure of their users), others are going strong and are going many places.
These days, projects that don't use the kde libaries are part of the KDE community, like necessitas and tomahawk. And that's great -- what KDE tries to provide these days is a community and infrastructure for creating applications for users.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 11:36 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] Linux Desktop people need to figure out how to do less in their Desktop Environment, not more. Identify those things that really must be integrated, and then carve off all the other apps to let them develop (or fail) on their own. The fact that each DE has it's "official" browser is silly. Nobody uses it, they all use either Firefox or Chrome (or possibly Opera). E-mail clients are in the same category. They should not be part of the DE, they should be separate apps (possibly developed by some of the same people), and if they are good, people will use them, even on different desktops. I only partially agree with this. People shouldn't write applications just to uphold some community brand - it's like stuff like KOffice back in the days of KDE 1 through 3 where tracts of functionality just didn't get the quality assurance attention it needed for people to be able to rely on it - but then again, people shouldn't just bundle stuff together and pretend it offers a complete solution, either - that's like GNOME Office or, apparently, WordPerfect Office back in the day - because although some of the applications may function well, combining them may end up being a frustrating exercise. This latter situation indicates what is really needed: the capability to integrate applications and provide common services. Indeed, the Free Software desktop would have been, and has been in part, the ideal venue to realise a component-based desktop without people wanting to throw infrastructure overboard in order to assert their own application's branding. I recently discovered that Digikam on a KDE 4 system couldn't access a camera (only giving an unhelpful message about Solid on standard error, which obviously isn't by any means sufficient or useful) whereas Gwenview would happily import pictures using its own dialogue, and Dolphin would also show the virtual filesystem for the camera (once the location bar had been revealed and persuaded to actually function properly). But really, we should have moved beyond application-specific menu options a long time ago - people shouldn't be forced to go to a specific application to do something associated with a physical device - and if there really remains a need to expose such functionality as an application operation, the applications should be using common services in the same way. All this having been said, I appreciate applications like Kontact in KDE 3 and the decision to develop them as part of a desktop project. Frequently, the alternative is something like Thunderbird which has a somewhat patchy reliability record and whose future is cast into doubt every time the weather changes, despite lots of organisations supposedly finding it "indispensable". An e-mail client fits into a wider vision of providing a usable desktop and if no-one is stepping up to provide something good enough, then it's understandable and justifiable that a desktop project would undertake the effort to deliver one.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 18:40 UTC (Thu) by ThinkRob (subscriber, #64513) [Link]
> Great. My mom doesn't know what a window manager is, she knows how to touch icons on an iOS device. She will even be confused as hell if you'd give her an Android tablet or phone.
Your mother know how to touch icons on an iOS device, but does not understand how to touch icons on an Android device?
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