That's funny. really...
That's funny. really...
Posted Jan 26, 2012 14:44 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: That's funny. really... by HelloWorld
Parent article: Poettering: systemd for Administrators, Part XII
Please, stop spreading bullshit. ALSA has had an OSS emulation layer ever since it was merged into the kernel.
It's one thing to have something called "emulation layer". It's something else entirely to support old programs. For years said emulation layer was buggy and basically unusable. When I start Adobe Reader I should not lose the ability to watch YouTube videos - even if both use "obsolete" OSS interfaces.
Linux desktop finally got good, usable OSS emulation in 2008 - years after switch from ALSA to OSS.
> As I've said: situation is slowly improving, but it's still far from perfect. You continue to say that you've run gtk2 and gtk3 applications side-by-side, that you've run Qt3 applications, etc but you forget to say what you needed to do to make them work.
Nothing.
Hardly.
I use ekiga (gtk2) and pavucontrol (gtk3). Both are shipped with debian, the package manager pulls in the required dependencies.
Ah, so to make them work you only need to give up your freedom and stop choosing your software for yourself - you should just use what your distribution offers you. This is good band-aid, but it does not solve the problem. ISVs are still out of the loop and this means Linux is still unsuitable for a desktop.
The only "application" I use that only supports OSS is Unreal Tournament, which works just fine. And I don't know many other people who use applications of similar age. I can't think of anyone, actually.
That's because there are none. Unreal Tournament is remnant of the brief era in which it looked like Linux is gearing to be real contender for a desktop. Then "great desktop designers" started breaking stuff repeatedly and ISVs abandoned their Linux efforts.
Besides, I'd like to see some kind of backup for your claim that compatibility is as important as you seem to think it is.
Well, it's kinda hard to do proper scientific experiment in this area, thus we only have one observation - but it's damning. We've had lots of OSes created for user-facing devices (desktops, mobile phones, tablets). Some of them cared about ABI stability (Windows/WindowsCE, MacOS/iOS, Palm, Symbian, etc), some have not (WindowsCE, Linux, Palm, etc). Note that couple of OSes are in two categories at once (WindowsCE and Palm). That's because they had two distinct phases: in one phase they cared about backward compatibility very much and in the next - they dropped it to create "greater, more popular platform". In all cases these attempts led to disaster: platform either died altogether or went below 1% market share for many years (most died, WindowsCE become incompatible Windows Phone 7 and while it's not technically dead yet it's market share collapsed catastrophically).
Correlation looks quite striking - but one-sided. There are plenty of OSes which had good backward-compatibility yet failed anyway, but we have no widely used OSes which treat backward-compatibility as cavalierly as Linux does. Even MacOS does it better: it gives ISVs short time (just a few years) till they are forced to do major changes to the programs - but at least in this short period old programs still work just fine and neither users nor developers are forced to search for the solution on forums. Start PowerPC program in Intel Mac - and it works, no question asked. Believe me, difference between PowerPC binary and Intel binary is much larger then difference between OSS and ALSA.
Posted Jan 26, 2012 15:10 UTC (Thu)
by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
[Link] (7 responses)
> Ah, so to make them work you only need to give up your freedom and stop choosing your software for yourself - you should just use what your distribution offers you. This is good band-aid, but it does not solve the problem. ISVs are still out of the loop and this means Linux is still unsuitable for a desktop.
> That's because there are none.
> Correlation looks quite striking - but one-sided.
Anyway, I'm really tired of wasting my time with your stupid trolling attempts. Have a nice life.
Posted Jan 26, 2012 15:31 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link]
This is aimed at everybody, not just the immediate parent post. Disagreements are fine, but we do not need to fling personal insults at each other. If you think somebody is a troll, then don't feed them! If you must respond, please find a way to do so without turning LWN into some sort of elementary school playground, OK?
Posted Jan 26, 2012 16:29 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
I've used RealVideo player in parallel to MP3 player with OSS in 1998, sorry. ALSA broke this ability not just for OSS applications, native ALSA applications can not issue any sound if Adobe Reader hogs the device either. And support was only reintroduced in 2008. That's 10 years, give or take. Exactly! They provide one version for Windows (85-90%+ market share), one version for Mac (5-10% market share) and eight versions for Linux (2-3% market share). Why? Because all these Linux versions have forsaken compatibility in the pursuit of pretty colors. And even then it does not work with all versions of Linux. For most ISVs this mess just does not make sense. There are hope: at least they can write "Ubuntu 10.4+ 32-bit." and are not forced to provide separate versions for Ubuntu 10.4, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10... but the fact that it's problematic to use 32bit version on 64bit Ubuntu is already quite aggravating and the need to provide eight packages to cover most (but not all!) distributions is just wrong. I don't care either at this point. OSS compatibility was sore point five years ago, but today it's thing of the past. Sadly linux desktop developers invent something new to break almost every year. Unless you'll run it in compatibility mode. I know: right-click and Run this program in compatibility mode is ubercomplicated trick and not all Windows users can do that. But it says something about expectations, too. Which is still possible if you install appropriate .dll files. Yes, Unreal II is rare case where Microsoft decided that small piece of API is not worth supporting in future versions of Windows thus you need to hunt down and install Windows Server 2003 DirectMusic Patch with proper versions of DirectMusic .DLLs. Somehow such activity is perceived as simple (some even say trivial) in Linux, yet when you hit the same trouble in Windows you've given up immediately. Don't it say something about your expectations?
Posted Jan 26, 2012 20:22 UTC (Thu)
by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
[Link]
> ALSA broke this ability not just for OSS applications, native ALSA applications can not issue any sound if Adobe Reader hogs the device either.
> Exactly! They provide one version for Windows (85-90%+ market share), one version for Mac (5-10% market share) and eight versions for Linux (2-3% market share). Why? Because all these Linux versions have forsaken compatibility in the pursuit of pretty colors. And even then it does not work with all versions of Linux.
> There are hope: at least they can write "Ubuntu 10.4+ 32-bit." and are not forced to provide separate versions for Ubuntu 10.4, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10... but the fact that it's problematic to use 32bit version on 64bit Ubuntu is already quite aggravating
> Unless you'll run it in compatibility mode.
> Which is still possible if you install appropriate .dll files.
Posted Jan 26, 2012 18:12 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (3 responses)
I actually have the original C&C disks. I've tried to install C&C from them, but disks have become unreadable over the years. So I downloaded it from TPB and installed it just fine in Win7 in compat mode.
There's a good story about Windows compatibility - they've actually made a special-purpose memory allocator for Win95 to work around a bug in Sim City.
Read it here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html - that's how much MS cared about compatibility.
Posted Jan 26, 2012 19:56 UTC (Thu)
by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jan 29, 2012 15:00 UTC (Sun)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (1 responses)
We can blame Corel, of course... Their products have never had a reputation for being solid, well-built applications, but then, wasn't the contention in this thread that on Windows that's not necessary, since Windows keeps everything running through amazing binary compability through the ages?
Posted Jan 29, 2012 16:12 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Have you tried to run setup in "Windows XP" compatibility mode? Corel Painter 11 works fine. You can find and start setup.exe directly. In general the appropriate help page can help you. AFAICS from forum posts Corel Painter Essentials works fine with Windows 7... with the exception that it insists in scanning the whole system drive at each program start. Which is sloow as you can guess (45min startup time is not unheard of). Yes, Windows tries to stay compatible very hard - but it can not fix all the bugs in all the programs.
That's funny. really...
What you're asking for has nothing whatsoever to do with compatibility. You're asking for new features that exceed the ones that OSS provided in the first place, not for compatibility.
This is, again, just bullshit. Using a package manager has *nothing* to do with giving up freedom, it is simply the most common and convenient way to install software on Linux, and nothing stops ISVs from adopting it. In fact, they do, e. g. Skype provides packages for various distros and a statically linked binary, in case all else fails.
Yes, and that's the reason why nobody really cares about OSS compatibility (except for trolls like you).
Yeah, except that it doesn't, because Windows really isn't all that backward-compatible either. Command & Conquer for Windows 95 wouldn't work on Windows XP (the installer crashes). And I didn't get Unreal II to work on Windows 7 either.
Can we please aim for a slightly higher level of discourse here?
Please
No, that's regression...
What you're asking for has nothing whatsoever to do with compatibility. You're asking for new features that exceed the ones that OSS provided in the first place, not for compatibility.
In fact, they do, e. g. Skype provides packages for various distros and a statically linked binary, in case all else fails.
Yes, and that's the reason why nobody really cares about OSS compatibility (except for trolls like you).
Command & Conquer for Windows 95 wouldn't work on Windows XP (the installer crashes).
And I didn't get Unreal II to work on Windows 7 either.
No, that's regression...
Then the sound card you used then probably had a hardware mixer.
It works perfectly fine if your sound card has a hardware mixer (as my Asus A7V880 did), and if it doesn't, you can use dmix.
Which version of Linux does the statically linked binary not work on? And besides, this still isn't a backwards compatibility issue, but a cross-distro interoperability problem. I agree that having so many different distros sucks.
Yet again, this is not a backwards compatibility issue but a cross-architecture compatibility problem specific to one distro (i. e. debian and its derivatives). It's trivial on, say, Fedora.
Aside from that, it is trivial to make the 32-bit version run on a 64-bit machine: just use the statically linked version. But then, why would anybody do that, given that a 64-bit version exists? You keep mixing up different issues and whining about things that nobody cares about in the real world.
Do you think I'm stupid or something? I tried that of course, it just didn't help.
Err, no. I got it to start somehow, but it ran unplayably slowly and it had massive glitches in the menu and the HUD. It way unplayable.
That's funny. really...
That's funny. really...
Well, it didn't work when I tried to install it from my disks. Perhaps this issue only applies to the german version or something.
That's funny. really...
Have you tried the usual tricks?