391–400 of 454 posts
It feels to me like there was a lot of social pressure over the last 10 years or so for open source projects to use the most permissive open source license they could. You were cool and "more free" if you used Apache, BSD, or MIT licenses. I wonder if this is coming back to bite us now. Red Hat built a very successful business selling mostly GPL software. Would things be different for the companies we've been talking…
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I’m sorry but I disagree, Cinnamon on Fedora is as good a desktop GUI in its day as win2k was in its and imo considerably better than win10 and I started on DOS3.22 so I’ve used them all even ME. It’s fast, stable, well laid out and very easy to configure. It also plays well with both gtk and qt apps. It took a long time but Linux did catch up it’s just by the time it did desktops are less relevant to average people.
Average people use laptops as desktops. Gtk and Qt still don't offer a full UI stack with all the Win32 features, guaranteed to be available in all customer desktops. Basic stuff comparable to DirectDraw, DirectText or a audio stack that doesn't get rebooted every now and then.
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Average people use laptops as desktops. Gtk and Qt still don't offer a full UI stack with all the Win32 features, guaranteed to be available in all customer desktops. Basic stuff comparable to DirectDraw, DirectText or a audio stack that doesn't get rebooted every now and then.
nobody uses DirectDraw anymore, its a completely antiquated technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectDraw
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It's weird how programmers are the only workers who think it's okay to give away their work for free for businesses to use and sell in their own products. Nobody expects firefighters or nurses to work for free. Even if lawyers sometimes have to work pro bono, it's to serve marginalized or poor communities/demographics, not to enrich massive, incredibly wealthy companies.
Millions of people every year make great salaries working as programmers. Many artists give away their work. Scientists give away their work. The DIY community and maker community give away their work. And so on... programmers aren't unique here. Framing all of OSS as simply "free labor to enrich massive, incredible wealth companies" is just wrong. That being said, I do agree we can certainly do a better job of suppo…
Funny you should mention this. Look into the median salaries of these professions, not the outliers.
I am not against OSS but when something is given away for free, people will have the perception that it has less value. Once that thought has anchored, no one will be willing to pay more in the future.
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>and for selling a crappy (at the time at least) desktop OS. The GUI of their OS at that time is still superior to what linux desktop provides us with today.
I’m sorry but I disagree, Cinnamon on Fedora is as good a desktop GUI in its day as win2k was in its and imo considerably better than win10 and I started on DOS3.22 so I’ve used them all even ME. It’s fast, stable, well laid out and very easy to configure. It also plays well with both gtk and qt apps. It took a long time but Linux did catch up it’s just by the time it did desktops are less relevant to average people.
Only if your chance on a "good" compatible laptop. Else all bets are off. The BT/wifi might not work, the video drivers might be problematic, the laptop might not sleep when you close the lid, the fans might blare all the time, and so on.
And even at that, it changes from release to release, whatever the fancy of e.g. Gnome devs strikes them for a non-compatible change, critical functionality is implemented in a ho-hum way, and so on.
And you also need to delve into the minutiae, to know that you should go for "Cinnamon on Fedora" over, e.g. Mint, or Ubuntu (and perhaps the proponents of the latter would say Fedora is shit, and so on).
Problems are always solved by "chose other hardware" and "get another distro".
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Average people use laptops as desktops. Gtk and Qt still don't offer a full UI stack with all the Win32 features, guaranteed to be available in all customer desktops. Basic stuff comparable to DirectDraw, DirectText or a audio stack that doesn't get rebooted every now and then.
nobody uses DirectDraw anymore, its a completely antiquated technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectDraw
One word: tokenization
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I wont disagree. But the OS was also full of holes (pre-XP: 95, 98, ME), programs would take down the whole system, updates required tons of restarts, and several other issues (BSOD, etc). People use to make memes against Windows, without even being Linux users: regular Windows users were frustrated. Linux desktop efforts never managed to get a coherent vision, as every 3-4 years somebody had the idea to remake every…
> Linux desktop efforts never managed to get a coherent vision, as every 3-4 years somebody had the idea to remake everything and screw compatibility That's not why Linux Desktop never got traction. Linux on Server got traction because thousands of companies all around the world managed to profit from it. A whole ecosystem was created. When Linux on Desktop was born, Microsoft's platform was already an ecosystem all…
That didn't prevent OS X, from a near bankrupt company in 1998-99 with ~2% of PCs in the US, to get to ~10-15% in the same timespan. And that while still introducing a whole new OS in 2000, and changing CPU architecture in 2005.
Plus, what I described has been described as the reason Linux didn't get traction by both Linus and Eric Raymond, for what's worth.
>Also, the situation regarding compatibility on Linux is not that different on Windows. KDE changed API 4 times in 25 years. Windows also changed a lot. Visual Basic, WinForms, SilverLight, etc. Actually windows abandoned more API's than KDE and Gnome did.
It's not even close. MS still supports running even Win95 apps to this day, whatever they used an "abandoned API", so that's a moot point though. Old VB apps still run fine, etc.
KDE and Gnome on the other hand had large incompatible changes that frustrated devs, community, and general public. Lots of devs in disfavor of the old design/techs just left the community, and those are harder to replace without a salary.
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nobody uses DirectDraw anymore, its a completely antiquated technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectDraw
Yeah, right.
SDL is perfectly comparable, except vastly less of a clunky ancient pain in the ass. That is why almost every 2d indie game uses it and not DirectDraw, so to say linux has nothing comparable to DirectDraw is stupid.