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Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

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Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#91

Post by msh »

peterwwillis wrote: post #71
msh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we should all be using the windows 3.1 ui?

Close. I've been using WindowMaker for 10 years. It's pretty perfect. No gimmicks. No unnecessary features. Lots of flexibility. Minimal. User friendly. Fast. Stable. It just works. If someone has used Windows 95 before, a whole slew of operating systems after will be intuitive and a random user will know how to use it without instruction. They don't need anything more advanced. They just need it not to crash or bloa…

Last time I used windowmaker it required hand editing config files, thats a pretty long way from shit that just work for most people.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#92

Post by losvedir »

The understated comment in his post that really caught my eye was this:

"Today it decided to update itself to the new chrome version with the Aura window manager."

This will be a boon to the average user, as they'll have constantly up-to-date software, and security holes can get patched as quickly as they're found. That said, I would be concerned with things changing like that without my control, but I expect I'm in the minority.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#93

Post by cookiecaper »

jahmed wrote: post #66
kristopolous wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you were 100% correct, hard drives aren't going anywhere. Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. And where do you expect the operating system and marvelous web stack where all these things are created to reside? Burned in EEPROM? I think the consumer already can't really differentiate between what is local or over the internet, they don't know…

>But if what you say is right, the pendulum, at the consumer level, will soon swing back the other way the first time that someone can't access the "cloud" on a trip or forgets to pay their "cloud access bill" (phone/internet whatever) and then gets locked out of ... well, everything. One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity. Its in the very infan…

>One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity.

This is interesting, because I see things from the totally opposite perspective. I think a period of war is coming and that people in America will look back astonished that they didn't realize the value of what they had, including reliable electrical service.

Of course, the internet is far too fragile to successfully operate in a real war zone so I expect the internet as we know it will change rather dramatically too.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#94

Post by cookiecaper »

ajross wrote: post #27
lukeschlather wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's going to be a big watershed moment. One of the big cloud service providers is going to have a major data loss event. (Probably Google or Facebook, but who knows, Microsoft or Amazon or a number of others are equally vulnerable.) At that point, it will be interesting to see how far into the rabbit hole we've gone and how we react to seeing so much of our info vanish. I'll be hanging on to my local hard…

Google's been indexing the web and Amazon executing bazillions of legally binding sales without a "major data loss event" for 13 years now. I don't think that's really likely. At that scale, backups aren't really a .serious problem, as you have to have redundancy in the system for reliability reasons anyway. A "major privacy event" seems quite likely though.

>A "major privacy event" seems quite likely though.

The breakdown that is going to happen when Facebook and/or Gmail's database gets dumped and uploaded to The Pirate Bay or Wikileaks is going to be mind-blowingly tremendous.

On top of that, I wouldn't expect any slowdown after "a major privacy event". I fully believe that we are in a world where very few organizational secrets can be kept. Virtually no one, including major corporations and governments, has a correct concept of what is necessary to protect digital data. In the early days of the war, when everyone is still able to use the internet, the intelligence leakage is just going to be astonishing.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#95

Post by peterwwillis »

msh wrote: post #91
peterwwillis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close. I've been using WindowMaker for 10 years. It's pretty perfect. No gimmicks. No unnecessary features. Lots of flexibility. Minimal. User friendly. Fast. Stable. It just works. If someone has used Windows 95 before, a whole slew of operating systems after will be intuitive and a random user will know how to use it without instruction. They don't need anything more advanced. They just need it not to crash or bloa…

Last time I used windowmaker it required hand editing config files, thats a pretty long way from shit that just work for most people.

I've been using this handy graphical tool called WPrefs that ships with WindowMaker (since at least 1998). The only time I hand-edited a config or menu was to enable functionality which nobody ever used (hiding all dock items but keeping icons small and visible and preserving both global and virtual desktop-specific icons/windows depending on context).

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#96

Post by ekianjo »

roel_v wrote: post #90
ekianjo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and in 2 years desktop computers will be gone, people will only use tablets, and Linux will have completely disappeared as a desktop environment (together with the fore-mentioned gone desktop computers, probably?). I always like people who over-simplify things to the extreme. They don't seem to understand that different solutions exist because there are different needs. Ever thought about doing video editing of…

"and Linux will have completely disappeared as a desktop environment" Of course not! 2014 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, just like every other year for the last 15 years!

Hehe. Joking aside, I do not see the Linux desktop losing "share" in the near future. It may be a very long time before it reaches significant market size, but the latest major distributions are very solid (OpenSuse 12.1, Ubuntu 12.04, Mint), drivers support is better than ever (while not perfect), and "app stores" are becoming more and more common. There are signs of progress, and if the rumours of a Linux client for Steam are real, there is no way it cannot grow further.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#97

Post by robryan »

kristopolous wrote: post #55
wavephorm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. We're moving toward a computing world where hard drives don't even exist. Within 3 years we may see devices that have only persistent RAM. And for large files, I bet we'll see some nice competition between Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and others which may eventually lead to making hard drives obsolete. Nah, don't t…

No. Even if we assume a magical device that stores nothing, cloud storage is still backed by guess what? hard disks. And this time, heavily redundant to ensure low latency and high availability. So no, moving everything to the cloud, tomorrow, would vastly increase hard drive sales permanently. Oompff! http://allthingsd.com/20111005/it%E2%80%99s-all-about-conten... Here's an example. I upload a video to youtube. yout…

Depends on the content, something like a movie that is on millions of hard drives around the world today could be replaced some redundant cloud storage in a handful of formats.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#98

Post by vacri »

hdevalence wrote: post #52
vacri wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're moving toward a computing world where hard drives don't even exist. That will only happen when my pipe hits SATA speed.

Sure, but compare your pipe speed today with your pipe speed ten years ago. I don't think that it's out of the realm of possibility that we will begin to see devices with no local storage within three years. Take Google Music, for instance. You can have 200 GB of music "on your phone", even though none of it is actually stored on your phone.

and then we also run into contention - the more people wirelessly streaming, the less bandwidth each gets. Add in that with the cloud, there are more links in the chain that can go wrong, plus you frequently get transient outages (instead of the rare catastrophic ones with local storage), and it's not a zero sum game. Some things are fine in the cloud. Some really aren't.

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#99

Post by nl »

vacri wrote: post #40
wavephorm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browser cache is around 1GB and web developers are itching for vast landscapes of local storage systems. We're moving toward a computing world where hard drives don't even exist. Within 3 years we may see devices that have only persistent RAM. And for large files, I bet we'll see some nice competition between Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and others which may eventually lead to making hard drives obsolete. Nah, don't t…

We're moving toward a computing world where hard drives don't even exist. That will only happen when my pipe hits SATA speed.

That will only happen when my pipe hits SATA speed.

I dunno.

GMail is orders of magnitude faster in every way than my work Outlook installation.

Google Docs is much quicker to start & use than Office.

I've often used online image editors rather than start Photoshop.

Yes, if I had a SSD on my work computer it might help, but still I think there is an important principle here..

Re: Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI

#100

Post by ralfd »

wavephorm wrote: post #21
furyofantares wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain why you believe native apps are toast in the long run, or how that's related to data moving to the cloud? Web apps solved the problem of having to figure out how to find, install, or update software and not having it everywhere you go. App stores have caught up on discovery/installation/updates, and mobile has solved the problem of not having it everywhere I go. Web apps will eventually catch up on pe…

Mobile apps, especially iOS apps, are hobbled by their curators. iPhone's don't even have an open file system and the platform was purposely designed so that apps are isolated, and funneled through a strict paradigm. This most certainly is not what I, or a lot of people want in a computing device -- it will not work, simply because a majority of innovators do not want to be locked into that universe. Apple has design…

Web 2.0 Expo NY 2010: John Gruber, "Apple and the Open Web" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qss5RnD7wK8

This is an old presentation by Gruber (Daring Fireball) from 2010, but it is still excellent. And only 10 minutes long. He argues that iOS vs Web is a false dichotomy, in fact, the Web was from the start a big part of iOS. He then differentiates between "Web Apps vs Browser Apps". Your notion is, that a Web App is something which uses html. But he argues, and I think this rings true, that a Web App is something which uses http.

"How can you say that Twitter, even though it is a native iPhone App, isn't really a Web App?"

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