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Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

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Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#41

Post by vacri »

saosebastiao wrote: post #17

Android is such a miserable experience that it has made me turn in my phone for the first closed-source computing device I have owned in 9 years. The latency on everything is at least 200-300ms, which makes typing consistently difficult (as if the moronic autocorrect didn't make it impossible anyways). The battery consumption is terrible (I have never been able to go more than 12 hours without a charge, and after a y…

Apart from the bit about the nonremovable carrier apps, the rest of what you said is FUD. I've got a Galaxy S3 and there's no latency like you talk of; typing with Swype (not available on iOS) is amazingly easy, and is actually the only app I've ever used which has left someone slack-jawed with amazement; the battery will last a weekend on standby, but only 3-4 hours of constant screen-lit use; most of the apps aren't buggy; you can tune what alerts you; so on and so forth.

Did you pay a premium price for your low-battery-life, high-latency phone? Or was it at the cheap end of the spectrum?

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#43

Post by woah »

romanovcode wrote: post #14

Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal? No thanks.

No comment on Joomla or Drupal, but I am currently building out a large marketing and documentation site for a client, and Wordpress is extremely well-suited for the job.

I do laugh at its hacked together nature, inconsistent naming conventions and multiple functions that do almost the same thing. Still, at the end of the day, I'm able to crank out pages very fast, and the writers are able to easily customize and populate them with content.

I went through a WP-hating phase for a while too, but at this point, I've realized that it is THE tool for your standard, somewhat-dynamic, large to medium sized website.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#44

Post by techwizrd »

rayiner wrote: post #37
joshbaptiste wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed... everything you posted is the exact opposite of my experience with stock Nexus 5 and my non-techie friends with their S5's and Galaxy Notes.

Anecdotal, but I've got a Nexus 5 and its substantially less stable than the Windows Phone I had before it, or the iPhone before that. Not full phone crashes, but a "Unfortunately, X app stopped" messages. I'm not a power user by any means, and I don't run anything more exotic than Yelp. So when I run into a bug with basic functionality, like cropping profile photos, its irritating. Also, battery life is shit, won't…

Most of the "Unfortunately, X app stopped" messages are not a result of Android itself, but of bad developers who don't thoroughly debug their apps. That's not really an operating system problem. If an applications crashes with an exception or some kind of issue do to a developer, it's not reasonable or fair to blame the operating system. I don't blame iOS when a buggy app crashes.

Also, I easily get about 24+ hours of battery life on my Nexus 5 with 4-5 hours of screen use. If you look on the Nexus 5 subreddit, some people have difficult getting more than 3-4 hours of screen time while others (like me) have no problem getting 4-5 hours.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#45

Post by vacri »

rayiner wrote: post #37
joshbaptiste wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed... everything you posted is the exact opposite of my experience with stock Nexus 5 and my non-techie friends with their S5's and Galaxy Notes.

Anecdotal, but I've got a Nexus 5 and its substantially less stable than the Windows Phone I had before it, or the iPhone before that. Not full phone crashes, but a "Unfortunately, X app stopped" messages. I'm not a power user by any means, and I don't run anything more exotic than Yelp. So when I run into a bug with basic functionality, like cropping profile photos, its irritating. Also, battery life is shit, won't…

The iPhone has a screen size of 4" and the Nexus 5 is 5" - does your iPhone battery last proportionately much longer?

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#46

Post by avar »

spindritf wrote: post #5

Mobile: dominated by Apple and the faux-open Android. I have a 3.5 year old phone running Cyanogen Mod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and all the sources for it. How is it "faux-open"? It passes the ultimate test: it builds.

It's faux-open because it's not developed in the open. Google just code-dumps Android after every major release, only OEMs have access to development builds. If you don't get a Google paycheck it's thus very hard to contribute to it as an open project.

It's faux-open because almost every single Android device needs proprietary kernel blobs & firmware to operate almost any non-trivial hardware feature on the device. In practice this pins you to specific kernel versions/APIs, and you're running code you can't change or even audit.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#47

Post by devcpp »

spindritf wrote: post #5

Mobile: dominated by Apple and the faux-open Android. I have a 3.5 year old phone running Cyanogen Mod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and all the sources for it. How is it "faux-open"? It passes the ultimate test: it builds.

CM is not Android, it's AOSP-based. Android is closed source but it's very similar to AOSP. Same goes for Chrome/ium and Chrome/ium OS.

You can indeed say that most mobile users are on a proprietary OS and most desktop users are on a proprietary browser.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#48

Post by devcpp »

jcastro wrote: post #34
hhsnopek wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what android phone you were using, but my Nexus 4 has definitely provided an amazing android experience. Your phone must of been $50 because my latency close to none. Be smart and download apps that are trusted, not one of the thousand "flappy bird" clones that just give you ads. Also bloatware only gets on your phone if you put it there. I've removed all the carrier apps on my family's T-Mobile phones(all a…

I have a Nexus 4 and the experience isn't as nice as it should be. Though he's full of the hyperbole he has a point. On my Nexus 4 (without carrier apps) I can't remove Chrome, Drive, Currents, Email, Gmail, Keep, Hangouts, Maps, Photos, Play Games, Play Movies and TV, Play Music, Play Newstand, News and Weather ... the list goes on and on. That adds up to a ton of space and clutters my menu. I want some of them, but…

You can fully disable these apps in Settings and you won;t see them again anywhere. As for the space, unlike iOS, you can install another OS with Gapps at all.

UI performance woes? Coming from an iPhone 3GS, it's flawless to me. As for battery, it fits my bill and it's the price to pay for the huge screen.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#49

Post by krick »

That's a screaming headline, but not a lot of meaning within. Actually, I understand what author is trying to say, but it's pretty pointless. Yeah, I also see a problem out there, but it's a little deeper than "only Mozilla understands".

Open Source Software is there because somebody is writing it, software isn't going to write itself. And mostly it's alive not (at least "not only") because somebody is financing it, but because there are people that both can and want to write it. And, oh, I should've said "make", not "write", because making it is so much more than just writing it. Especially when we talk about general purpose client-side apps author cares about so much.

And here we have problems with both "can" and "want". Generally, people that are actually able to write software prefer slightly different stuff from your "typical end user". Actually I don't know a single browser that I would still like and it's pretty obvious that your "typical user" won't be so much delighted by my beloved CLI apps.

But what really makes me sad is that "can" problem. There might be enough of those who can do some simple coding in community, but it still takes large company to hire somebody who will cooperate with programmers to make beautiful design for their app or some folks that can do some serious math/programming. FOSS apps still generally suck in terms of UX and visual design (at least for that typical end-user). There's no FOSS that could compete against Photoshop or Cubase or be even close to quality of Google's text-to-speech services.

Of course there's no one to blame except ourselves, but if you want to see the problem — here it is. It's about us improving our skills to be able to build something outstanding, to build it for free and make it open source.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#50

Post by malkia »

knappador wrote: post #29

Linux is younger than I am. GNU is two years older than I am. Anyone making smart statements about the long-term prospects of a spontaneously organizing tidal wave erupting from a vacuum needs to take a step back, stop talking, and find something worth working on to them personally. Web is mostly a distraction for proponents of FOSS. Web developers consume the foundation of FOSS and, without moving past web developme…

Valve recently open sourced vogl, voglperf and togl - https://github.com/ValveSoftware CryTek are going ahead to open source RenderDoc - https://twitter.com/RenderDoc and Sony just released an awesome .NET/WPF framework (used for a lot of tools in some of Sony's internal studios) - https://github.com/SonyWWS/ATF
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