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Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

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Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#32

Post by rbanffy »

tzs wrote: post #3

Here is the discussion from /r/linux on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hhpku/linux_the_sourc... The top comment there pretty much nails it.

> And the menu appears on different screens

Actually, it's an advantage. Have you tried to use the menu on monitor 1 when the app is on monitor 3 of your Mac?

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#33

Post by udp »

rbanffy wrote: post #31

I still think the greatest innovation in Linux distros is package management.

FreeBSD has the ports collection [1] and pkg_add [2] with --remote. The range of software I can get from those is wider than with many Linux distributions, and it's often much more up to date. And yes, they can automatically handle dependencies.

[1] http://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html

[2] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pkg_add&sektion...

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#34

Post by cageface »

bad_user wrote: post #24
Xuzz wrote: post #4

I think it's really awesome that Linux is finally taking the lead with innovation on the desktop — Gnome-Shell and Unity are just the beginning. And, they are not "catch-up": they are released both before and with more interesting changes than Lion or (what we've seen of) Windows 8. However, what Cupertino and Redmond are up to isn't "nothing", it's just not the desktop. The Windows Phone "Metro" UI is downright amaz…

I own both a Galaxy S II (Android 2.3) and an iPhone 3GS. IMHO, Android has the lead on the user interface. Reuse of components and events provided by other apps is at the heart of Android, the system notifications are better, it has desktop widgets that are actually useful, keyboard interaction for writing text is better (I love copy/pasting or moving the text-cursor around on my Android) and you can use the back-bu…

Android is a better mobile web/cloud device, for sure. Multimedia in general is better on iOS, but unfortunately for Apple, that's the same marginally profitable niche they dominated in the desktop era. For most people a mobile phone is a window into the web world and that's just more deeply encoded into Google's DNA than it ever will be in Apple's.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#35

Post by cageface »

rbanffy wrote: post #31

I still think the greatest innovation in Linux distros is package management.

Linux-style package management is a lot more useful for servers, where you have fairly tightly controlled distribution requirements. I find it an encumbrance on desktops where I often want to update individual apps or keep several versions of a single app side-by-side.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#36

Post by rbanffy »

ralfd wrote: post #30

"And these are some of the most radical and exciting new features MacOS X has had to offer since its initial release over 10 years ago." What a trollish statement.

Well... the maximize button continues every bit as useless as it was when introduced in System 5, IIRC.

But MacOS had some very interesting ideas - they did right more-than-one-user thing (copied from Windows) and Exposé.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#37

Post by cageface »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #17
jaimzob wrote: post #14

Honest question: as someone who dropped Linux in favour of OSX largely to get a nicer user experience, what is in the new generation of Linux desktops to tempt me back? The videos linked from the article show a Spaces'esk virtual desktop and a more interactive Growl'esk notification box. Both very slickly done but not really anything mind blowing. The features in the other videos on the Gnome 3 site seem equally deri…

before you got low UX, high customizability with Linux. now you get very comparable effects (customizable and evolving with 11.10 too) with all of the customizability and flexibility of Linux. I don't mind the UI/UX of my MBP, but I prefer both Unity and GNOME3 and my heavily customized GNOME2 installs. The app-indicators and control center in Ubuntu are actually easier to use than in OS X. ICS to my Xbox took 10 sec…

I too prefer a Linux desktop, but too many of the apps I rely on still aren't available. The day Photoshop and Ableton Live get ported is the day I switch back.

I still haven't found a Linux distro that really behaves 100% reliably on a laptop either. Suspend/wake issues and flaky wireless behavior eventually became dealbreakers for me, even if the blame lies with the hardware vendors.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#38

Post by rbanffy »

blub wrote: post #15
sandGorgon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seriously? What do you think Android is - and its not just the kernel. I have a working userspace on my phone. In fact, when I have spotty connectivity, the first thing I do is fire up the terminal and do a ping/traceroute. Gnome != Linux.

Android is a Java userspace on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn't help that most people say "Linux" to actually mean "GNU/Linux", but Android is certainly not GNU/Linux and it can't be "Linux" either, because that's just the kernel.

Shouldn't we start calling it Android/Linux? Oh, and, BTW, Java is just the language most people use to write (most of the) software for it. Dalvik is not the JVM and, in fact, the compiler people use to generate Dalvik bytecode doesn't read the Java sources - it read Java bytecode.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#39

Post by jamii »

cageface wrote: post #37
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

before you got low UX, high customizability with Linux. now you get very comparable effects (customizable and evolving with 11.10 too) with all of the customizability and flexibility of Linux. I don't mind the UI/UX of my MBP, but I prefer both Unity and GNOME3 and my heavily customized GNOME2 installs. The app-indicators and control center in Ubuntu are actually easier to use than in OS X. ICS to my Xbox took 10 sec…

I too prefer a Linux desktop, but too many of the apps I rely on still aren't available. The day Photoshop and Ableton Live get ported is the day I switch back. I still haven't found a Linux distro that really behaves 100% reliably on a laptop either. Suspend/wake issues and flaky wireless behavior eventually became dealbreakers for me, even if the blame lies with the hardware vendors.

For what it's worth, I haven't had any issues with Ubuntu in the last two years or so (HP Envy 15, Alienware M11x). Even things like docks with multiple monitors work smoothly.

Re: Linux: The Source of All Desktop Innovation

#40

Post by rbanffy »

cageface wrote: post #35
rbanffy wrote: post #31

I still think the greatest innovation in Linux distros is package management.

Linux-style package management is a lot more useful for servers, where you have fairly tightly controlled distribution requirements. I find it an encumbrance on desktops where I often want to update individual apps or keep several versions of a single app side-by-side.

> keep several versions of a single app

How many people actually do that?

I have Python 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 3.x, but I am a programmer who writes lots of Python. And they were all very easy to install (2.6 and 3.x from packages, 2.5 and 2.7 from source). I also have two different releases of Eclipse (I also write lots of Java).

Package management frees you from managing the software you don't want to manage, like MySQL or Apache. I want to manage my languages.

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