What are we going to do to keep up with longhorn?

Blood Fluke · Apprentice Joined: 15 Sep 2005 Posts: 224

I can answer the OP's question in one word:
Nothing.

Cinder6 · l33t Joined: 05 Aug 2004 Posts: 767 Location: California

mikkoloo · Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2005 7:59 am Post subject:

have no idea why, I have a thread out about it but no results or clues :\
(this is a little off topic tho, sorry)
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Gentree · Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2005 12:19 pm Post subject:

Gentree · Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2005 12:25 pm Post subject:

PS , Gates & Ballmer can stick thier long horns where ever it gives them the most pleasure as long as they dont expect the rest of us to bend over and take it. :evil:

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cp_tar · Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2005 4:04 pm Post subject:

The only thing Linux really needs to gain on Windows are games.

Well, that and legacy apps that are so critical to some people...

In everything else, it seems to me Linux is already winning: my father, who was a computer-illiterate mere six months ago, now owns an Ubuntu-powered laptop. I would have installed Gentoo on it if I'd had more time to do it, but this seems to work fine for him.
His desktop system is a SuSE/WinXP dual boot; when I offered to make his laptop a dual-boot system, he told me not to bother.

He's getting on-line soon; I can't even begin to describe how relieved I am that I won't have to explain him the use of antivirus/antispyware/etc programs...
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fourhead · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 3:41 pm Post subject:

What I'd personally like to be improved in Linux (not necessarily to "compete" with Longhorn, but just in general):

A complete OpenGL/SVG-driven desktop. If I could code, I'd do it this way. Everything, from windows to text to icons, would be SVG. No more bitmaps!! :-)

The X server would in fact be an OpenGL server, and - as an example - a KDE or Gnome theme or window style would contain SVGs that describe the look of everything - window bars, buttons, controls etc. Everything would be nicely resizeable - the graphics hardware would render the whole desktop.

Full and complete support for UTF-8. Honestly, I HATE those charset stuff. Most of you American users will propably not care much about that, but for us who have strange letters like ä, ö, ü or ß this is really crap! Until today there's no way for me to name the Trashcan "Mülleimer" in Squirrelmail because it won't deal with anything else than ASCII. We should do it like SkyOS is doing it: UTF-8 is the ONLY ONE charset, there's nothing else, UTF-16 supports ALL characters needed and everybody would be happy! I know this would be very problematic, since many system (think of e-mail) still are made for ASCII, but damn, there has to be progress in this area!

A common syntax for config files: No, I don't want a GUI tool or a registry, but I think it would be a major improvement if all (it won't be possible for all of them probably) config files would have a common syntax. Personally, I very much like the syntax of smb.conf. It's simple, straight-forward, easily readable and logic.

Last but not least - I might get a lot of bad responses for this - don't fork so much! Don't make everything 10 or 20 times! I know, it's good to have choices and I don't mean in no way that we should put KDE and Gnome, KOrganizer & Evolution, Kopete & Gaim together and let there only be one app for each purpose. But I think there are areas where it is just too extreme, where you have 10 projects doing basically the same, but all of them are more or less stalled because they all don't have enough coders. In such a case - and only in such a case - wouldn't it be better if they all sit down together and create ONE project that actually gets finished in the near future?

My last wish goes out to KDE: I LOVE KDE, I use it every day, but there's one thing I don't like: It's sometimes over-featurized. ShowImg as an example has - in it's standard configuration - 15!! toolbar buttons. This is way to much. A toolbar is for the most common used actions, it's not a replacement for the menu bar. Sometimes, I look at Gnome and think - oh how much beautiful easy all those programs look. Another example is Beagle - the Gnome search tool - against KAT, the KDE search tool. Beagle wins hands-down in usability aspects. I think this should in general be a much more important topic!

Tom

mikkoloo · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 5:49 pm Post subject:

right on! esp. with the fork thing. its so true. there are so many half made projects out there.
about the Kde though, most of the times you can always customize the toolbars to your liking. guess they put in all stuff so you can see them to later remove those you dont like rather than never experience them at all.
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AMD 64 4000+, nforce4 mobo, 2GB RAM, 200Gb SATA HDD, xfx Geforce 7900GT XE
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fourhead · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 5:57 pm Post subject:

I agree, usability is of course a very personal think. But I'm thinking of beginners: I got some friends that have very little computer experience, and I have installed Linux for them. They all like it, and they can work with it very good, but I often see that they are sometimes just overwhelmed by the mass of icons & options. I had a friend searching an eternity to find the button to zoom the image fullscreen in showimg. Besides all the other thousands of icons, he just didn't see it. Of course, once you know it, it's easy, but it's confusing for the first time. I did always suggest to "split" KDE into a "beginners mode" and an "experienced mode". In a config dialog, put the most common things in the first place, all more advanced stuff could be hided under a button. Think of MacOS, they're doing this. I think an app should offer the possibility to be configured very much, but it should not overwhelm unexperienced users with all those options.

Tom

Naib · Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2005 7:14 pm Post subject:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1028295515#post1028295515
check out the 3rd post

could this be done at present in linux?
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fourhead · Posted: Sun Sep 25, 2005 7:22 pm Post subject:

Not in the Linux that you or me have installed today, but there are tech demos & alphas & betas out there doing this - and hey, Vista isn't finished yet, too. You might have a look here or here which is very nice imho.

About the Vista screenshot. Yes honestly, it looks nice. BUT, honestly, WHAT is it useful for. Do these stacked windows do anything when you hover/click them? If they just sit on the screen like this, then I wouldn't know what to do with them. I mean I can't even see the title of the windows that are behind the first one, so I had no way to see which window shows which content, so for switching windows, I don't see how this would be useful.

Tom[/url]

Q-collective · Advocate Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 2076

Yes, that is possible, get a look at skippy
At least, I find skippy way more usefull then the Vista stacked stuff.

Omega21 · Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2005 12:36 am Post subject:

Omega21 · Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2005 12:42 am Post subject:

Shadow Skill · Veteran Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 1023

Kensai · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2004 Posts: 569 Location: Puerto Rico

Q-collective · Advocate Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 2076

Kensai · Guru Joined: 09 Mar 2004 Posts: 569 Location: Puerto Rico

Vista is something in which M$ don't even know what to put in it. :lol:

. But seeing the screenshots it will feature a looking glas clone. But who cares? is old technology. :wink:

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mikkoloo · Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2005 8:08 am Post subject:

Decibels · Veteran Joined: 16 Aug 2002 Posts: 1629 Location: U.S.A.

How bout actually Donate some $$. Even $1 can add up.
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Q-collective · Advocate Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 2076

Boinky · Apprentice Joined: 03 Dec 2004 Posts: 256 Location: Almere

Microsoft Windows Officially Broken
David Richards & WSJ - Tuesday, 27 September 2005

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Allchin is co-head of the Platform Products and Services Division. "It's not going to work," he told Gates in the chairman's office mid-2004, the paper reports. "[Longhorn] is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly. "The reason: Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Thousands of programmers each produced their own piece of computer code, to be stitched together into one sprawling program.But Longhorn/Vista was too complex: Microsoft needed to begin again, Allchin told Gates.Allchin's warning recognised a growing threat from Google, Apple Computer, makers of Linux and corporate buyers - the latter horrified about security problems. Allchin and a small team demanded a revolution in how Microsoft works.

Accordingly, according to the Journal, Microsoft then went down the Linux path of first developing a solid kernel for what's now called Vista. It is now adding the features it wants, one by one. Gates was eager for his programmers to add a fundamental change to Windows called WinFS that would let PC users search and organise information better. WinFS was so troublesome that engineers began talking about whether they could make the "pig fly". Images of pigs with wings started appearing in presentations and offices.
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potatoface · Guru Joined: 18 Feb 2004 Posts: 542 Location: ::7F00:1

sargek · Apprentice Joined: 13 Mar 2005 Posts: 170 Location: Texas

I just wanted to make a comment on boot-up speed: microsnot claims XplodingPile boots faster than any previous version of windoze, but this is really a ruse. Sure, you get to a login prompt faster, but the OS is still useless even for a couple of minutes after that. My 2.5 ghz hyperthreaded p4 at work takes a full 4 minutes to get to a USEABLE desktop on XplodingPile. My 2.8 gig athlon at home can get to a useable (Xfce4) desktop in around 1 minute, and that's on a stage 3 install.

I don't really think we need to look at individual facets of their "OS" and top each one - we've done a pretty good job of that for the past 10+ years anyway. The issues that have made microsnot popular on the desktop are not good things to follow: lack of security, boring UI. A paradigm shift in the attitudes of users is going to have to take place before people are going to "flock" to GNU/Linux. People are going to have get used to the idea of not running as the administrator - this is a big hurdle to overcome. The Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) issue may be an attractor, but the word needs to be spread about this. I lecture at a local community college on FOSS, and am amazed at the lack of knowledge about FOSS.

The GNU/Linux community has grown tremendously in the past 5 years. I don't think emulating the worst OS ever written is really a good idea. I think changing the attitudes of the userbase is better. Microsnot is scrambling to "help"users overcome the inadequacies of their buggy/unsecure OS by graciously distributing anti-spyware software for free. How nice of them, since it is their fault spyware exists in the first place...people may get tired of spyware and virii and look to something different on their own. Business certainly are doing that.
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slonocode · Apprentice Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 273