Desktop Linux Falters as Linux Use Shrinks for First Time
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A-Fucking-Men. The comment above this mentions that Linux is a "Geeks Paradise" - well I'm pretty sure I qualify as a geek, and I most certainly do NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, consider it a paradise. I consider it a half assed solution that, more often then not, makes me waste *my* time on futzing around with it in all sorts of stupid ways, from configuring, to fighting with installers/updaters, to dealing with piss-poor development tools/libs that were not very good 15-20 years ago (make anyone? - TAB as a critical character???, automake/autoconf/autopuke and friends) and are *certainly* not noteworthy at this point in time. Linux will never take off as whole until it becomes a *platform* and until it's software "ecosystem" is something other than the largely GPL mono-culture that it is today. Linux suffers from: - Absolutely no baseline *platform*. This includes a standard directory tree, standard set of libs, from basic kernel level and IO stuff all the way to UI libs. As a developer that is considering targetting linux you are forced into making all sorts of low level decisions that have ramifications on your users because of library dependencies. You have no guarantee that the libs you need will be on the version of linux (or whatver the hell it's supposed to be called) that your user may be using. - No standard set of configuration tools nor any standard whatsoever of config storage. - No baseline installation techniques. They vary ALL over the place, each distro seems to relish either completely re-inventing the installer (i.e YAST, RPM, et al) or making subtle changes to "standard" packages that make it difficult to install on another distro. - No baseline UI that either a developer can count on, and thus either work with or against(in the case of some custom UI app). - Development tools that lag behind pro tools found on other platforms. For example, what does it imply if your baseline compiler generates binaries that are three times the size of what most Win32 compilers (specifically MS compilers from VC6 onwards) can generate? ALL your binaries are fat. And compiler optimizing performance isn't too great either. What does that imply when this is spread across the whole damn system? - A software ecosystem that is largely a "mono-culture". On both the Win32 and Mac OSX platforms there's a wide variety of different developers (and, gasp!, even companies!), from commercial developers/companies, shareware developers, freeware developer, to GPL/OSS developers. This is not (o
Top post !! You said it well. Please accept my covetted 5 of the day. :-) Regardz Colin J Davies The most LinkedIn CPian (that I know of anyhow) :-)
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From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. cheers, Chris Maunder
The average computer user today is not the same as it was 20-30 years ago. Today's computer user wants a toaster, even if they have to pay for it. Plug it in, drop the bread (which they will happily buy) into the slot and activate the switch. Pop, out comes the toast. They do not want to have to assemble the free toaster using nonexistent or difficult to find/understand instructions, find out they have the wrong plug for their country's power system, find that plug, take the toaster apart, remove the old plug and install the new plug, put it back together, find out that the algorithm for toasting the bread is not quite right for their taste, download the source code for the bread toasting algorithm, find the specific piece of code dealing with toastiness, fix it, recompile the code and reinstall. Oops, did you want to toast two pieces of bread at the same time? Well, you installed the single-toasting kernel by mistake. Time to find the appropriate line in the source code to enable dual-toasting, recompile and reinstall. Unfortunately, there's only a couple of kinds of free* bread out there that will run on the toaster, so options for toast are limited. * that's free as in beer. -Sean ---- Shag a Lizard
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Top post !! You said it well. Please accept my covetted 5 of the day. :-) Regardz Colin J Davies The most LinkedIn CPian (that I know of anyhow) :-)
Thanks! I tried to hold back, but I feel a real bad case of anti-unix/anti-X coming on.... ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
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A-Fucking-Men. The comment above this mentions that Linux is a "Geeks Paradise" - well I'm pretty sure I qualify as a geek, and I most certainly do NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, consider it a paradise. I consider it a half assed solution that, more often then not, makes me waste *my* time on futzing around with it in all sorts of stupid ways, from configuring, to fighting with installers/updaters, to dealing with piss-poor development tools/libs that were not very good 15-20 years ago (make anyone? - TAB as a critical character???, automake/autoconf/autopuke and friends) and are *certainly* not noteworthy at this point in time. Linux will never take off as whole until it becomes a *platform* and until it's software "ecosystem" is something other than the largely GPL mono-culture that it is today. Linux suffers from: - Absolutely no baseline *platform*. This includes a standard directory tree, standard set of libs, from basic kernel level and IO stuff all the way to UI libs. As a developer that is considering targetting linux you are forced into making all sorts of low level decisions that have ramifications on your users because of library dependencies. You have no guarantee that the libs you need will be on the version of linux (or whatver the hell it's supposed to be called) that your user may be using. - No standard set of configuration tools nor any standard whatsoever of config storage. - No baseline installation techniques. They vary ALL over the place, each distro seems to relish either completely re-inventing the installer (i.e YAST, RPM, et al) or making subtle changes to "standard" packages that make it difficult to install on another distro. - No baseline UI that either a developer can count on, and thus either work with or against(in the case of some custom UI app). - Development tools that lag behind pro tools found on other platforms. For example, what does it imply if your baseline compiler generates binaries that are three times the size of what most Win32 compilers (specifically MS compilers from VC6 onwards) can generate? ALL your binaries are fat. And compiler optimizing performance isn't too great either. What does that imply when this is spread across the whole damn system? - A software ecosystem that is largely a "mono-culture". On both the Win32 and Mac OSX platforms there's a wide variety of different developers (and, gasp!, even companies!), from commercial developers/companies, shareware developers, freeware developer, to GPL/OSS developers. This is not (o
gcc actually produces exe's comparable to microsoft compilors. The defect in Linux development tools is that they don't have anything that as user-friendly as Visual Studio. Also, bear in mind Linux is constantly improving KDE is supieror to the Windows desktop in many ways. They have a huge advantage, a new version of KDE is released every 6 months, compared to Windows XP which is now five years old. Also, there is some effort to make Linux distributions compatible and improve sw installation.
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gcc actually produces exe's comparable to microsoft compilors. The defect in Linux development tools is that they don't have anything that as user-friendly as Visual Studio. Also, bear in mind Linux is constantly improving KDE is supieror to the Windows desktop in many ways. They have a huge advantage, a new version of KDE is released every 6 months, compared to Windows XP which is now five years old. Also, there is some effort to make Linux distributions compatible and improve sw installation.
I read a comparison around a year or so ago that compared GCC, VC6/7/7.1, BCB and DMC(Digital Mars Compiler) with a number of different tests. The results had GCC doing the worst for most tests, especially in anything performance related. I think the article was in Dr Dobbs. Granted this was on Win32, but I don't see why the linux version of GCC(from what I remember of the tests it was all commandline stuff that I'm pretty sure would have run on linux as well) would be that much different. I know for a fact, on both OSX and linux, that the binaries that GCC produces for C++ code (that also makes uses of templates and STL) is at least 3 times the size from what VC6 produces (this is with debug turned off and running strip over the binary). This is the same code base with the exception being the platform specific classes, and there's *less* code being compiled for linux/OSX than for Win32. This was using GCC 3.4.x and GCC 3.3.x. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
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I read a comparison around a year or so ago that compared GCC, VC6/7/7.1, BCB and DMC(Digital Mars Compiler) with a number of different tests. The results had GCC doing the worst for most tests, especially in anything performance related. I think the article was in Dr Dobbs. Granted this was on Win32, but I don't see why the linux version of GCC(from what I remember of the tests it was all commandline stuff that I'm pretty sure would have run on linux as well) would be that much different. I know for a fact, on both OSX and linux, that the binaries that GCC produces for C++ code (that also makes uses of templates and STL) is at least 3 times the size from what VC6 produces (this is with debug turned off and running strip over the binary). This is the same code base with the exception being the platform specific classes, and there's *less* code being compiled for linux/OSX than for Win32. This was using GCC 3.4.x and GCC 3.3.x. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
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From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. cheers, Chris Maunder
Actually it's a shrink in the growth rate Chris, I've seen this elsewhere. Personally it would be nice to use Linux as a desktop home OS but just not pratical, you spend too much time on the OS and too little carrying out tasks. Elaine :rose: The tigress is here :-D
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The only suprise about that is that so many people believed all the hype for so long. Too bad though - the industry would be better served in general if MS had some real competition.
Stan Shannon wrote: The only suprise about that is that so many people believed all the hype for so long. Too bad though - the industry would be better served in general if MS had some real competition. I would agree, even though we started a cross platform port, I held off until I could find a 3D toolset that gave us improvements in windows (our prime platform) and offered us crossplatform as a bonus. I wasn't sure the latter was just worth the money, though a few of our customers did; however, I hope that I covered the bases by getting gains on windows and other platforms rather than just the risk of Linux. _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Oops, didn't read you post correctly, you did run strip. But I think you must have made a mistake somewhere. I have written a cross-platform app and didn't notice any big size difference.
Did your project uses templates and/or STL? I've noticed that STL usage seems to really slow GCC down, at least at the compile stage, and I've heard other complaints about the code it produces when templates are used. In my project I make use of both templates in my own classes plus STL. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
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gcc actually produces exe's comparable to microsoft compilors. The defect in Linux development tools is that they don't have anything that as user-friendly as Visual Studio. Also, bear in mind Linux is constantly improving KDE is supieror to the Windows desktop in many ways. They have a huge advantage, a new version of KDE is released every 6 months, compared to Windows XP which is now five years old. Also, there is some effort to make Linux distributions compatible and improve sw installation.
ed welch wrote: Windows XP which is now five years old Umm... If you have a retail XP box look at the bottom I believe it will say Version 2002. Both of mine do, and if it is indeed 2007 I'm guessing I don't need to go back to work as they have probably terminated and forgotten about me. Just kidding, I'm not trying to be an ass just sarcastic humor :D Matt Newman
Even the very best tools in the hands of an idiot will produce something of little or no value. - Chris Meech on Idiots
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Actually it's a shrink in the growth rate Chris, I've seen this elsewhere. Personally it would be nice to use Linux as a desktop home OS but just not pratical, you spend too much time on the OS and too little carrying out tasks. Elaine :rose: The tigress is here :-D
Trollslayer wrote: just not pratical, you spend too much time on the OS and too little carrying out tasks. That’s the whole reason why I stopped using Linux period. I have better things to do with my time. Even if it’s only staring at the ceiling while I falsely hope to fall asleep. :) -------------------------------
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Did your project uses templates and/or STL? I've noticed that STL usage seems to really slow GCC down, at least at the compile stage, and I've heard other complaints about the code it produces when templates are used. In my project I make use of both templates in my own classes plus STL. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
I use stl, but as the project is only a few hunderd lines I don't notice it particularly slow to compile. Templates make a lot of work for the compilor. I once worked on a large c++ windows project that made extensive use of templates and that *was* quite slow compiling.
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I use stl, but as the project is only a few hunderd lines I don't notice it particularly slow to compile. Templates make a lot of work for the compilor. I once worked on a large c++ windows project that made extensive use of templates and that *was* quite slow compiling.
Yeah, the VCF is around 160K LOC (or maybe less on the linux/OSX side). ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
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ed welch wrote: Windows XP which is now five years old Umm... If you have a retail XP box look at the bottom I believe it will say Version 2002. Both of mine do, and if it is indeed 2007 I'm guessing I don't need to go back to work as they have probably terminated and forgotten about me. Just kidding, I'm not trying to be an ass just sarcastic humor :D Matt Newman
Even the very best tools in the hands of an idiot will produce something of little or no value. - Chris Meech on Idiots
Matt Newman wrote: Just kidding, I'm not trying to be an ass just sarcastic humor (Just for the record though, Windows XP was released in 2001.)
Ðavid Wulff Audioscrobbler :: flickr Die Freiheit spielt auf allen Geigen (QT)
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Matt Newman wrote: Just kidding, I'm not trying to be an ass just sarcastic humor (Just for the record though, Windows XP was released in 2001.)
Ðavid Wulff Audioscrobbler :: flickr Die Freiheit spielt auf allen Geigen (QT)