OSNews

@Priest

This has got to be the only industry where the products you use and your religion are one in the same.

If that were only true.

*cough* cars *cough*

Not to mention gaming consoles.

This has got to be the only industry where the products you use and your religion are one in the same.

For which you can blame on two things, IMO.

1. Computer and OS vendors have historically kept all their eggs in different baskets - thus choosing another hardware vendor meant choosing another OS, other software and perhaps even different peripherals. In fact DEC used to support more than one proprietary OS on one architecture - the PDP-11 - and no more than two PDP architectures were ever compatible with each other (e.g. PDP-6 and -10). By contrast, even though people argue about cars, choosing Ford over Toyota this time round has never meant ditching your Toyota-shaped bottom for a Ford-shaped one. Even when DOS and Windows PC's came along, you still couldn't buy more than one or two architectures (depending on how you count) to run them on - at first by design, and then by default.

2. AT&T are the only people who (grudgingly or accidentally) created an open platform - which, until the advert of Linux, STILL got proprietarized. IBM, of course, accidentally did it in hardware too.

The only reason that Linux (even more, Linux or BSD) is the only game in town for many people who run FOSS is that it's the only mature/maturing technology based on a sort-of-open one. To the casual user, even certain aspects of BeOS/Zeta/Haiku look more "Unixy" than (say) "Windowsy" or original(-y?!).

The whole idea of being unbiased is a load of bull crap. The only people who are unbiased are the blissfully ignorant. Try finding an engineer who thinks that all designs are equally valid! Competent people have opinions, and are thus biased. A good reporter isn't unbiased, but simply honest and open-minded about his opinions.

"Unbiased" reporting is the drivel you see on CNN, where the anchor spouts off about a topic with which he's unfamiliar, unbiasedly regurgitating whatever he's fed from his teleprompter. Of course he's unbiased, because he doesn't know enough about the subject to have formed an opinion! It's the crap you see where every viewpoint is presented as equally valid, despite the fact that some things are clearly better than other things.

There's a difference in calling a website "unbiased" and a person "unbiased". As a person, nobody is unbiased. Neither am I.

I can, however, say that I do not select stories on OSNews based on my personal opinions about the content of the article. It's not a factor involved in the process. I decide whether it fits our scope, whether the English is of acceptable levels, more of that stuff. For rare type of articles (i.e. a review of SkyOS) these criteria are more loosely applied than for i.e. another SUSE review.

A good reporter isn't unbiased, but simply honest and open-minded about his opinions.

Yes, but only if he constraints his opinions into separate, clearly marked as such stories. You will not see me take a stab at project Xyz in its release announcement on OSNews (save for the few feeble attempts at humour); however, I might write a review of Xyz two days later in which my opinion is clearly visible.

It is this separation that leads to me saying that OSNews is unbiased. My own personal opinions on things are not reflected in OSNews' overall content, and hence OSNews is unbiased.

The whole idea of being unbiased is a load of bull crap. The only people who are unbiased are the blissfully ignorant.

Not true! Bias is a prejudice, not an opinion.

A bias person says they like the design of the Ford Taurus becasue they happen to like Ford.

An unbias person says they hate the car, and they don't care who produces it.

You are basicially a genius rayiner, your bias is what limits you.

it's indeed the case Gnome seems willing to do much deeper architectual changes within it's 2.x release. KDE commits to binary compatibility in it's X.y releases, so it is much more restricted (unless Gnome also keeps binary compatibility with 2.0, but i guess they would need a 3.x release to really fix/refactor stuff, and would have released such a thing already). Gnome sure has added big stuff, like cairo, which will in time bring it on par with Vista...

Thats a good reply *adds a point to sakru post*

Alot of features I hear about get labled 'for 3.0' then after investigating, there is a realisation that the change isn't so radical as to break compatibility so they can actually merge it into the GNOME 2.x series without major issues.

What I think the issue should be is comparing the different methods of development between Microsoft and the Opensource/Sun/others models.

Opensource make small incrimentalc hanges at rapid pace; in the case of GNOME, new features are added every 6months, not big radical, but small, those that need more time, can be added at the next release.

In the commercial world, Sun do the same thing with their maintanance releases; a release every 6months involves rolling up the tarball with all the fixes they released till that point plus added features - in one of the releases, they made ZFS available for non-root partitions.

Microsoft on the other hand have bundled all their 'new features' into one big release - or more importantly, they'll release' incrimental updates' like IE 7 and Mediaplayer, which would have a negliable impact on their next operating system release, but don't expect incrimental features and improvements over the lifetime of the product - you'll have to wait till the next release of Windows - which is where Vista came unstuck.

Microsoft tried to bolt too many new features onto it, and with something being in development for so long, things outside a company change - security has become the hot topic online now; its now no longer stability as Windows XP already addressed that with the migration to the NT line of kernel - the issue is security and Microsoft is squarely in the lime light, hence the reason they had to start again using the Windows 2003 SP1 codebase rather than continuing on using a bastardised Windows XP one.

For me, I'd sooner see incrimental improvements - ultimately the issues with GNOME and KDE, and *NIX on the desktop have to do more with small niggling problems that can be corrected via small and incrimental updates - it isn't as though *NIX on the desktop is so fundamentally broken that the baby has to be thrown out with the bathwater to actually improve the over all environment.

Here here.

My thoughts exactly (but better worded).

Not having a roadmap doesn't really matter, indeed. A roadmap is just some very vague schedule that show when some things may be done.

Having no plan or goals like Thom said, however, is far more severe. A plan is like a strategy. When a certain amount of complexity has been reached (both KDE and Gnome *are* complex), a project needs people who coordinate it, whether you like it or not.

So if there really is no goal or plan set for the future I believe Gnome is a sinking ship. I doubt however, that that really is the case. For example, they still have their philosophy and HIG to give them at least some direction.

And while it may indeed be true that Gnome has no concord innovations on the roadmap like KDE has, I believe that those will appear bottom-up, and be given some structure by the HIG and by their philosophy. Its success however, will largely depend on the people who are at the helm of the project.

better yet, not write at all. that'd be better.

why the hell are you even visiting this site? If all you long for is totally unrealistic articles stating "desktop linux is here, ms is a sinking ship" go to digg.com.

"""
better yet, not write at all. that'd be better.
"""

Stated in a confrontational way... but a valid suggestion.

I could do without the OSNews provided opinion pieces.

(Do they really generate valuable discussion? Or are they just stirring the pot?)

The more concrete factual stuff, I enjoy. The OS Essay contest (can't remember exactly what it was called) was fantastic. Some of the entries were absolutely excellent.

More of that and less of OSNews staff on the soap box (and the associated turmoil) would get my vote as a reader.

@sbergman27

I could do without the OSNews provided opinion pieces.

It's what made OSNews popular. Only Eugenia could piss off the devs like that. lol

Thanks.

I'm not here to promote my view alone; OSNews has always been about discussion and alternative viewpoints, whether they be the editors' or someone else's. This is something the team and I value a great deal (and hence when we are accused of being biased or hidden agendas, we generally tend to get really pissed off).

Hey, at least I got your name right this time 'round .

Edited 2006-12-23 20:22

The biggest advantages of Vista will not be the look, even for enterprises, even for home. For enterprises will be better deployment mechanism than XP has in the past and a somehow more secure implementation, and for home that DirectX 10 which will be Vista only, making the users to be forced to upgrade to play the next hit from Blizzard or from Valve. And of course, the advantage over Linux will be in some time: the preinstalled on Dell, etc. PC, more applications that will run (some of them at least) than Linux and that some hardware will run only with it (because most producers doesn't drivers or support or both).

Actually, the biggest hold back is the lack of support by commercial application vendors - there are two ways around this; improved wine support with support by the commercial software vendors so that they can help Wine get up to speed with compatibility whilst at the same time supporting those users who choose to run their applications under wine.

The other alternative is for these vendors to come to the party and port their application natively to *NIX and use the prior wine experience as a benchmark to the popularity for native support that end users need.

Sure, there are desktop applications like Nero that can be replaced quite easily with opensource counterparts, but there are commercial applications like MYOB and Peachtree, which no opensource application can hold a candle to.

Once you get those applications on *NIX, the reason for staying with Windows will be gone - unlike MacOS X, which has cost AND compatibility, the only thing in the way of *NIX is simply compatibility via the need for applications to be ported.

Now, Novell may *think* that if they offer a 'compelling environment' companies will port - that isn't the case, its the old Jerry Maguire of "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" - and thats what they want; these companies want to see a return on their investment, and simply saying, "it might take a while" won't satisfy their bean counters - hence, my constant push for over 6 years that the *NIX community need to pool their resources, and start PAYING vendors to port their applications - show up at their door step, find out the cost, and cut the company a cheque; get the bally moving, it might end up costing $200million, but once you have that ball moving, more vendors will come onboard without the need of enducements.

aye. well said.

I think this statement is, to put it simply...not true.

"Other than that, KDE and GNOME developers themselves are never shy of referring to GNOME 3 and KDE 4 in a positive context" does NOT mean: "talking about it every possible moment".

It just means what it says right there-- that GNOME 3 and KDE are often used in a positive context without ANYBODY ever bringing up the argument that version numbers mean nothing-- however, as soon as I use the designations in a negative context, everybody is up in arms about the version numbers. That's rather hypocritical. That's all.

Taking about GNOME 3, it already exist in GNOME. As you can imagine, Project Topaz page evolve, and most of it's ideas were put inside of the "old gnome" at the moment that were time and posibility to make them available (and were good ideas).

KDE 4 is on time on evolving, even right now it looks even uglier than KDE 3! Did you sow a build of Longhorn in 2003? That which looks as XP + a sidebar? And asks 384 RAM with doing nothing? I think that is the same as you count down.

GNOME or KDE hipocrisy is the same as you say the Vista is better as much as features, when of course they implement something in that two years, but from the articles it seems that GNOME and KDE doesn't evolve. That is the outside view.

Numbering in linux DEs, different from Windowses service packs which add mostly fixex and no visible update, the GNOME and KDE evolves a lot (look on screenshots on KDE page, and see some of them).

Edited 2006-12-23 21:36

But what are you talking about? Nobody is raving about how great GNOME 3 will be and it's never brought up as an excuse when GNOME is to be compared with Vista or OSX. Topaz is purely playground, it's neither used to make GNOME look good, nor should it be used to make GNOME look bad. There is plenty of good innovation that can and will still happen in the 2.x line.

It just means what it says right there-- that GNOME 3 and KDE are often used in a positive context without ANYBODY ever bringing up the argument that version numbers mean nothing-- however, as soon as I use the designations in a negative context, everybody is up in arms about the version numbers. That's rather hypocritical. That's all.

Bzzzzt... Nobody was up in arms because you dared use version numbers in a negative context. People rejected your use of them in such a simple minded way. You used the lack of major new version numbers as "proof" of stagnation. People have tried to explain to you in post after post, why you are wrong.

Imagine when KDE 4 is fully released, someone writing on OS/news: "version 4 of KDE is out now and Microsoft won't have anything to replace Vista for 2 or 3 more years! That means they're in trouble!!" You'd think that person was smoking something illegal. Yet that pretty much sums up your entire article, except the names were reversed.

If you want to compare desktops, compare FEATURES, not major version release dates. And stop calling other people hypocrites because they took you to task for the conclusions you drew from the fact that Gnome and KDE aren't going to release major versions soon.

If you don't like the opinion pieces that are being written by Thom and the other OSNews writers why don't you submit your own opinion piece/story/whatever on topics relating to Operating System news. In general Thom seems to be very good about letting OSNews forum readers and others have opinion articles shared here, if they are submitted.
I think people are being too harsh with Thom. He does have a tendency, in my opinion, to write in a sensational way. That's not necessarily bad but it reminds me of how John Dovark writes. Besides it is merely an opinion piece and he didn't state any of it as fact. Also I have gained a lot of knowledge about the actual place that KDE 4.0 is at now. I have been very interested but it is hard to gather news about KDE 4.0's status at the moment because there are so many different sub-projects for KDE 4.0 and it promises so many great things that when you are coming from the Windows world where such promises tend to be vaporware you can become rather cynical.
I have also gained more perspective with regards to the GNOME project and their position on whether or not they will be moving to a 3.0 release soon. I consider myself a Linux hobbyist because I used to try different flavors of Linux (although I have recently decided that I would rather use the room on my hard drive for other files) and I mostly just try Linux on the various Live CD's now.
Personally I use Windows XP because I know how to use it properly and it meets all of my needs, including games. I'm sure that I could get along well in Linux except for the lack of games support because while I do enjoy the new game consoles they just don't offer the support for the kind of games I like such as strategy games like Civ 4, Black and White, etc.

"I can't understand why the main object is to offer similar things Windows offers, instead of being innovative, they are copycats."

The answer is simple (and maybe stupid): Linux desktops want new users and those who still use MICROS~1 products to use a Linux desktop instead. Their question is: "Oh erm Linux? Is it like 'Windows'?" or "Can it do everything 'XP' can do?" So they usually think about offering the same functionalities as "Windows" does. In the second stage, they innovate and bring new features to the community. Sad to say, usually the answer is "Uh, that's to complicated for me!" or "But is it available in German (or any other non-english language), too?" When it comes to innovations, it usually takes a longer time for people to use it; as I mentioned in another discussion posting before, can you imagine how many people are unable (or not willing) to use document templates? And they've been innovated years ago.

"Me? Ratpoison is all i need."

Take 'xzgv -tzf rat*' instead. :-)

"Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS)"

Most users don't want it simple, they just want it stupid (and complicated). Just imagine how difficult it is for some to tell what hardware they are running, what IP they currently have assigned or how the name of their word processor is.

Congratulations on saying nothing new, and nothing right.

If new users were so bothered about consistency they wouldn't download Ubuntu and then immediately download kde-desktop.

Indeed Kubuntu/Xubuntu wouldn't exist at all.

I couldn't agree anymore with you. Linux needs to standardize to go anywhere. Every year has been deemed "The Year of Desktop Linux" since the early 2000's, and yet all I see more and more every day are just politics with Linux.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and the idea of it; however, it needs to unify. Choice is good, too much choice is just confusing. "Desktop" Linux OSes try to do things right, but are often rejected because they typically employ proprietary technologies to get the job done.

Your mom and pop new users are NOT going to download Ubuntu and then fumble around trying to install "kde-desktop". I was around Lycoris for a couple of years, which developed a now defunct Desktop Linux distribution that *really* tried with unification of the UI and applications. It was also KDE centric. There was no GNOME libriaries, let alone the desktop. The only people asking in the high active community for GNOME libs was really only the "power users". The new users had enough trouble without having to worry about which desktop to use.

Sorry for taking this even further off-topic than it already is.

What a lot of commenters aren't seeing is that Linux desktop really has no "traction"

The big picture is that the Linux desktops are developing very nicely. Let's be frank, if mass adoption ever happens it'll be years down the road, there's no reason to panic.

How many years did it take Apple to get wide adoption? The Apple Macintosh had a better desktop than Windows for _years_ and still didn't get much traction. Proving I think that the Desktop is not the end all and be all.

Nevertheless, there are great things happening in the open source desktop world with many unification projects and such, some of which are hosted on freedesktop.org if you want to check them out.

Apple and Microsoft are dramatically ahead of Linux desktops.

Would you _please_ list a few areas where you think this is true? It does no good to just keep repeating that over and over.

App vendors and users want ONE set of desktop API's, not multiple, constantly moving targets.

LoL, you just got done explaining how _TWO_ different API's are surviving and thriving (Apple & MS). Perhaps there's more room for API's than you imagine? Besides, with more cross platform programming tools being offered all the time; this is becoming less of an issue.

Edited 2006-12-24 00:06

Also, Linux has had its chance to build a desktop - it had a chance with literally tons of Venture Capital thrown its way, and now the money is gone.

There's not going to be any more money to throw at it. The stock market/dot com boom is gone. The housing bubble is currently imploding. The U.S. is already in a recession (as long as you aren't a Government economist). The money is gone, and Linux could never get its act together. If there's no money now for developers to keep these projects going, there sure isn't going to be any more money coming in the next 3 years.

Linux had its chance - noone wanted to listen to adults and standardize on one desktop environment. Noone wanted to standardize on one distribution layout, and then have companies form services around THE STANDARD. If that had happened, you would be light years ahead in terms of desktop development now, and would actually have more than a miniscule share on the desktop.

Remember the insane VC's actually funding Nautilus, for millions? Insanity over a lousy file explorer! Novell wasted millions on Ximian! Now it's gone, and there's no more money. That's the reality. The debt overhang in the U.S. is unreal, and it's all coming down. Imagine what you will, but in the end money talks, and the bubble money (meaning phony Fed-created money) is history, and after every phony boom is a horrifying debacle. And people don't volunteer during debacles - they just try to feed their kids.

This might be a good essay topic: How the collapse of the housing and dot.com bubbles and the resulting recession will impact open source development over the next 5 years.

users don't care about APIs. vendors, however, do. and can choose one.