Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 15th Jul 2009 21:38 UTC
It's time for another "OSNews asks" item. This time, I want to focus on something that I've been wanting to talk about with you all before, but never found the time for. The question is simple: which feature(s) from other operating systems would you like to see in your own main operating system?
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Member since:2006-01-28
Member since:
2006-01-24
Quite a few things:
1) Syncing up my music player. No music player I've used on linux comes close to winamp sadly. Right now I'm using a combination of mpd and command line scripts. It's acceptable, no more. I want an ipod touch, but looking at what you have to do to sync up those... :/
2) A multi-display friendly compositor. Compiz + multimonitor never worked. I tried so hard, it didn't work. And I actually don't want all the fancy effects. I wanted a limited amount of transparency, and shadows around my applications (really helps with gimp I find, so many small windows). I'm currently using xfce, and even that has glitches when I enable a 2nd screen. I have to turn off the compositor first, then enable the monitor, and then turn compositing back on. And my panel is always on the wrong monitor, but isn't aware of the fact that the new monitor exists. So I also have to kill the panel and restart it.
3) Performance. xorg takes up WAY too much cpu, and my framerates are roughly 20% lower when playing openarena between windows and linux. I'm running 8.10, not 9.04. So it's not the intel chipset performance regression.
4) A full-featured web browser that integrates well with the shell. In all fairness, IMO no operating system can boast this. FF doesn't look quite right anywhere, Safari doesn't have extensions which I consider a requirement of being 'full featured', and opera is weird. I love opera, but it's weird.
5) A human readable filesystem. I know most people love it, but the FHS sucks. There's no way around that. I get it, I really do. My view is NOT based on ignorance.
6) A really great IDE for web development. I've seen my mac-loving friends use coda, and I think 'why can't we have that on linux? :/'. There's a gtk widget for both webkit and gecko I believe, but none of the gtk text editors I'm aware of really integrate it in, or are planning on it. Ditto for version control in editors. Yes, I'm aware of geany's vc plugin. It's barely integrated. And I've never gotten eclipse to run stable, ever.
7) stable sound. This is probably my own fault. I built an xubuntu system, then tried to run/install gnome on top of that. Sometimes my sound doesn't work in my video player until I change it to oss and play something. Once it works, then I can change it back to alsa and it works. PulseAudio.. oh god.
All that being said, I don't want to ever run anything else. But all of these features seem to be present in the big two, and it's very very frustrating.