Thursday, April 12, 2012
Shadowrun Returns
A team, which includes the orignal designer of Shadowrun, is doing a kickstarter project to create a new and awesome sounding version of the game. Development has already been funded, but if they reach a new $1 million goal (only $150,000 to go as I write this!) they will add Linux support! Go check it out!
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
AMD Open Sources HD 7000 Driver
Check this article on Phoronix.
This is too little, too late for me, as I already bought an nVidia card. But this is great for Linux graphics in general, and the next time I have money to throw away on a GPU, I will definitely revisit this.
This is too little, too late for me, as I already bought an nVidia card. But this is great for Linux graphics in general, and the next time I have money to throw away on a GPU, I will definitely revisit this.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Someone Reddit This Immediately
OpenMW 0.13.0 preview! Terrain and water! Please note that these two features became functional within the past few days, so there's still a lot of work to be done on them. This is also from a development build of OpenMW, not the current or possibly even the next release. But this is Morrowind running (for some value of running) in an open source engine on Linux!! Wow!
My Social Media Quandry
I'm really in a pickle lately when it comes to Social Media. Let me break it down:
Facebook: I hate Facebook with a passion. I recently deleted my account. I had to remake it though, as it's the best way for me to keep in touch with my local salsa scene, of which I am a very active participant. I use my new facebook exclusively for networking with salsa people, which I much prefer to using it as a general networking tool. However, while narrowing my use case for Facebook has made it much more functional for me, I also find myself yearning for an avenue to share the more general stuff I used to share on there. I won't return to using Facebook as a general social media platform though, I refuse to provide content to a platform that is predatory to its users' privacy.
Google+: Google+ really could be cool and useful. It's only real shortcomings are the lack of an active user base, poor visual design, and the lack of a groups feature. I'm lucky to have quite a few active friends on there, but nothing close to the kind of audience I would like to be able to reach. Also, since my Google+ profile is tied to my real name and primary email, I have to filter what I share on there, and don't really do any public sharing. That's no fun.
Twitter: I use twitter, and I really enjoy it, but I have to confess that I am a pretty passive user. I don't like sharing links because I use it on my phone. Phone browsers are just not up to the challenge of handling the real Web. So, Twitter is just a very casual and passive channel for me, it's not something that I take very seriously.
This Blog: Obviously I don't update this blog very often, and obviously it doesn't really have a following. I doubt anyone will even read this post. I use this basically to just write up articles on software/internet subjects that interest me. It's more a notebook for my own thoughts than a channel through which to reach an audience.
So what would I like to accomplish with social media? There's basically three subjects that I am interested in sharing about:
Software/Internet Things: The idea behind this blog was to have a place to rant about Linux, Internet freedom, and any other software or technology subject that I wanted. I think this blog mostly fails because I don't update it. If I were to write on it more consistently, and promote it to audiences that would have an interest in it, I might be more successful with it. Hmm.
Electronic Music: I'd really like to have a place to share sweet dubstep/drum & bass tracks that I find. I used to do this by posting to Facebook and Google+, but that audience is limited to the people who are friends with me. I don't want to publically post music on Google+, because some of the stuff I listen to I don't necessarily want associated with my name in search. Not because it's bad or incriminating, just because there's a ton of people out there who don't understand electronic music and artistic expression, and they might make false assumptions about me based on my taste. I don't really know what the best solution for this is. I've thought about setting up a Wordpress blog, so I can just post whatever I like, but I'm not 100% sure that's the most effective thing to do. I'd love to hear any suggestions anyone has on this subject.
Salsa: I'm a very active salsa dancer. As has been previously stated, most of my salsa social media needs are satisfied through Facebook. I guess this is a Good Enough solution, it's just dissatisfying that I have to resort to a platform that I absolutely hate in order to communicate with the people that I want to. Ho hum.
So there's my story. Just some musings for now. Maybe writing this all out will inspire some idea in my head, or maybe I'll just be stuck in the same spot months from now. We'll see!
Facebook: I hate Facebook with a passion. I recently deleted my account. I had to remake it though, as it's the best way for me to keep in touch with my local salsa scene, of which I am a very active participant. I use my new facebook exclusively for networking with salsa people, which I much prefer to using it as a general networking tool. However, while narrowing my use case for Facebook has made it much more functional for me, I also find myself yearning for an avenue to share the more general stuff I used to share on there. I won't return to using Facebook as a general social media platform though, I refuse to provide content to a platform that is predatory to its users' privacy.
Google+: Google+ really could be cool and useful. It's only real shortcomings are the lack of an active user base, poor visual design, and the lack of a groups feature. I'm lucky to have quite a few active friends on there, but nothing close to the kind of audience I would like to be able to reach. Also, since my Google+ profile is tied to my real name and primary email, I have to filter what I share on there, and don't really do any public sharing. That's no fun.
Twitter: I use twitter, and I really enjoy it, but I have to confess that I am a pretty passive user. I don't like sharing links because I use it on my phone. Phone browsers are just not up to the challenge of handling the real Web. So, Twitter is just a very casual and passive channel for me, it's not something that I take very seriously.
This Blog: Obviously I don't update this blog very often, and obviously it doesn't really have a following. I doubt anyone will even read this post. I use this basically to just write up articles on software/internet subjects that interest me. It's more a notebook for my own thoughts than a channel through which to reach an audience.
So what would I like to accomplish with social media? There's basically three subjects that I am interested in sharing about:
Software/Internet Things: The idea behind this blog was to have a place to rant about Linux, Internet freedom, and any other software or technology subject that I wanted. I think this blog mostly fails because I don't update it. If I were to write on it more consistently, and promote it to audiences that would have an interest in it, I might be more successful with it. Hmm.
Electronic Music: I'd really like to have a place to share sweet dubstep/drum & bass tracks that I find. I used to do this by posting to Facebook and Google+, but that audience is limited to the people who are friends with me. I don't want to publically post music on Google+, because some of the stuff I listen to I don't necessarily want associated with my name in search. Not because it's bad or incriminating, just because there's a ton of people out there who don't understand electronic music and artistic expression, and they might make false assumptions about me based on my taste. I don't really know what the best solution for this is. I've thought about setting up a Wordpress blog, so I can just post whatever I like, but I'm not 100% sure that's the most effective thing to do. I'd love to hear any suggestions anyone has on this subject.
Salsa: I'm a very active salsa dancer. As has been previously stated, most of my salsa social media needs are satisfied through Facebook. I guess this is a Good Enough solution, it's just dissatisfying that I have to resort to a platform that I absolutely hate in order to communicate with the people that I want to. Ho hum.
So there's my story. Just some musings for now. Maybe writing this all out will inspire some idea in my head, or maybe I'll just be stuck in the same spot months from now. We'll see!
Sunday, January 22, 2012
SCaLE 10x
I went to SCaLE 10x! It was awesome! I volunteered at the Ubuntu California Loco booth, which was really awesome. The Loco people are great, and it was fun talking to Expo attendees about Ubuntu (and plugging Xubuntu, because why not) and seeing all of the booths and generally having a great time! Some highlights:
OpenShot Video Editor: I got to talk to Jonathan Thomas, the Creator and Lead Dev of the OpenShot Video Editor. I used it recently for a quick and dirty video project, and it worked quite well! This is super exciting! I've been waiting for a good video editor to land on Linux, and I think this is it! OpenShot gets overlooked a lot by serious video people like me because it appears to have a dumbed-down interface, but the truth is that it is actually quite powerful. I went to Jonathan's talk, and he demonstrated many of the capabilities it has, including the chroma key effect which can be used for green screen stuffs. It's a very serious and awesome program, and if you've been looking for a Linux video editor, it's definitely worth checking out! This is coming from someone who was formally trained on Final Cut Pro, so take me seriously!
The Open Photo Project: I only go to talk to the Open Photo guy very briefly, but I am very excited about the project! It's advertised as the "Wordpress for Photos", but you could also think of it as what Diaspora was to Facebook, Open Photo is to Flickr. Though Open Photo looks much much more promising that Diaspora. Very exciting!
VideoLan: Just putting this here because I got to talk to the VLC Devs and they are awesome. :D
The FreeBSD people were there (I got a FreeNAS cd!), and a ton of others. I played Unreal Tournament 2004 (without sound, because you need a workaround to get sound working on modern distributions) at the ZaReason LAN party which was awesome. Overall it was a really awesome experience, and I hope to go again next year! I'm kicking around preparing a talk on Linux Gaming, and open source game engine ports.
OpenShot Video Editor: I got to talk to Jonathan Thomas, the Creator and Lead Dev of the OpenShot Video Editor. I used it recently for a quick and dirty video project, and it worked quite well! This is super exciting! I've been waiting for a good video editor to land on Linux, and I think this is it! OpenShot gets overlooked a lot by serious video people like me because it appears to have a dumbed-down interface, but the truth is that it is actually quite powerful. I went to Jonathan's talk, and he demonstrated many of the capabilities it has, including the chroma key effect which can be used for green screen stuffs. It's a very serious and awesome program, and if you've been looking for a Linux video editor, it's definitely worth checking out! This is coming from someone who was formally trained on Final Cut Pro, so take me seriously!
The Open Photo Project: I only go to talk to the Open Photo guy very briefly, but I am very excited about the project! It's advertised as the "Wordpress for Photos", but you could also think of it as what Diaspora was to Facebook, Open Photo is to Flickr. Though Open Photo looks much much more promising that Diaspora. Very exciting!
VideoLan: Just putting this here because I got to talk to the VLC Devs and they are awesome. :D
The FreeBSD people were there (I got a FreeNAS cd!), and a ton of others. I played Unreal Tournament 2004 (without sound, because you need a workaround to get sound working on modern distributions) at the ZaReason LAN party which was awesome. Overall it was a really awesome experience, and I hope to go again next year! I'm kicking around preparing a talk on Linux Gaming, and open source game engine ports.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
In praise of Minecraft
I've been meaning to do a post on Minecraft for a while. The game is absolutely ingenious, and here's why:
1. It's written in Java. I remember back when any game developer would scoff at Java as a noob language for people who didn't want to do real programming. Point any of those scoffers to Minecraft's multi-million dollar profits, and they'll shut up right quick. While it's no Id Tech 5, it gets the job done, and has one very important benefit: Java is multi-platform. Minecraft can be played natively on any OS with OpenGL a suitable JVM. That means I'm playing it on Linux without a hitch.
2. It's a true sandbox. A lot of games tout themselves as sandboxes, but then only deliver a little pile of sand on top of a lot of cement. The world of Minecraft can literally be dismantled down to the bedrock, and rebuilt in whatever fashion the player wants. The game delivers the experience of an unlimited set of Legos, but to scale with the player, so you can walk around inside your creations.
3. The world is procedurally generated, and is a joy to explore. There's a few key things to note here. First, every world is different, so your experience changes with each world you play. Second, with mountains and forests and cave systems and chasms, there are truly gorgeous bits of scenery to discover. Every time I start a new Minecraft world I am driven by the thrill of exploration. Third, because the world is procedurally generated from a limited number of assets, the majority of the content created by the developers was programmatic, rather than artistic. Instead of being bogged down with hours of modelling and texturing, the devs spent time writing algorithms that would generate an effectively unlimited amount of compelling content.
These last two points, and especially the last part of this last point, are where the true ingenuity of Minecraft lies. Instead of pouring millions of dollars and countless man-hours into producing a blockbuster AAA title with fancy graphics and marketable characters, the creators of Minecraft made a game that makes itself. Minecraft gameplay is centered around the player establishing their own objectives, and essentially entertaining themselves. Minecraft content is procedurally generated, making the experience different and compelling in every new world the player enters. Combining these things with the fact that the game is playable on any OS, on almost any system, and it's easy to see why the game is so successful.
1. It's written in Java. I remember back when any game developer would scoff at Java as a noob language for people who didn't want to do real programming. Point any of those scoffers to Minecraft's multi-million dollar profits, and they'll shut up right quick. While it's no Id Tech 5, it gets the job done, and has one very important benefit: Java is multi-platform. Minecraft can be played natively on any OS with OpenGL a suitable JVM. That means I'm playing it on Linux without a hitch.
2. It's a true sandbox. A lot of games tout themselves as sandboxes, but then only deliver a little pile of sand on top of a lot of cement. The world of Minecraft can literally be dismantled down to the bedrock, and rebuilt in whatever fashion the player wants. The game delivers the experience of an unlimited set of Legos, but to scale with the player, so you can walk around inside your creations.
3. The world is procedurally generated, and is a joy to explore. There's a few key things to note here. First, every world is different, so your experience changes with each world you play. Second, with mountains and forests and cave systems and chasms, there are truly gorgeous bits of scenery to discover. Every time I start a new Minecraft world I am driven by the thrill of exploration. Third, because the world is procedurally generated from a limited number of assets, the majority of the content created by the developers was programmatic, rather than artistic. Instead of being bogged down with hours of modelling and texturing, the devs spent time writing algorithms that would generate an effectively unlimited amount of compelling content.
These last two points, and especially the last part of this last point, are where the true ingenuity of Minecraft lies. Instead of pouring millions of dollars and countless man-hours into producing a blockbuster AAA title with fancy graphics and marketable characters, the creators of Minecraft made a game that makes itself. Minecraft gameplay is centered around the player establishing their own objectives, and essentially entertaining themselves. Minecraft content is procedurally generated, making the experience different and compelling in every new world the player enters. Combining these things with the fact that the game is playable on any OS, on almost any system, and it's easy to see why the game is so successful.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Power Users vs Usability
The big quote of UDS seems to be: "There is a bit of a myth that power users don't like and aren't interested in usability and ease-of-use. I think that’s nonsense."
You're actually correct, Mr. Shuttleworth. And that's why all of your power users are switching away from Unity. They want usability and ease-of-use. Which happen to be things that a rigid, non-customizable interface does not provide.
Mark, you need to start thinking of usability as User-Ability. Are you giving your users the ability to do what they want with your interface? No? Then you're not providing usability.
You're actually correct, Mr. Shuttleworth. And that's why all of your power users are switching away from Unity. They want usability and ease-of-use. Which happen to be things that a rigid, non-customizable interface does not provide.
Mark, you need to start thinking of usability as User-Ability. Are you giving your users the ability to do what they want with your interface? No? Then you're not providing usability.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Followup: Giving Up on Fglrx
I bought an nVidia card. Never been so happy to see a binary blob in my life. Pardon me while I go huggle my bug-free silky-smooth fps.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Giving up on Open Source
Well, sort of. I ditched the FOSS radeon driver. Why? I've been playing Minecraft. As you are probably aware, Minecraft isn't exactly a graphically intensive game. So when I have to run it on the lowest settings, and it still makes my system chug, I've had enough.
I know the open source radeon driver is a work in progress. But if I can have the performance I want now, for free, there's no reason to make myself suffer. Additionally, the driver has been a "work in progress" for years. There's obviously very little work and very little progress going into it.
So now I can play Fable, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, Doom 3, Guild Wars, Heroes of Newerth... all of those games that have just been sitting on my hard drive. Yay!
In other news, to switch back to fglrx, I upgraded to Oeneric. This is my first time upgrading releases while still in beta. No complaints so far, though aside from LightDM there's nothing really new for me in Xubuntu 11.10.
I know the open source radeon driver is a work in progress. But if I can have the performance I want now, for free, there's no reason to make myself suffer. Additionally, the driver has been a "work in progress" for years. There's obviously very little work and very little progress going into it.
So now I can play Fable, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, Doom 3, Guild Wars, Heroes of Newerth... all of those games that have just been sitting on my hard drive. Yay!
In other news, to switch back to fglrx, I upgraded to Oeneric. This is my first time upgrading releases while still in beta. No complaints so far, though aside from LightDM there's nothing really new for me in Xubuntu 11.10.
Friday, September 2, 2011
The current state of r600g
Xorg-eders on Xubuntu 11.04 current to 2011-09-02 on r600g with i386 libs installed on amd64. Just figured I'd share the level of success I am having with this.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
How Fark Does Patents
Following up on my recent post on patents, here's a (WARNING: strong language) blog post from Fark about their recent troubles. Good to see more people calling this stuff out for what it is.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Patents in the Blagosphere
Patents seem to be all the rage at the moment, ever since NPR did a piece called "When Patents Attack!" It's a bit dry, but gives a really good overview on the current patent situation. Well worth a listen, or a read (pdf) if you prefer.
The Economist also recently did an article entitled "Patents Against Prosperity" that gives a revealing look into the ridiculousness of recent patent legislation.
And then there's this recent post on Google's own blog, calling out its competitors for effectively ganging up on the open source Android platform. In an update to that very post, it looks like the Department of Justice was having none of it, going so far as to slap the GPL on all acquired patents:
Here's hoping all of this recent dialog pushes patent reform into public discourse. I've got my fingers crossed!
The Economist also recently did an article entitled "Patents Against Prosperity" that gives a revealing look into the ridiculousness of recent patent legislation.
And then there's this recent post on Google's own blog, calling out its competitors for effectively ganging up on the open source Android platform. In an update to that very post, it looks like the Department of Justice was having none of it, going so far as to slap the GPL on all acquired patents:
"All of the Novell patents will be acquired subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2, a widely adopted open-source license, and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license for the Linux System."
Here's hoping all of this recent dialog pushes patent reform into public discourse. I've got my fingers crossed!
Linus Torvalds moves to XFCE.
Albeit grudgingly, Linus Torvalds himself has gotten fed up with Gnome's disregard for usability, and has switched to XFCE. Along with Ubuntu Studio's somewhat recent switch, this is great news for XFCE, hopefully heralding further adoption and contribution to the project.
So nyah. :P
Sunday, June 19, 2011
A Year In The Life
So it's a little more than a year since my last post, but I'm sure you'll forgive me. What's happened in the world of Linux gaming!?
Well, nothing revoutionary. But there have been some important and exciting steps forward. On my ATI 4670 card, I can now play some modern games, such as Doom 3 and UT2004, using the open source driver. I am using the r600g driver provided in the xorg-edgers ppa. While it's disappointing to have to use an unstable, unsupported external repository just to get basic functionality out of my hardware (yes, I just called speedy 3d acceleration "basic functionality", welcome to the world of the User) this is an unprecedented event in Linux for me. I'll be excited to see if this driver makes it into the 11.10 release of Ubuntu.
Hot on the heels of my fresh driver adoption, I gave 0 A.D. another whirl. I was excited to finally be able to get my hands dirty with this forthcoming open source game project, and it did not disappoint. While the game is still in early alpha, and only very basic gameplay is implemented, I had a grand time goofing around with it. This project is very promising, keep your eye on it.
A few more things: I've also been following the OpenMW project very closely. Unfortunately, development has been a slow trickle, though a constant one. My fingers are always crossed that development speeds up, but given the track record of projects like this, it's not likely. XFCE also finally implemented the freedesktop.org menu specification, which is awesome, but it just means that now I'm in the market for a good menu editor. Lastly, I got nQuake and Skulltag (a Doom port) working on my machine, which is tons of fun.
Slowly but steadily we are moving forward, which is great. Things could be better all around, but for now I'll enjoy what I can!
Well, nothing revoutionary. But there have been some important and exciting steps forward. On my ATI 4670 card, I can now play some modern games, such as Doom 3 and UT2004, using the open source driver. I am using the r600g driver provided in the xorg-edgers ppa. While it's disappointing to have to use an unstable, unsupported external repository just to get basic functionality out of my hardware (yes, I just called speedy 3d acceleration "basic functionality", welcome to the world of the User) this is an unprecedented event in Linux for me. I'll be excited to see if this driver makes it into the 11.10 release of Ubuntu.
Hot on the heels of my fresh driver adoption, I gave 0 A.D. another whirl. I was excited to finally be able to get my hands dirty with this forthcoming open source game project, and it did not disappoint. While the game is still in early alpha, and only very basic gameplay is implemented, I had a grand time goofing around with it. This project is very promising, keep your eye on it.
A few more things: I've also been following the OpenMW project very closely. Unfortunately, development has been a slow trickle, though a constant one. My fingers are always crossed that development speeds up, but given the track record of projects like this, it's not likely. XFCE also finally implemented the freedesktop.org menu specification, which is awesome, but it just means that now I'm in the market for a good menu editor. Lastly, I got nQuake and Skulltag (a Doom port) working on my machine, which is tons of fun.
Slowly but steadily we are moving forward, which is great. Things could be better all around, but for now I'll enjoy what I can!
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Busy busy
Sorry I've kind of abandoned this. I plan to post lots more when I have time, but I have been super busy with work. Stay tuned!
Thursday, April 29, 2010
10.04 Tomorrow!
I've been busy busy with work, with no real time to post. But Lucid Lynx comes out tomorrow! Wee!
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Banshee
And now for something positive. One application dear to my heart from the windows world is Winamp. It's an awesome multimedia player geared toward music management. It's closed source and has had some bumps along the road, but it's very solid and has an amazing interface. I've missed it something terrible since I switched to Linux.
The Linux world has basically nothing to offer when it comes to music players. Most FOSS players don't feature media libraries, and those that do are either bloated, unstable, or have too many anti-features to be worth it. Basically none of them have good interfaces. Rather than dwelling on that crapstorm though, I'd like to recommend Banshee. It's great.
Yes, there's a few nitpicks I have about it. It isn't Winamp, but it's the best thing out there. And after months and months of muddling through awful media players, it's a breath of fresh air. It's solid, full-featured, and has a surprising lack of anti-features for a Gnome affiliated project. Good on them.
Short and sweet. Hooray for music, hooray for well-developed applications.
The Linux world has basically nothing to offer when it comes to music players. Most FOSS players don't feature media libraries, and those that do are either bloated, unstable, or have too many anti-features to be worth it. Basically none of them have good interfaces. Rather than dwelling on that crapstorm though, I'd like to recommend Banshee. It's great.
Yes, there's a few nitpicks I have about it. It isn't Winamp, but it's the best thing out there. And after months and months of muddling through awful media players, it's a breath of fresh air. It's solid, full-featured, and has a surprising lack of anti-features for a Gnome affiliated project. Good on them.
Short and sweet. Hooray for music, hooray for well-developed applications.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Wine Whine Whine
As promised, a post about Wine. I'd like to pretext this post by saying that I've had nothing but awful personal experiences with Wine. This post in no way reflects an unbiased or balanced viewpoint. I'd also like to say that as much as I hate Wine and wish it never existed and think it's awful, I have a huge amount of respect for the hard work and dedication of the Wine devs. I have nowhere near the kind of skill needed to do what they have done. Moving right along.
Wine touts itself as a compatibility layer between Windows executables and the Linux kernel, allowing Windows-native applications to be run in Linux without any Windows software. Most relevantly, Wine is used as an ace-in-the-hole by Linux devs for why Windows users have no excuse not to convert, implying that any Windows application can run just fine on Wine, and life will be grand, and flowers and rainbows will be everywhere. The Wine devs even go so far as to host a database for applications with compatibility scores, so you can get an idea how well something will run before you give it a go.
I'd like to address this first from an ideological perspective. Hacking together, literally reverse engineering, a compatibility layer between a terrible proprietary system and a very particular open source system is just silly. The idea is so bug prone and monumentally difficult that I don't understand why someone even bothered. Then implying that this solution should serve as a replacement for a natively running application is just a joke.
Secondly, I'd like to address this from personal experience. Wine just doesn't work for me, even for applications with Gold Star Platinum +1 Super Awesome ratings in the Wine AppDB. Take for example, Guild Wars. The additional comments in the AppDB go so far as to state "everything works fine! awesome!" I wish I could show you a screenshot of everything not working "fine! awesome!" but I can't even do that. My entire system crashed during the installer to an unresponsive black screen. That's something that just doesn't happen on Linux. Except with Wine, it seems. I've tried running other things through Wine at various times in the past, all with similar, if mildly better results. Nothing ever actually worked.
But Raevol, you cry, just submit a bug report! Submit a patch! Do your part! No, dear reader. Stop this nonsense. The Wine project is completely irrelevant. Linux needs its own native solutions. People turn to Wine because the applications that exist on Linux are crap, and need to be improved. So let's improve them.
An exception to that last statement is the case of applications that can't be ported because of Intellectual Property, like games. I can discuss my views on those politics until I'm blue in the face, but let's bypass that for now. In this case, these applications should really really be implemented through virtual machines. It's much easier to emulate hardware than it is to reverse engineer an entire operating system. One might argue that performance becomes an issue, however I would argue that optimizing a VM is much less difficult than emulating an entire OS.
Good? Good.
Wine touts itself as a compatibility layer between Windows executables and the Linux kernel, allowing Windows-native applications to be run in Linux without any Windows software. Most relevantly, Wine is used as an ace-in-the-hole by Linux devs for why Windows users have no excuse not to convert, implying that any Windows application can run just fine on Wine, and life will be grand, and flowers and rainbows will be everywhere. The Wine devs even go so far as to host a database for applications with compatibility scores, so you can get an idea how well something will run before you give it a go.
I'd like to address this first from an ideological perspective. Hacking together, literally reverse engineering, a compatibility layer between a terrible proprietary system and a very particular open source system is just silly. The idea is so bug prone and monumentally difficult that I don't understand why someone even bothered. Then implying that this solution should serve as a replacement for a natively running application is just a joke.
Secondly, I'd like to address this from personal experience. Wine just doesn't work for me, even for applications with Gold Star Platinum +1 Super Awesome ratings in the Wine AppDB. Take for example, Guild Wars. The additional comments in the AppDB go so far as to state "everything works fine! awesome!" I wish I could show you a screenshot of everything not working "fine! awesome!" but I can't even do that. My entire system crashed during the installer to an unresponsive black screen. That's something that just doesn't happen on Linux. Except with Wine, it seems. I've tried running other things through Wine at various times in the past, all with similar, if mildly better results. Nothing ever actually worked.
But Raevol, you cry, just submit a bug report! Submit a patch! Do your part! No, dear reader. Stop this nonsense. The Wine project is completely irrelevant. Linux needs its own native solutions. People turn to Wine because the applications that exist on Linux are crap, and need to be improved. So let's improve them.
An exception to that last statement is the case of applications that can't be ported because of Intellectual Property, like games. I can discuss my views on those politics until I'm blue in the face, but let's bypass that for now. In this case, these applications should really really be implemented through virtual machines. It's much easier to emulate hardware than it is to reverse engineer an entire operating system. One might argue that performance becomes an issue, however I would argue that optimizing a VM is much less difficult than emulating an entire OS.
Good? Good.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Year of the Linux Desktop: Stop Lying to Yourselves
There's some sort of delusion that's been going around the Linux community for years, called the Year of the Linux Desktop. The idea is that in some fanciful year, the Linux Desktop will finally be ready for mass consumption, and hordes of Windows and Mac users will finally see the light and convert. This event is contingent on some unknown value of Stability and Usability being reached in the Linux Desktop.
If that's all it were contingent upon, we'd already be living in the Era of the Linux Desktop. Linux is very stable and usable now. We've arrived. But the Year hasn't. What's missing? Raevol, if everything's so grand, why is everything so terrible?
I'll tell you why, dear reader. Applications. People don't use computers because of their nice desktop environments, pretty window managers, or convenient package management systems... they use them as solutions to tasks they need to finish. Word Processing, Web Browsing, Chatting... all of these tasks require applications. And Linux has some good ones, sure. But it's missing the most important ones.
Which are the important ones could be argued. In my opinion, we're missing a video editor, and games. And I don't mean crappy, half-assed games like Nexuiz. I mean real games, like Half Life, Guild Wars, and Age of Empires. There's some AAA commercial games on Linux, but not hardly enough, and not the ones that matter. And by a video editor I don't mean iMovie, I mean Final Cut Pro.
There's been some effort in the right direction, see Lumiera and 0 A.D., but these projects are moving at a very slow pace, and are not getting the attention from developers that they should be. These kinds of projects are important if Linux is ever to matter as a Desktop OS. The focus on Linux development needs to move away from territorial pissings over GTK vs QT, apt-get vs yum, and so forth. The Linux Desktop needs to provide solutions to problems, not just be a stable environment where nothing happens.
Next up: Why WINE is terrible and has no bearing on anything whatsoever.
If that's all it were contingent upon, we'd already be living in the Era of the Linux Desktop. Linux is very stable and usable now. We've arrived. But the Year hasn't. What's missing? Raevol, if everything's so grand, why is everything so terrible?
I'll tell you why, dear reader. Applications. People don't use computers because of their nice desktop environments, pretty window managers, or convenient package management systems... they use them as solutions to tasks they need to finish. Word Processing, Web Browsing, Chatting... all of these tasks require applications. And Linux has some good ones, sure. But it's missing the most important ones.
Which are the important ones could be argued. In my opinion, we're missing a video editor, and games. And I don't mean crappy, half-assed games like Nexuiz. I mean real games, like Half Life, Guild Wars, and Age of Empires. There's some AAA commercial games on Linux, but not hardly enough, and not the ones that matter. And by a video editor I don't mean iMovie, I mean Final Cut Pro.
There's been some effort in the right direction, see Lumiera and 0 A.D., but these projects are moving at a very slow pace, and are not getting the attention from developers that they should be. These kinds of projects are important if Linux is ever to matter as a Desktop OS. The focus on Linux development needs to move away from territorial pissings over GTK vs QT, apt-get vs yum, and so forth. The Linux Desktop needs to provide solutions to problems, not just be a stable environment where nothing happens.
Next up: Why WINE is terrible and has no bearing on anything whatsoever.
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