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!

10.04 Tomorrow!

I've been busy busy with work, with no real time to post. But Lucid Lynx comes out tomorrow! Wee!

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.

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.

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.

Mark Shuttleworth: Maybe You Missed The Point

Window buttons. It's all over the blog-o-sphere. The iron fist of Mark Shuttleworth has slammed down on the iron armrest of the Canonical throne. Window buttons, to the left.

And all of this in the name of Design. Oh Design! That word of words, that instills such longing and idealism in the hearts of wannabes everywhere. It's time to toss aside the charade. Sure, there's some arguments for the buttons being on this side, or that side, or on no side at all, but what's the real issue? User choice. Isn't that why we switched to Linux anyway?

Do a little searching, and you will see that the window buttons can be moved back. But what the hell is this? Gconf-editor? It's so reminiscent of the Windows registry editor I almost start hallucinating Bill Gates cackling in my ear.

In summation, this whole business shouldn't be about right side or left side, it should be about freedom of choice for the user. And hiding functionality behind complicated, secret editors is poor design. Get over yourselves.

And speaking of user choice, you could always just switch to XFCE, like I did a long time ago. Goodbye bloaty Gnome!

Introduction, or WHY DEAR LORD WHY

I used to game on Windows. It was great. I'd heard of Linux, even tried it a few times. Let's be honest though, it was awful back then. Windows users, especially gamers (read: power users), are used to having to tweak their OS to get what they want out of it. They're also used to having GUIs expose OS functionality to them. On the rare occasion that they have to do something drastic, they're reading a handy guide and it's got fancy links and formatting to show them how to get things done. Linux offered none of that. If you wanted to fix one your all-too-frequent problems, you had to patch it yourself. Give me a break. I just want to play games.

So skip forward a few years. Linux stopped being so awful as Ubuntu matured. Windows started getting more awful as Vista showed up. Microsoft started treating XP more and more like an unwanted stepchild, and there was no way I was subjecting my beautiful hardware to the bloated, infested mass that was Vista. It was time for me to take off the training wheels and become a real computer user.

I switched to Linux. I still use it, on all of my machines, so obviously there's something right with it. But there's a lot wrong too. I don't want there to be things wrong with my Operating System, that's why I switched in the first place. Here's where FOSS ideals start kicking in. You might tell me, submit a patch, or fork a project, or make your own distro.

Sure, I could do that. I could reinvent the wheel. But it's time we stopped being a bunch of whiny little children, and started working together. So my contribution to all this will be my thoughts and observations, as a user of Linux. As a former Windows gamer, turned open source idealist. But still bitter about the games.

I'm not a developer. I don't spend hours with my head in code. I come at this from an outside perspective. Every day I boot up my computer, and I can't play the load of Windows games sitting on my shelf. I can't use Winamp, the best media player in the history of media players. There's a lot I can do that I couldn't do before, to be sure. But somewhere in this crazy world of penguins and other such mascots somebody missed the damn boat. Linux isn't what it should be. This blog will investigate those shortcomings. Hello.