something that you feel linux is missing

Silex89 · 2012-12-04 14:52:49

Hmmm. Interesting discussion about Office Suites. I've been using Open/LibreOffice since v 1.0. I've witnessed their development, achievements and progress over these years. I still have to use MSOffice for a few things (Excel's Solver specially) but the improvements they're making for the apps in such short time has convinced me to stick with LibreOffice.

For me, it's just a matter of time until LibreOffice reaches a more "mature" state in terms of options and functions.

Regards

bohoomil · 2012-12-04 15:18:19

drcouzelis wrote:

KDE is still ugly though.

You haven't seen my super neat Qt theme.

Speaking of my secret GNU wishes: an improved pdf rendering library, as well as a decent, Acrobat's class pdf editor, would make me the happiest dwarf in the forest. Bearing in mind the fontconfig to-do list I keep believing that at least half of my dreams will eventually (soon?) come true.

satanselbow · 2012-12-04 15:21:06

cfr wrote:

To be honest, the chances that a document saved on one machine in Word will look exactly the same when opened on another running Word is also fairly close to negligible. Even if they are the same OS and version of Office, it still depends what fonts etc. are available. If you really want it to look exactly the same, you need a different format...

Come back RTF all is forgiven ...

drcouzelis · 2012-12-04 15:42:58

bohoomil wrote:

drcouzelis wrote:
KDE is still ugly though.
You haven't seen my super neat Qt theme.

I don't even care about seeing your theme, just just lobby the KDE developers to get the default theme replaced with yours.

Bearing in mind the fontconfig to-do list I keep believing that at least half of my dreams will eventually (soon?) come true.

Oh my. That list appears to be really really old. You have stronger faith than I do.

bohoomil · 2012-12-04 15:43:31

satanselbow wrote:

cfr wrote:
To be honest, the chances that a document saved on one machine in Word will look exactly the same when opened on another running Word is also fairly close to negligible. Even if they are the same OS and version of Office, it still depends what fonts etc. are available. If you really want it to look exactly the same, you need a different format...

Come back RTF all is forgiven ...

It's called standards, not RTF, nor MS Office or LO/OO. Standards and templates. OpenDocument and XML offer way more flexibility, are much more future-proof and are easily portable. As far as font chaos is concerned, a standardized list of fonts, including default Sans, Serif and Mono faces would do the trick. This is how the problem is dealt with in major publishing houses for example: when you send them a text to be published, it should be prepared in accordance with clearly stated guidelines. And no one really cares what tools you are going to use to create the file. Easy, efficient and 100% correct.

Last edited by bohoomil (2012-12-04 16:21:37)

bohoomil · 2012-12-04 15:46:16

drcouzelis wrote:

Oh my. That list appears to be really really old. You have stronger faith than I do.

That comes with time.

Jristz · 2012-12-04 18:06:39

Unification in place of des-unification (or wathever the name is)
you know 'Split and you win, join and you lose'

Is 20% cool have many option but if all those option not have almos one common goal there are all doomed (in the good sense)

and...a clone-like for Dreamweaver

cfr · 2012-12-05 00:31:32

bohoomil wrote:

satanselbow wrote:
cfr wrote:
To be honest, the chances that a document saved on one machine in Word will look exactly the same when opened on another running Word is also fairly close to negligible. Even if they are the same OS and version of Office, it still depends what fonts etc. are available. If you really want it to look exactly the same, you need a different format...

Come back RTF all is forgiven ...
It's called standards, not RTF, nor MS Office or LO/OO. Standards and templates. OpenDocument and XML offer way more flexibility, are much more future-proof and are easily portable. As far as font chaos is concerned, a standardized list of fonts, including default Sans, Serif and Mono faces would do the trick. This is how the problem is dealt with in major publishing houses for example: when you send them a text to be published, it should be prepared in accordance with clearly stated guidelines. And no one really cares what tools you are going to use to create the file. Easy, efficient and 100% correct.

Not sure what counts as a major publishing house but lots of academic journals published by academic presses will accept only Word or, sometimes, RTF or Word. Worse still, many will not even *look* at a paper to *consider* it if it is in any other format.

Even open access journals which eventually turn stuff into PDF demand Word for submission.

nomorewindows · 2012-12-05 02:32:30

cfr wrote:

bohoomil wrote:
satanselbow wrote:

Come back RTF all is forgiven ...
It's called standards, not RTF, nor MS Office or LO/OO. Standards and templates. OpenDocument and XML offer way more flexibility, are much more future-proof and are easily portable. As far as font chaos is concerned, a standardized list of fonts, including default Sans, Serif and Mono faces would do the trick. This is how the problem is dealt with in major publishing houses for example: when you send them a text to be published, it should be prepared in accordance with clearly stated guidelines. And no one really cares what tools you are going to use to create the file. Easy, efficient and 100% correct.
Not sure what counts as a major publishing house but lots of academic journals published by academic presses will accept only Word or, sometimes, RTF or Word. Worse still, many will not even *look* at a paper to *consider* it if it is in any other format.
Even open access journals which eventually turn stuff into PDF demand Word for submission.

I submit my resume in Word format and the parser chews my resume up and spits it out. So much for format, the parser only accepts a strict dialect. The parser programmer might be the only one able to apply for that particular job. This is the irony of how the computer have helped us. It helps us do what the HR department was going to do to the resume -- file 13.

bohoomil · 2012-12-05 05:06:11

cfr wrote:

Not sure what counts as a major publishing house but lots of academic journals published by academic presses will accept only Word or, sometimes, RTF or Word. Worse still, many will not even *look* at a paper to *consider* it if it is in any other format.
Even open access journals which eventually turn stuff into PDF demand Word for submission.

I believe Springer or Elsevier would qualify, two of many which accept LaTeX alongside Word files. Some strongly encourage to use LaTeX exclusively, and the list of institutions that use simple solutions that simply work is quite long (there are more not mentioned there, worldwide).

However, my point wasn't the number of people still / already using open standards, but this line:

cfr wrote:

...the chances that a document saved on one machine in Word will look exactly the same when opened on another running Word is also fairly close to negligible.

The answer to your doubts are those two terms: 'standards' and 'templates'. Any and every incarnation of a word processor is a misconception, something bad and wrong deep in its roots. It doesn't work as people expect and it genetically can't work this way. Why? Because text isn't what a word processor makes you think it is. It's not a picture (WYSIWYG), but a structure (WYMIWYG), and a word processor of any brand is incapable of treating it (correctly) like a structure. So, whatever office suite we are looking forward to, none will do the job as we would like it to do, because -- once again guys, loud and clear -- those who created the first word processor had no bloody idea what printed text was. Period.

Iranon · 2012-12-05 14:02:41

The problem with LaTeX: If authors develop good habits, they could submit their work to just about anyone with little additional effort to adjust it to another publisher's quirks. Customers with a choice are bad customers.

Word processors are clumsy tools that are at best "good enough" and "convenient enough" if you have low standards. Things get worse when the dominant line uses proprietary or needlessly complicated and poorly documented file formats , because everything else gets measured not on its own merits but by how well it deals with that gibberish.

omeringen · 2012-12-05 15:41:55

And drivers of course. No AMD/ATI graphics card next time !

Last edited by omeringen (2012-12-05 15:42:16)

drcouzelis · 2012-12-05 15:50:56

omeringen wrote:

And drivers of course. No AMD/ATI graphics card next time

What do you mean? They aren't missing... I have AMD / ATI graphics card drivers on my computer. Could you be more specific?

anonymous_user · 2012-12-05 16:01:25

His post before edit was:

omeringen wrote:

And drivers of course. Can't even play quake3 with my HD2400 card because of crappy driver support. No AMD/ATI graphics card next time !

Maybe omeringen is talking about AMD dropping support for his card in the propeitary driver? But then again, NVIDIA dropped support for older cards in their latest driver 310.xx. I think NVIDIA is not as quick as AMD to do so however.

Last edited by anonymous_user (2012-12-05 16:02:04)

omeringen · 2012-12-05 16:11:36

Yeah i am talking about legacy drivers. Maybe the reason they don't care about drivers is that GNU/Linux platform is not a big market for games comparing to Win.

drcouzelis · 2012-12-05 16:14:16

omeringen wrote:

Yeah i am talking about legacy drivers. Maybe the reason they don't care about drivers is that GNU/Linux platform is not a big market for games comparing to Win.

Oh. I thought they didn't support Linux because the open source drivers were so good. Oh, well. The only fancy thing I use my video card for is Extreme Tux Racer.

MrCode · 2012-12-05 17:49:01

I thought they didn't support Linux because the open source drivers were so good.

AFAIK, at least on the NVIDIA side of things, nouveau still has a ways to go before it reaches a level of performance/number of features comparable to the proprietary blob; e.g. I've read that (proper) power management is still in the works.

Last edited by MrCode (2012-12-05 17:49:33)

Leonid.I · 2012-12-05 18:32:11

taylorchu wrote:

personally, in order of most important to least are:
1. power management: linux is a power monster. no matter how you config it.

This is simply wrong.

While I don't know how to _consistently_ measure power consumption in Win and Linux, judging by the MB and CPU temperature, a properly configured modern (>=3.4.0) linux kernel runs at least ~10C cooler. For instance, my C2D laptop rarely heats up above 42C (w/o compiling stuff, ofcourse, which means that I don't even need fan). The Atom tablet (exopc) under Win7 operates at ~53C. Under archlinux -- at <=45C. The air cooled AMD Phenom server runs at <=30C/35C (CPU/northbridge).

blackout23 · 2012-12-05 21:45:57

No matter if prop or open source. The AMD drivers are still horrible if you want to do something useful with them. Since I'm in the Steam for Linux Beta Forum I see "Graphics Glitch" and "Slow Performance" issue reports" very often. 90% of the time they are from AMD users. 10% of the time they are Intel. I'm so very glad I have an NVIDIA Card installed. Driver updates come regularly and always carry good improvements. Just recently the 310 driver boosted all games by 20-25% on all supported cards and the nvidia driver was rather good before that. Up until the last driver release they supported A LOT of old cards for a very long time. Hope they are more flexible now and the new drivers can become even better even faster.

Last edited by blackout23 (2012-12-05 21:47:14)

cfr · 2012-12-06 02:11:50

Iranon wrote:

The problem with LaTeX: If authors develop good habits, they could submit their work to just about anyone with little additional effort to adjust it to another publisher's quirks. Customers with a choice are bad customers.

Not if the journal insists on Word or RTF and won't accept anything else. (And I probably have very bad habits just because I have never, ever sent LaTeX code to anybody. Nobody I've ever worked with would have a clue what to do with it. PDF works OK there but then I know good habits don't count.)

@bohoomil,

I know this is true in some disciplines but it is not so in all. It is *certainly* not true in mine. I have *never* submitted to a journal which would accept LaTeX. Most will accept PDF for submission, though. If they really want Word to publish, well, that's doable if it must be. What I object to is the number of journals which won't even consider a paper which is not in Word or RTF format.

I have also been asked for work which "looked like" it was done in Word. This is pretty easy with philosophy.sty although I still have no idea why anybody in their right mind would require it. philosophy.sty basically uglifies LaTeX output. A kludgy install of a TNR look-alike and you're done. Sadly, most places want actual Word or RTF and that is just not so easy.

This isn't to say it is a good solution. Just that is the way the world of academic publishing is in my field.

There *are* issues with the accessibility of PDF files produced from LaTeX, though. Word documents, I've been told by my university, are more accessible. (Not that I have switched to a word processor but this might have made me hesitate if I was not yet so fully committed.)

Last edited by cfr (2012-12-06 02:15:07)

Trilby · 2012-12-06 02:48:55

Most journals I've seen only list MS Word in their "instructions to authors", but if you dig a little deeper they certainly do accept latex.

Both Elsevier and BioMed Central have their own classes.

Janarto · 2012-12-06 04:20:57

Linux is not missing anything, it's the upper layers that are less convenient

Linux is already well suited for the embedded world

Linux on the desktop, not so much !

- audio
- more efficient and lighter graphic stack
- power management
- spreadsheet

If it's not dealt with, chances are we'll soon just run android on laptops & desktops

16bitkernel · 2012-12-06 08:56:35

I can't understand why people keep pushing Linux to the masses
for me GNU/Linux is not missing anything , in fact the more time I spend with my system I realize I've been missing many of Linux features

drcouzelis · 2012-12-06 14:16:44

Janarto wrote:

- audio
- more efficient and lighter graphic stack
- power management
- spreadsheet
If it's not dealt with, chances are we'll soon just run android on laptops & desktops

What aspect of "audio" is missing?

What is a "more efficient and lighter graphic stack"? I use Openbox on xorg-server. I think it feels pretty light...

What aspect of "power management" is missing? As has been pointed out in this thread, power management in Linux can be better than in other operating systems.

What aspect of "spreadsheet" is missing? I know of five spreadsheet applications. What is missing about them?

...I think I understand why litemotiv was so vocal in this thread...

Unia · 2012-12-06 14:49:24

I am by far not an audio junk, as long as I get sound out of my laptop with videos and music I'm fine. Both my internal and external speakers are working and so are my headphones. All OOTB, I just had to unmute the channels first. So, I am also interested in hearing what's missing with audio on Linux. Perhaps I'm not into it enough to see what's missing..?

I do get what's meant with spreadsheet: it has been said many times before. Sure, Libreoffice does the job when you work alone and don't have any file type you have to work with. But once you have to use .doc(x) and/or work with other people who use MS Office, it's a big hassle. Last year me and my (twin)brother did an assignment together: I was on Libreoffice and he was on MS Office. Everytime we exchanged files, the layout was messed up and we had to start all over with it. In the end I just didn't do any layout work on Libreoffice anymore so he just got pure text. Although that worked, he wasn't happy with having to do more work by getting the layout looking good on my documents. Neither could I do the formulas, as MS Office's formula editor thingy works differently. Also, no program on Linux matches Excel.

I would also like to see better graphics support from AMD, but that's not going to happen. It works, but multi monitor is still troublesome and I regularly have to hold back xorg packages etcetera. My next laptop will have Intel, for sure!

Lastly, power management. It's there, but not available "to the masses". We are tinkerers, we aren't afraid of editing some configuration file and echoing values into a file in /sys. But most of the Linux users are and thus, "the masses" are left without powersaving. What we need is some project being setup that simplifies this. (no, not going to be me I would like to, but I'm far from being experienced enough)

Arch Linux

#51 2012-12-04 14:52:49

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#52 2012-12-04 15:18:19

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#53 2012-12-04 15:21:06

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#54 2012-12-04 15:42:58

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#55 2012-12-04 15:43:31

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#56 2012-12-04 15:46:16

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#57 2012-12-04 18:06:39

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#58 2012-12-05 00:31:32

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#59 2012-12-05 02:32:30

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#60 2012-12-05 05:06:11

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#61 2012-12-05 14:02:41

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#62 2012-12-05 15:41:55

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#63 2012-12-05 15:50:56

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#64 2012-12-05 16:01:25

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#65 2012-12-05 16:11:36

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#66 2012-12-05 16:14:16

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#67 2012-12-05 17:49:01

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#68 2012-12-05 18:32:11

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#69 2012-12-05 21:45:57

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#70 2012-12-06 02:11:50

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#71 2012-12-06 02:48:55

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#72 2012-12-06 04:20:57

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#73 2012-12-06 08:56:35

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#74 2012-12-06 14:16:44

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#75 2012-12-06 14:49:24

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

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