something that you feel linux is missing

Gullible Jones · 2013-02-09 00:10:52

Re Windows security issues, I feel I must raise this point:

http://www.rationallyparanoid.com/artic … stems.html

Based on the figures above the average Windows desktop user would have been vulnerable to actively exploited 0-day vulnerabilities for at least 166 days, with any overlapping of vulnerability exposure being factored in. In other words for the past 12 months 45% of the time that the average Windows desktop user is browsing the internet on a fully patched Windows system running antivirus and with a firewall enabled, they are doing so in an environment in which their computers could suddenly become compromised without their knowledge by an exploited vulnerability in which no official vendor-provided security update exists.

There is a lot more to this issue than installing the latest version of Norton Internet Security and being done with.

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2013-02-09 00:11:25)

jakobcreutzfeldt · 2013-02-10 12:32:42

jakobcreutzfeldt wrote:

drcouzelis wrote:
And in my opinion Linux is missing an open source 3D first person shooter with a single player story mode. The multiplayer first person shooter games are fun to play with friends, but I don't have any friends.
In that theme, we're missing a sandbox RPG with a solid story line and plenty of side quests for me to get lost in (basically, an Elder Scrolls game). We have plenty of hack-and-slash but no real substance.

I just found Eschalon: Book I (well, technically also Book II but I haven't gotten that far yet). It's proprietary but I'm not so strict when it comes to games; at least it lacks DRM, which is the main concern for me. Anyway, it's exactly what I was looking for, and at only $6. Open world, flexible character generation/development, an actual story, side quests, etc.

So, check that off the list of things Linux is missing.

Last edited by jakobcreutzfeldt (2013-02-10 12:32:59)

kaszak696 · 2013-02-10 17:02:50

jakobcreutzfeldt wrote:

I just found Eschalon: Book I

Wow, this game is awesome, thank you.

smsware · 2013-02-14 21:49:38

jasonwryan wrote:

Trent wrote:
jasonwryan wrote:
Calendar-contact-email integration. This is the single biggest hurdle for getting organizations to move to FOSS desktop productivity tools.
I'm working on it, okay??
XP goes out of support here in early 2014. There are a lot of public sector organizations working on their migration plans now; so if you could have it sorted in the next month or two, that would be good...

So, how is it going? ^^

blackout23 · 2013-02-14 23:15:31

Yeah hurry up Trent!

8th April 2014. Windows Doomsday. XP support ends.

nomorewindows · 2013-02-15 01:33:16

blackout23 wrote:

Yeah hurry up Trent!
8th April 2014. Windows Doomsday. XP support ends.

Hey that's it! There's virtually no migration with Linux. It is practically the same thing it has been since its' inception.

Stone Henge: long time to build, still standing today.

Ford: Fix or repair daily.

Government: The machinery that allows 10 men to do the work of 1.

Nightly build of a program: 1500 lines later, and still the bugs aren't fixed.

United States: Our archaeologists are still looking for clues to try to prove if this civilization did in fact exist many years ago.

Last edited by nomorewindows (2013-02-15 01:42:51)

Trent · 2013-02-15 15:13:09

Sorry, I've been a bit preoccupied with other things like getting a job and stuff. No biggie, I just have to code basically the whole thing. April? It'll be done by March!

Lol. Seriously, I would like to get that project moving again (mostly for my personal benefit) but I think at this point it's going to require a redesign by someone with a little more experience. For the moment I'm using Google webmail, my cell phone and "cat -n .todo" in my .zshrc. Not very sophisticated

smsware · 2013-02-17 08:14:07

Trent wrote:

Sorry, I've been a bit preoccupied with other things like getting a job and stuff. No biggie, I just have to code basically the whole thing. April? It'll be done by March!
Lol. Seriously, I would like to get that project moving again (mostly for my personal benefit) but I think at this point it's going to require a redesign by someone with a little more experience. For the moment I'm using Google webmail, my cell phone and "cat -n .todo" in my .zshrc. Not very sophisticated

I will do it 1st and take all the gratitude Linux society can give!

nomorewindows · 2013-02-24 23:25:35

Linux is missing those elaborate install wizards. You know those ones that require you to hit next, next, next even if you take all of the default settings?

WonderWoofy · 2013-02-24 23:32:56

Trent wrote:

Sorry, I've been a bit preoccupied with other things like getting a job and stuff. No biggie, I just have to code basically the whole thing. April? It'll be done by March!
Lol. Seriously, I would like to get that project moving again (mostly for my personal benefit) but I think at this point it's going to require a redesign by someone with a little more experience. For the moment I'm using Google webmail, my cell phone and "cat -n .todo" in my .zshrc. Not very sophisticated

For the calendar/todo, part (namely the "cat -n .todo"), you should check out "when". It is a calendar program that is only slightly more sophisticated than your simple todo list. If I actually ever used a calendar program, I would totally use this one!

blackout23 · 2013-02-25 08:26:09

nomorewindows wrote:

Linux is missing those elaborate install wizards. You know those ones that require you to hit next, next, next even if you take all of the default settings?

You mean the ones where I have to be careful that I don't accidentally install some browser toolbar? I miss those.

Reminds me of a lecture I attended once. Guy in front of me started his webbrowser (IE) on his laptop. Half of the screen was completely covered with toolbars not kidding. The browser displayed more toolbars than actual webcontent.

Last edited by blackout23 (2013-02-25 08:27:15)

jakobcreutzfeldt · 2013-02-25 10:06:14

blackout23 wrote:

Reminds me of a lecture I attended once. Guy in front of me started his webbrowser (IE) on his laptop. Half of the screen was completely covered with toolbars not kidding. The browser displayed more toolbars than actual webcontent.

Something like this?

Awebb · 2013-02-25 10:29:44

This could reside in the grrrr thread as well, but I have my solutions, so…

1. More GUI loving programmers outside the KDE or Gnome territory. Most of the time I find a GUI tool I like, it either pulls in half KDE/Gnome, looks ugly, is not really intuitive (and therefore no reason to abandon the respective CLI tool) or written in Java (urgh).

1.1. I am talking about PDF viewers specifically. I have tried many of them and only found Evince and Okular usable in the long run. The "zen" faction (zathura, mupdf) are great in terms of rendering speed and precision, but since PDF is such an ugly format, I need way more manual control than those will offer. Especially the lack of a "continuous" viewing mode hits me hard on the netbook. Then there is epdfview, which neither pulls in too many dependencies, nor limits the interface to the minimum, but it has no continuous mode and poppler seems to wet its pants with half of my files on low-power machines. Only Evince and Okular seem to have speed, interface and my continuous mode, but they are tied into their respective DE very deeply, therefore no good candidates for a simple setup.

1.2 File managers and MIME type association is horrible outside complete desktops. I am not sure, why this is such a problem, as there actually is a central institution for file types on the Linux desktop (xdg), but most lightweight file managers seem to prefer to set their own file associations and a lot of desktop applications do not respect it either (especially "nasty" big ones like chromium, thunderbird etc.). Furthermore, the "middle-weight" file manager thunar loves messing up the system because exo seems to override xdg as soon as it is present on the system. I have wasted many hours trying to figure out, how those tools work, until I found mimeo and configured this to be the default in exo (and probably xdg as well). You know… I heard you like abstraction, so I put mimeo on your exo, so you can xdg while you xdg.

I currently ended up using KDE. The small netbook screen I'm currently limited to, as well as my current work flow (my studies require too much work with PDF and graphics to be happy), do no longer play together very well with my simple i3-wm + a bunch of terminals. I would have rather liked to add something to i3 and be done, but I spent many hours trying to find a solution, that does not get in my way. I am just glad, that a) my netbook has enough 3D performance for a seamless KDE experience and b) KDE has configuration options on virtually every inch of the system. At least that side of the spectrum does not need to be abandoned: I have configured kwin for a very manual tiling and all the hotkeys I need are there.

EDIT:

jasonwryan wrote:

Calendar-contact-email integration. This is the single biggest hurdle for getting organizations to move to FOSS desktop productivity tools.

KDE has this, but I'd rather want an interface, so, say, thunderbird can use a central provider.

Last edited by Awebb (2013-02-25 10:33:32)

nomorewindows · 2013-02-25 14:43:42

jakobcreutzfeldt wrote:

blackout23 wrote:
Reminds me of a lecture I attended once. Guy in front of me started his webbrowser (IE) on his laptop. Half of the screen was completely covered with toolbars not kidding. The browser displayed more toolbars than actual webcontent.

Something like this?

But that's all of the "legitimate" ones, just wait until you add the ones that are either invisible to the user and part of some funky BHO exploit. The latter causes IE to perform "better".

anonymous_user · 2013-02-25 16:05:11

Awebb wrote:

Only Evince and Okular seem to have speed, interface and my continuous mode, but they are tied into their respective DE very deeply, therefore no good candidates for a simple setup.
...
I currently ended up using KDE. The small netbook screen I'm currently limited to, as well as my current work flow (my studies require too much work with PDF and graphics to be happy), do no longer play together very well with my simple i3-wm + a bunch of terminals. I would have rather liked to add something to i3 and be done, but I spent many hours trying to find a solution, that does not get in my way.

So would using the Gnome/KDE apps within i3 not be sufficient or would it be too ugly?

Awebb · 2013-02-25 16:11:13

anonymous_user wrote:

So would using the Gnome/KDE apps within i3 not be sufficient or would it be too ugly?

I actually did. While I do not mind configuring GTK3 or Qt to make it pretty, I would certainly mind having too many Gnome/KDE deps on a "lightweight" minimal system, as they are not just made for their respective environments, but made out of the same material. Especially Okular seems to have only a small impact (as in memory footprint) on a KDE system, that already has all those libs loaded for other programs, while a naked system feels the impact way harder.

I think this is the core problem, you can't have bling without bang. Or something… like that. Maybe this is a luxury problem, I have here.

Iranon · 2013-02-26 11:09:17

The same thing bugs me quite a bit too... stark minimalism works well, a full-fat fully-integrated DE works well. Combining stuff I like for a good middle ground is bloody annoying if trying to eliminate major rough edges or disruptive amounts of bloat.
If I understand it correctly, distributions like Gentoo have the infrastructure to make this easier... but Arch seems a happier medium between transparency and convenience otherwise. I'm hesitant to trade in one annoyance on a system I like for other annoyances on a system that's probably too technical for my tastes.

Having said that, that's more of a missed opportunity rather than something Linux is missing compared to other OSes. At least I get the choice to stitch something together.

Trilby · 2013-02-26 12:17:45

If I ever win the lottery (unlikely as I don't buy tickets), I'll start working on TKFDE: the toolkit-free desktop environment.

There is nothing standing in the way of such middle-ground programs from doing just what you want without any of those dependencies - there's just no one writing them. I target most of my hobby coding around this range, to make tools that can be practical replacements (for me) for the big office suite tools without any big dependencies.

chris_l · 2013-02-26 17:10:53

Trilby wrote:

If I ever win the lottery (unlikely as I don't buy tickets), I'll start working on TKFDE: the toolkit-free desktop environment.

You don't need to win the lottery, you can just save money to put something like an store, hire someone else to take care of it, and live from that income. You would need to dedicate some time to check it, etc, but still would be much less time than on a regular day job.

Trilby · 2013-02-26 19:07:30

chris_l wrote:

hire someone else to take care of it, and live from that income.

Well if it's that easy ... *sarcasm*

flipper T · 2013-02-26 19:28:17

Sharks with frickin' lasers on their frickin' heads !

chris_l · 2013-02-26 19:43:38

Trilby wrote:

Well if it's that easy ... *sarcasm*

I didn't say was easy
Saving for that would take some years and lot of effort, but I think it worth it.

Besides, is easier than winning the lottery What can I tell you? it would be nice to have TKFDE

D4ve · 2013-02-26 21:38:41

Trilby wrote:

...I'll start working on TKFDE: the toolkit-free desktop environment.

Just an idea: I think wayland/weston will be the future and at the moment weston does not use any toolkit like gtk or qt. My idea: Modify weston to have server side decorations and you will have a toolkit-free desktop environment, of course you must add a few features (like a shutdown-button), but: why not?

Would be cool

cfr · 2013-02-26 21:47:44

Perhaps you could buy some lottery tickets (or a store) on Trilby's behalf?

Trilby · 2013-02-26 22:01:19

I'm skeptical of wayland/weston's future. But then I was betting against cell phones too some time ago - so you never know.

Xlib also does not require any toolkits. The projects I'm tinkering with now only rely on Xlib and any directly needed library tools (like poppler-glib for pdfs). There is no need for a change to weston to make streamlined programs. We just need more groups like suckless making programs that, well, suck less.

Last edited by Trilby (2013-02-26 22:01:35)

Arch Linux

#126 2013-02-09 00:10:52

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#127 2013-02-10 12:32:42

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#128 2013-02-10 17:02:50

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#129 2013-02-14 21:49:38

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#130 2013-02-14 23:15:31

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#131 2013-02-15 01:33:16

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#132 2013-02-15 15:13:09

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#133 2013-02-17 08:14:07

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#134 2013-02-24 23:25:35

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#135 2013-02-24 23:32:56

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#136 2013-02-25 08:26:09

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#137 2013-02-25 10:06:14

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#138 2013-02-25 10:29:44

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#139 2013-02-25 14:43:42

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#140 2013-02-25 16:05:11

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#141 2013-02-25 16:11:13

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#142 2013-02-26 11:09:17

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#143 2013-02-26 12:17:45

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#144 2013-02-26 17:10:53

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#145 2013-02-26 19:07:30

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#146 2013-02-26 19:28:17

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#147 2013-02-26 19:43:38

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#148 2013-02-26 21:38:41

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#149 2013-02-26 21:47:44

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

#150 2013-02-26 22:01:19

Re: something that you feel linux is missing

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