Am reading this thread and the varying opinions on Open Source developments with great interest. It's nice to hear when some other users' opinions have some similarities to my own since typically that's been difficult for me to find.
Aleksandar Kuktin wrote: >> Their explanation for that seems to have been "the community will take care of it" - an attitude which speaks volumes about their misunderstanding of the free/open source software culture. I sent in some patches to the GTK project and they weren't really nice about it. I'm not sure if some projects even want patches from the community. At this point, I feel like I'd rather work with alternative software or a fork if developers aren't going to be open to listening to concerns from users (such as bug reports). I keep thinking one of the main reasons Open Source advocates tout it is that they claim Open Source can be less buggy than closed source. There are more eyes looking at the source and thus more opportunity to fix issues. However, if projects won't even bother with patches that don't meet their agenda, how could the software possibly be less buggy than a closed source project? You have the same issue as in a closed source environment, only certain people can fix the source. Of course, you can always fork Open Source it, but then you're no longer necessarily dealing with the developers involved in the original project. Aleksandar Kuktin wrote: >Firefox is already a lost cause, although it never really was a real hardcore > FOSS project, and certainly never was a browser made for Unix. Am curious why Firefox is a lost cause and what possible alternatives there are. I'm not really thrilled with Chrome/Chromium at this point. In trying to increase security, they've made it nearly impossible to run or debug scripts locally on one's machine. There's a long list of developers and users who have written in and asked for a work-around in their bug-tracking system and they've been pretty much ignored. I don't find Chromium a viable alternative for web development. Someone developing a web site needs certain support from the browser. Tools like firebug and ability to run scripts is extremely useful. Also, some support for modern browser functionality (such as certain HTML 5 and CSS 2 or 3 features and JavaScript) is needed. A majority of browsers today are based on trident (IE) on Windows or Wine or mozilla or webkit. So, what's left in browser choices for web developers? Ken Moffat wrote: > I loathe cmake [ reinventing the bumpy wheel of configure, but with >edges instead of the fairly smooth curves, in my biased opinion ] so >I've long since given up on kde. I suppose I'll have to look at mate >and xfce, and wonder how long I'll be able to continue using gnumeric >and abiword. Interesting to hear others opinions on this. I personally felt both cmake and qt do too much to hard-code where they expect locations of files (such as libaries) should be. If you're coming from an enviroment where you value portable apps (such as programs just running from your flash drive), hard-coding file locations isn't a very desirable thing. While most KDE/qt programs do seem to use cmake, I'm running across quite a few qt apps that just use qmake. (Not sure that's all that much better of an option, since you still have hard-coded paths.) I've even run across a few that use gnu autotools. Personally, I've been trying to look into what alternative cross-platform GUI libraries are out there that will work efficiently (even on older systems) and that have enough Open Source applications using them that I can get the tasks I need done with them. So, I've been focusing more on SDL, FLTK and curses based applications in place of programs using GTK or Qt. Fox Toolkit looked interesting as well, but a lot of applications that worked with 1.6 appear to fail to build with 1.7. Still checking if there are other cross-platform GUI options. Some people prefer if all their applications have a similar look and feel, but I'm quite happy to just find lightweight efficient tools that get the job I need done. Don't care what they look like. I also happen to like command line tools for certain tasks and they're usually quite effective for automating jobs. A couple of other options besides Mate and XFCE might be Equinox Desktop Environment and razor. Personally, I'm quite happy with a minimal desktop/window manager environment. I basically just use it for multi-tasking, so I can have several terminal sessions and a decent programming editor open and can cut and paste between them all. Will be interested to hear if other LFS users find useful alternative applications and desktop tools and configurations. Sincerely, Laura http://www.distasis.com/cpp -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
