Okay,
Now that I'm thinking of it, and keeping the post to one topic at a
time...here is my next one...
WEB BROWSERS AND PLUG-INS and other related software.
The one thing that causes me to shift over to microtrash more often then not
is reliable feature rich internet utilities. Mail clients are the biggest
problem that forces me to boot over to microtrash. The clients that are
promissing are still in early beta (some in alpha even) and are very buggy.
Balsa is getting better, but kfm has problems. Webcameras...I have C-It USB
camera, but can't get the modules to load and work with it. And even if I
did, I haven't seen any conference softaware to work with it. Browsers:
Sigh...this is a rough one for me. I know that Netscape has been actively
courting the Linux community and has been working on a browser for the
platform for several years now. The problem is, it's buggy and doesn't like
some things like volcanoe chat (which is something I use regularly.) Also,
plug-ins are a major problem. They are not as many as what's available for
microtrash or even mac and what is available is always in beta or is several
versions behind what's availabe for other platforms. News clients are
little better. The default app with KDE is okay, but there is another one
(that I can't remember off the top of my head) that works even better. I
think it's either gtk or gnome...not sure.
Finally mpg and avi apps are really poor in comparision to windows
counterparts. The best one is xTheater and that has problems also. Often
the video is choppy and slow, and sometimes it will refuse to play a file.
And it really doesn't recognize the new codecs that offer better compression
and performance.
As far as a solution to these issues, I don't know. I know that Wine and
one it's child is working on porting over microsoft apps, but I never really
had much success using wine. Perhaps working closer with companies and
devolopers would help the final goal of making more high quality software
available.
B. K. Barley
