On Thursday 10 April 2008 14:12, Guillaume Laurent wrote: > Chris said the same thing, and I think you're both mistaken. Your > arguments, "almost there", "beginning to work in <whatever domain>", > or "depends on the right distro" (so commonly used it's almost said as > a reflex), are the same I've always heard, and used myself, for almost > as long as I've been part of the Linux community. I'm pretty confident > you'll keep on using them for a long time.
You haven't noticed the big developments in multimedia on Linux over the last two years? Suffice to say that currently the average user can do things out of the box that just weren't possible two years ago (eg Jost/Jucetice, for VST hosting). Certainly some may not *yet* be packaged up as neatly as one would like, but then look at graphics software on Linux over teh previous two years. This was limited to the GIMP a few years ago; now we have Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Synfig - all of them apps that are in the ballpark with proprietary apps (and Google has recently committed to getting Photoshop CS running on WINE - not ideal, but a sign of the times). So this is not a platform that is stymied on the desktop - if anything, the momentum is now increasing. So I still find it an ironic time to give up. > The DIY approach is the reason why Linux won't ever reach outside of > geek-land. And it's an unfixable problem since it's a direct > consequence of its very nature. As for "catching up fast", that's also > an old argument, and yet Linux still has less than 1% of the desktop > market share. Looking at OS X, I don't see any catch up, quite the > contrary. It's only DIY if you want to do something a little out of the ordinary, which is where multimedia still is to some extent. But even here the type of DIY has changed - a couple of years ago it meant sawing your own planks from a log; now it's more like going down to the lumber yard and buying them. And "catching up fast" is not pie in the sky - I have an Asus eeePC, a huge hit, and it runs Linux out of the box. That's over 300,000 Linux users right there - a few will have put Windows XP on, but not all of them. And what about all the other new PCs in that form factor that are lined up for release? Virtually all of them will be running Linux, for very good reasons. Even if the majority of people put Windows XP (an end-of-lifed distro) on them afterwards, they will have been exposed briefly to the interesting equation "computer != OS". Incidentally, I don't believe we'll see OSX on many of these, even as a secondary install - I wonder why? > As jwz said, "linux is free if your time has no value". I agree that there is probably a bit more fiddling involved - my DVD would probably have been easier to do on iMovie. Until ... oops, my son was doing a short film on his iMac two months ago, and needed German subtitles. Can't do those in iMovie. Find subtitle package - hmm, another £20. The dickens to use, took 3 hours to encode the titles onto the film, and ... yikes, interleaving artefacts all over the place. Hmm - how to fix this? Not sure really - the app doesn't really tell you what it's doing, and there are no ways to tweak it (eg by using a different set of command-line switches). So we used quite a bit of time anyway, paid for the privilege, and are not much further forward. I'm not sure how that is better than the Linux approach, where I'm still working on subtitles, but where at least there are options. And "free", of course, relates to more than just cost - lock-in can be costly too, but you just don't realise it until further down the line. While on the subject of the iMac, I might as well say that the build quality leaves a lot to be desired. My son's iMac is 15 months old, and the keyboard has already had to be replaced (I have keyboards here that are 7 or 8 years old, and working fine), the DVD drive refuses to spit out the disks (I caught him last week holding the iMac up and shaking it to make the disk fall out!), and one of the clasps for the memory snapped off when we were upgrading it (I have worked with umpteen PC mobos, and *never* had something like that happen). So we're talking here not only about costly apps and proprietary lock-in, but also about a company that is charging top whack for pretty average gear. I don't mean to be critical of what is presumably a well-thought out decision on your part, but I think it's important that this ML (which is a place of record) doesn't give the impression to future readers that it's OK to undersell Linux (and especially RG). -- Pob hwyl / Best wishes Kevin Donnelly www.klebran.org.uk - Gwirydd gramadeg rhydd i'r Gymraeg www.eurfa.org.uk - Geiriadur rhydd i'r Gymraeg www.rhedadur.org.uk - Rhedeg berfau Cymraeg ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
