Its not Rev's fault that Linux has small market share. No, of course not. But Richard, you cannot seriously be arguing that it is either sensible or acceptable to release poor quality software as long as the target markets are small? As to its being the same half dozen people. Well, maybe. How many people on the list are exclusively using Rev on Linux?
Rev's problem seems to be that it has already made the decision to have a Linux offering. So it has to make it a good quality one. Our task is not to raise the market share of Linux in order to motivate it to improve its offering. Our task may well be to try to help Rev in making their offering better by testing, inputting, even contributing if we are able. I will do what I can if its needed. But I'm not going to accept that because my platform has low market share right now, I have no right to expect a quality product until it rises. Fewer features, maybe. Those that it has must work. Richmond, my suggestion to anyone testing Rev on Linux is to get as close to bare metal as you can. Slackware, which I do not use myself, is the closest in this respect. If it fails on that, you can be absolutely sure the problem is with the app, not with some tweak of packaging. My second suggestion is to use the most stable, if not exactly leading edge, distro you can find, and that is Debian Stable. It is the most tested and scrutinized one there is. The reason is, then you can be pretty sure that bugs you encounter are not coming from your distro. Debian Stable by the way is also not what I use myself. I know that many people like and use Ubuntu in various versions. What we are looking for however is not something that pleases us. We are looking at a tool for diagnosis of the extent of problems in what is reported to be more or less buggy software. So we need to eliminate as far as possible any suggestion that there is something about our distribution which is causing our problems. The closest thing there is in the Linux world to an unproblematic distribution, though its not one I myself want to run every day particularly, is Slack. It will do the job we need. No-one can seriously say, if Rev has a problem on a basic install of Slack, that there is some problem with the distro or setup. If its a decent Linux app, it will run properly on Slack. Debian Stable is a close second in this respect. It is the same reason why, in the present state of affairs, I would avoid testing on KDE4. People may like KDE4 a lot, but up to now, if you had a problem, it was very difficult to pin down between it and the application. This is horses for courses. The problem now is eliminating variability and tying down the problems. Richard's advice is load it up and use it. Yes, I agree, but not casually. do it in a disciplined way. And on a modern machine with a modern sized screen. Get someone to use it in native mode, not in a VM, and on a full time exclusive basis. Do it professionally. We can all potentially gain from that. I suspect that quite a few of the quality problems here come from excessive reliance on testing on Ubuntu running on Parallels. I use VMs, they are wonderful. But they are not the real thing. I would never have found the screen resolution and printing problems on my VMs, because I run them in a window with different resolution settings from the primary machine. There's lots of stuff like this. If people have not found it, they have not done enough with VMs. There's a ton of problems out there, waiting for you, at the interface between a real OS and real hardware, which you will not find with the virtual hardware on the VM. -- View this message in context: http://n4.nabble.com/RunRev-and-Linux-tp1835808p1836199.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
