Effective immediately, the new release of Ubuntu, 17.10, aka 'Artful Aardvark' has been released!
This release will be supported for 9 months (until 2018) for Long Term Support, stick with release 16.04, instead.
Official flavors (e.g. Kubuntu) are also released.
See the above release notes for a full list of changes and where you can get a copy.
[Full disclosure: the majority of SoylentNews' servers run Ubuntu 16.04 LTS though we have taken steps towards moving to Gentoo.]
Also:
The customized version of GNOME that Ubuntu 17.10 uses is very much in the mould of the (now defunct) Unity desktop, so it won't be to everyone's tastes.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Saturday October 21 2017, @04:52PM (78 children)
This is Ubuntu's first release to try to go 100% Wayland, so expect some gui bugs and report them.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday October 21 2017, @05:02PM (5 children)
When i get a new system (i guess i should say, if i ever get a new system at the rate i'm saving) i'll have to try ubuntu out again, for shits and giggles, on a dual-boot.
For now, i'll stay with Arch/Manjaro//i3/budgie/xfce: i need the quickness.
I. still. miss. Corel. linux.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @09:24PM (1 child)
As I recall, that wasn't a Live CD (where everything would run from the plastic disk).
You had to install it to give it a try. 8-(
...and ntfs-3g wasn't working until 2007, so, on an eXPee/NTFS box, you'd have to make a FAT32 partition to use a file with both Windoze and Linux.
What was especially nice about Corel Linux?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday October 22 2017, @10:45AM
It was auto-magical: everything worked out of the box for me. No messing with config files, was pretty.
Basically, the Ubuntu of back then.
It was scary enough for MS to shut it down.
Just....memories, basically. Great memories. And Canadian!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @02:06AM (2 children)
I dual booted my new Windows 10 preloaded laptop a year ago thinking I would switch back to Windows for games. I never did. Now I am working out how I can blat the Windows partition nicely to have another version of Linux on the hardware instead of in a VM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @02:33AM (1 child)
Now I am working out how I can blat the Windows partition nicely to have another version of Linux on the hardware instead of in a VM
I heard that gparted (the GNOME Partition Editor), which comes with just about every Linux distro, can handle the task.
I've also heard that you should only use MICROS~1 tools on MICROS~1 partitions these days.
Feedback from those who who have tried both|either would be interesting.
.
...and is "blat" a new thing in common usage now?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @01:35PM
Sure. Last time I logged back into Windows just to change the partitions without buggering up the whole disk. The Windows partition is reporting as being "locked" (wtf), so right now I am seriously considering just wiping the whole disk and starting again. One partition for Linux daily use, one for Linux 32 games, another for Linux 64 games ((fixing .so issues drove me nuts)), and a blank partition for Windows 7 if ever needed maybe dedicate 70GB for it.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by terrab0t on Saturday October 21 2017, @05:16PM (11 children)
I’ve read that Wayland is not production ready yet. I doubt only six months will change that. I only install Ubuntu’s long term support releases. It sounds wise to skip 18.04 if it’s going to have Wayland. Wayland should be fine by the time 20.04 comes out. I’ll stay with 16.04 until then.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Saturday October 21 2017, @06:38PM (2 children)
Wayland works well right now only if you use gnome or kde (and only use GTK or QT apps - Xwayland adds a bunch more issues). There aren't really any other mature and fully featured DEs/WMs right now, and due to Wayland's design, a less-than-mature option will mean you might not be able to configure your mouse, or copy-paste won't work as expected (or at all!).
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:15PM (1 child)
And ONLY if you have a working xorg stack to handle the hundreds of things wayland still hands off to x. (Especially in KDE).
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/using-linux-with-wayland/ [makeuseof.com]
Even Ubuntu devs were not so certain that Wayland was ready to be the default in 17.10 as little as 3 months ago.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/07/ubuntu-uncertain-using-wayland-default [omgubuntu.co.uk]
In the end it was another forced march decision with project leaders deciding they had to force the issue in order to find all the bugs. Like systemd and btrfs there's not a painfree choice to avoid it till it is ready, (Which won't be for another year IMHO)
And the security we were promised in Wayland is illusional, because wayland simply doesn't allow some operations that many became dependent on, such as sudo of graphical applications. In this regard its still no better than X, so they mask that by forbidding it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @09:59PM
It's ironic we can get more control in X11 via Xpra [xpra.org]. Now, not someday. You can separate things at will, so trusted apps can still work as before (global bindings, screen scrappers, eg) while unstrusted ones can't get out of the box they are put in. Local apps work as fast, same shared mem tricks than compositors.*
Add firejail [wordpress.com] or nsjail [nsjail.com] (new "toy") and the locking gets even better, no filesystem level surprises like touching configuration files of other programs.
Extra bonus: Xpra lets you do non-integer scaling, all old apps can work with HiDPI monitors, new apps can workaround crappy limitations of their toolkits. Check the default keybindings or tweak them to match your keyboard, or launch with script [github.com].
Meanwhile, all the cool kids keep on replanning half of the features and finishing half of that.
*: has graphic tech gone from video cards being accelerators to just dumb framebuffers unless you code your app in something like OpenGL? It sounds a lot like that.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 21 2017, @06:40PM (4 children)
At this point I'm seriously convinced that Canonical has long been infiltrated by Microsoft loyalists and others who don't want it to succeed.
Ubuntu had plenty of chances to be THE Windows killer. It had the chance to usher in Linux as being "ready for the desktop." Then their business decisions were one head-scratchingly dodo-brained misstep after another.
Yeah, Wayland does suck shit. I've tried it. It is bland, buggy, and with all the excitement of a lukewarm bowl of plain oatmeal. Shuttleworth and others like him should be fucking fired.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:27PM (1 child)
At this point I'm seriously convinced that Canonical has long been infiltrated by Microsoft loyalists and others who don't want it to succeed.
Ubuntu had plenty of chances to be THE Windows killer. It had the chance to usher in Linux as being "ready for the desktop." Then their business decisions were one head-scratchingly dodo-brained misstep after another.
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."
There's every indication that Mark is simply incompetent; he got lucky at something back in the dot-com days, and after that has been flailing around with this pet project of his. It did pretty well at first, mainly because there was a serious void in the early/mid-00s of Linux distros that were easy to install and "just worked". But after he succeeded there, it's been screwup after screwup, largely because of 1) no clear strategy for profitability on the desktop, and 2) poorly-conceived and executed side projects like Ubuntu Phone which distracted from the distro, plus 3) wasting resources on stuff like Mir out of either NIH syndrome or trying to get a competitive advantage in phones (again, poorly-conceived, they started way too late to attempt any kind of vendor lock-in tricks). Now he's given up on a bunch of that stuff and gone back to Gnome3, which was a totally stupid idea because Gnome3 is a crap DE built on a crap toolkit that the Gnome devs are constantly mucking with so you can't build anything on it as it's so unstable and APIs are always being deprecated. If he were smart, he would have switched to KDE (which is happy for people to customize it, unlike Gnome), then had his team fork Plasma and make a different version which lets them explore their particular UI ideas, while taking advantage of KDE's stable foundations. Instead, it's more-or-less another me-too Gnome3 distro like all the others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @01:16PM
I agree with what you wrote, but I'll say one thing to defend Shuttleworth - I think he tried to pivot away from what Ubuntu 10.04 was because his grand vision of Ubuntu conquering the desktop wasn't getting anywhere. Users loved it, but the growth of the user base was too slow to mean anything.
I'd argue that the reason Linux is making headway on the desktop today has less to do with improvements in Linux desktop distributions and more to do with Linux adoption through the rest of the technology industry. "Chrome OS is built on Linux. I wonder what Linux is?" "Android is built on Linux. I wonder what Linux is?" "These software setup instructions for my Mac have instructions right next to them for setting up the same thing on Linux. Interesting." "It seems like 30% of the companies in the US are using Linux on AWS." "Microsoft now offers Linux on Windows Azure? Wow, Linux really must be more than just a niche toy for supernerds." "Steam supports Linux now."
But at the time it looked like nothing was working, so he decided to go for radical innovation. He wanted to be the next Steve Jobs. But you can't be Steve Jobs with free software, you need to be a different kind of leader.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @10:28PM (1 child)
To Shuttleworth defense, they did try to develop Mir as an alternative to Wayland... and it failed... ok, nevermind I guess
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 21 2017, @11:10PM
Mir got a LOT of flak, and deservedly IMO: they started development of it *after* Wayland was announced and started its development, so it became in effect a competitor, though Mark later tried to argue that they had different goals. There was every indication that they were doing it because of their phone project, to try to achieve some kind of vendor lock-in there, and it was distracting people (namely toolkit maintainers and application developers) from Wayland, and the feeling was that they should have been contributing to Wayland instead instead of fragmenting desktop Linux even worse.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:30PM (2 children)
Wayland is a big disappointment. It's been under development for almost a decade now! The first release was just over 9 years ago, but it's still not "production-ready" according to many sources.
Why does it seem like everything is going so slowly these days anyway? The difference in computing between 1999 and 2008 is absolutely enormous in every way (and also the difference between 1999 and 1991), but the difference between 2008 and today really isn't much at all. You can point to many other non-computing things and see the same.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday October 22 2017, @12:00AM (1 child)
Enlightenment is moving to Wayland so you know Wayland is awesome. Fuck! I mean not Awesome, because that's all X all the way. Wayland is Enlightened. Yes. That's it, so very Enlightened.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday October 23 2017, @05:31PM
Good to know there will be at least one sane DE available whenever I finally end up making that switch. Unless I jump to a BSD first, which is certainly possible...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by KiloByte on Saturday October 21 2017, @05:39PM (53 children)
Even more of a reason to stay clear. Wayland is pretty solidly in my "do not want" land, as I use "hard-to-discover easter eggs" such as mouse paste [gnome.org] or first-class network transparency. Not to mention Wayland doesn't support most graphics drivers, especially if you go past x86.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday October 21 2017, @06:50PM (46 children)
the MINT alternative is still pretty good.
they are not systemd-free, but they also don't force a lot of ubuntuisms on you. ubuntu has lost their way in lots of areas and mint fixes them up while still being 'mostly ubuntu' (which is good for compat.)
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 21 2017, @07:15PM (10 children)
Mint is fucking horrible. I am going to make it my mission to bash Mint everytime somebody here suggests it.
It is buggy as fuck, GRUB doesn't work with it, the UI is boring as fuck and surprisingly unresponsive considering its simplicity, it crashes. I have no idea why people keep recommending it and especially somebody like you who is a reasonably smart guy.
I would rather run fucking IRIX on decades-old hardware than Mint on a modern i7 machine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @07:49PM (1 child)
...meanwhile, by at least 1 metric, [distrowatch.com] Mint is the most popular distro.
There are millions who say "WFM".
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @08:03PM
yes, those are all the new converts who want the easiest, most polished, windows-like linux they can get. unfortunately, mint is a bit of a turd.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:14PM (5 children)
the UI is boring as fuck
This point is wrong and stupid, simply because there is no "Mint UI", there's 4 of them: KDE, Cinnamon, MATE, and Xcfe. If you don't like one of them, that's fine, but I'm quite sure you haven't tried all four of them and found them to be "boring as fuck".
As for crashing and GRUB and unresponsiveness, I have no idea what you're talking about. I've been running Mint KDE for years now without any such trouble. I can't speak to the other DE choices. And of course it uses GRUB (what doesn't? No one uses LILO any more; that's ancient).
What did you do, try out Mint way back in the days of Gnome2 or something, have some problems, and then continue spouting these obsolete complaints forevermore? Are you going to complain about Ford because of the Pinto too?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:51PM (2 children)
I mostly use Cinnamon (which is the "default" choice), and I can vouch that it still has some problems with stability and polish. It (very, very rarely) crashes immediately after login and switches to a "fallback mode". Restarting the cinnamon process sometimes works, sometimes doesn't...
But my biggest complaint is that the tiny popup that appears when you switch to Japanese input blocks everything else, including opening the application menu. Took me weeks to figure out why the menu would seemingly randomly stop working -.- I blamed it on interface freezes, and it looked like a huge responsiveness issue. Not to mention that the popup also tends to hide the one element on the interface that I'm looking at, or floats over the text cursor itself...
(Score: 2) by rylyeh on Saturday October 21 2017, @10:25PM (1 child)
Mint MATE is quite stable - if uninspiring. No issues for a decade! Before that, Knoppix was my favorite.
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @01:39PM
+1 for Knoppix back in the day :)
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:53PM (1 child)
3 of them are, in fact, boring as fuck; and the one which isn't (KDE) is ugly as fuck with a workflow that seems cluttered and counterintuitive. Nobody should have to spend hours trying to tweek-and-eke basic functionality out of their user interface.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:57PM
Nobody should have to spend hours trying to tweek-and-eke basic functionality out of their user interface.
Then don't. It's fine in its default configuration. There's nothing "cluttered and counterintuitive" about KDE. Maybe a Mac would be more to your liking.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 22 2017, @09:11AM (1 child)
The UI should be boring. I want to be excited about the programs I run, not get distracted by UI gimmicks. The point of an UI is to support you in doing what you want to do, without taking attention away. The best UI is one that you don't really notice.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday October 22 2017, @10:02PM
That's one reason I like i3.
Reason I don't like i3: my memory sucks for remembering some program names.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:26PM (34 children)
Let me know when there's a 'nix that I can install on whatever PC hardware I already happen to have, that has all the drivers available and reasonably bug free, that won't break when I try to do things without being a guru, and that will run all of the Windows CADCAM software that I'm already locked into (OpenGL).
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @09:02PM (33 children)
Let me know when there's a 'nix that I can install on whatever PC hardware I already happen to have
To echo the response to Ethanol-fueled by Grishnakh, you should try a distro from this decade.
(I've never had the slightest problem getting hardware recognized by Linux, going back to my 1st try with KNOPPIX in 2002; everything has always worked out of the box.)
that won't break when I try to do things without being a guru
You're reminding me of my first weeks with Windoze after using DOS for years.
(Everything has a learning curve.)
...and if you can't move from 1 point-and-click interface to another without a lot of hand-holding, just how pathetic are you?
(My move from Windoze to Linux was pretty easy. I even found stuff that was easier in Linux.)
and that will run all of the Windows CADCAM software
I can just imagine you going car shopping.
"Nope. Can't buy that make/model. It doesn't use the same oil filter my current car does."
If you can't get your software vendor to support more that 1 OS, I'd say that your problem is with choosing lousy suppliers with lousy support.
(Same with hardware, if that is actually a problem for you.)
Since leaving Windoze, I'm constantly reminded what an inflexible bunch Redmond's fanboys are.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by mhajicek on Saturday October 21 2017, @10:28PM (32 children)
When I have $60,000 invested in software, I choose a computer and OS based on what will run that software best. Then there are all the part files which cannot convert losslessly (with history and toolpaths intact). On top of that there is no professional grade five axis CAM software for Linux. Therefore unless I change fields, I will be running Windows based software, and my OS must run that software. It's just a bit more involved than using a different oil filter. It's more like buying a car that can't drive on the roads that I need to travel.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @11:28PM (17 children)
Sounds completely backwards to me.
Linux will run whatever software has been ported to it.
Again: Your single-platform software vendors suck.
To give an example, there are thousands of games (a traditional Windoze-only stronghold) that run just fine under Linux.
(It's a fair bet that those vendors (intelligently) started with cross-platform toolkits.)
...and have you even asked your vendors when they will be offering a Linux port of their stuff?
Again: Sounds like you're blaming Linux for lousy support from software vendors.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Sunday October 22 2017, @12:07AM (16 children)
Linux doesn't run the vast majority of useful software for industry and engineering. We are talking about massively complex systems. And no, it's not the fault of the people writing these pieces of software, for the most part. Linux is a massive pile of shit to support a binary distribution on. Part of this is by design - breaking ABIs and a dumb-as-fuck dynamic linking system. So Linux gets garage-tier CAD/CAM/Simulation/Analysis software. I'm not against the free software movement, in fact I agree in principal. But there are very real reasons why Linux won't be taken seriously for anything but coding IDEs anytime soon.
(Score: 2) by rylyeh on Sunday October 22 2017, @02:01AM (1 child)
Bullshit. Those developers want the proprietary lock-in black box they get from windows.
They see 'other' OS's as a risky waste of time and money.
"a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday October 22 2017, @05:58AM
They don't want to spend millions of dollars on cross platform development and support for a tiny niche market. There's a bit more to it than clicking "compile for Linux."
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @02:40AM (10 children)
The moment before the vendor clicked "Compile", it wasn't a binary.
What's keeping them from selecting "Compile as a Linux binary"?
As rylyeh notes, this isn't a choice made to expand the company's user base--which your typical company would like to do.
This choice is about lock-in.
...and the idea of giving money to lazy people doesn't excite me.
Apparently, there are some who feel that subsidizing sloth is something other than a negative incentive.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday October 22 2017, @05:54AM (9 children)
If cross platform graphics support is so easy, why wouldn't everyone do it? The fact is that you can't just recompile Windows software to run on Linux. Do you know anything about how professional grade software is developed? Especially software that's been continually added onto since 1980, and still contains code that was written for DOS? They would have to start over from scratch writing with cross platform in mind, which is not something they'll spend tens of millions of dollars doing just to appease a tiny niche market.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @08:23PM (6 children)
Now, see.
You started from "Windoze software" and I started from "software".
cross platform graphics support
Games have already been mentioned.
Your apps are more graphics-intensive than games??
I'm not buying that for 1 second.
Again: This is about sloth and lock-in.
Your excusing your lazy, greedy vendors shows how easily you allow yourself to be led around by the nose.
Again: I doubt that you have even broached the subject with your vendors.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday October 22 2017, @08:39PM
I have asked, and there is no vendor of professional grade five axis CAM who is willing to consider developing for Linux. Not one. Why is this my fault again?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday October 22 2017, @08:58PM (4 children)
I forgot to address your other points. Yes it is more graphics intensive, just in a different way. It's not worried about fancy visual effects, but representing a model which may be several feet across with a facet every .002" or less is pretty intensive. And all the software that currently exists in the field was written to use the Windows API, with the exception of the older DOS code that they're still using. Unless someone is willing to pony up a few tens of millions to start over from scratch this is what there is.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @10:09PM (3 children)
If you're trying to impress me, you're failing.
Going in a different direction, but on a related theme, I remember DJ Delorie (a developer of the gEDA suite) mentioning how for laughs he had demonstrated that, by tweaking a parameter in the setup file, the software would (assuming that you have enough RAM/virtual memory) lay out a printed circuit board that was 64 feet by 64 feet.
There's nothing special about software for which you have to pay a license fee again every year.
I remember Terry Porter regularly posting a link to photos of his latest FOSS-created PWBs at sci.electronics.design back around the turn of the century.
FOSS has been making money for pros for a long long time while preserving their freedom.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday October 23 2017, @08:50AM (2 children)
There's absolutely nothing special about it, except that there are zero viable alternatives in the real world. If it's so easy, why is the best free CAM only passible for 3 axis hobby use? Why can't it be on par with the software that's had hundreds of millions of dollars poured into it over almost fourty years of continuous development and improvement?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @09:39PM (1 child)
I've pointed to other folks with needs that they filled from within their own ranks.
Someone saw a lack of Free(dom) Software for a particular set of tasks and set about filling the void.
(In the FOSS world, we call it "scratching an itch".)
At $60k per individual, how many of you in that field would it take to commission a cross-platform FOSS app?
The narrowness of your vision is disappointing.
Techies are supposed to be problem solvers and you guys instead just bend over and take it.
...and in my field, as alluded to, several proprietary products have had changes to their licenses.
Others have been bought by a competitor and abandoned, crippled, made spyware, and/or increased in price.
Keep your fingers crossed that none of that happens to your single-platform proprietary apps and you then have to start spending buckets of money all over again and learn an entirely new UI.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday October 23 2017, @10:41PM
My business is machining parts, not writing software. You're proposing that instead of buying software that I can use right away, I set aside all of that capital for a decade while someone tries to remake something equivalent? That's horrible business sense. How about this: your car breaks and you need an immediate replacement. Take the money that you could use to buy said replacement, and instead give it to a group of people who may or may not develop a usable replacement in a decade. In the mean time you walk.
No. If Linux wants to replace Windows it will need to run software that was written for Windows. It's this "No, you come to me" attitude that's keeping Linux from succeeding.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday October 23 2017, @03:48AM (1 child)
If you start with a Windows-only codebase, yes.
If you start and use something like Qt, then porting to Linux becomes easy.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday October 23 2017, @08:40AM
That's the thing. ALL PROFESSIONAL GRADE 5 AXIS CAM IS WINDOWS CODE BASE!!! All of it. All. Of. It.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @12:21PM (1 child)
Bullshit. If you are making a binary-only distribution, you just have to ship all your libraries with your binary and set your library load path accordingly. That's already the standard Windows way of doing things for the most part.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @08:48PM
There's fat binaries as well: Compile in all the dependencies.
This makes it possible to e.g. run very old apps under newer versions of Linux.
It also gets rid of the .deb|.rpm|many distros "problem".
(...and newer packaging paradigms have already made mention of this an anachronism.)
You can also put the fat-binary app on a thumbdrive and take it with you from Linux box to Linux box.
This sort of thing is done for Windoze-compatible (FOSS) apps over at PortableApps.
Those apps don't require installing DLLs or modifying the Windoze Registry.
Again: Having the source code available makes this possible for those devs.
Again: Closed-source proprietary apps always come in last when it comes to freedom for the user.
People who hold up their closed-source single-platform apps as some kind of shining example are the kind of people who would point to the chains their slave masters put on them and call that jewelry.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @01:26PM
I think you're grossly overstating the difficulty of writing cross-platform software that runs on Linux. Considering the fact that a loosely affiliated group of volunteers has tens of thousands of working software packages that build from source on Linux, and most of the fucking internet runs off it, I would say supporting it isn't especially difficult.
The real problem is simply legacy code. If some company made the completely reasonable decision to use Visual Studio 6 or similar to start writing their colossal piece of software on Windows, and fifteen years later it's a colossal Frankenstein of unbelievably complicated code, then there is simply no business case to port it. Most companies still use Microsoft Windows on the desktop. No sane Chief Financial Officer is going to greenlight a project to do a clean rewrite in cross-platform tools when the Return On Investment (in the form of new customers who will run the new application from Linux) is negative. And to be clear, I'm not criticizing companies, Microsoft, or Visual Studio for having huge and complicated legacy apps. If they had started out writing the software for OS/2, OS 9, OS X, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 1 the codebase would be every bit as enormous and complex today and a clean cross-platform rewrite would be every bit as impractical and financially unsound.
Your industry is stuck on Windows for legacy reasons. It's not good or bad, it just is. The best I can do as an FSF member is support the development of fully free software alternatives to the software you're using. But it's awfully difficult for the free software community to put together something that is probably quite literally almost an order of magnitude more complicated than the Chromium project.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @02:19AM (11 children)
It's more like buying a car that can't drive on the roads that I need to travel
No. It's more like a company saying "We'll make oil filters for Fords but not for Chevys."
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday October 22 2017, @05:44AM (10 children)
Since the software is several orders of magnitude more expensive than the OS, that's more like "No, we won't change our Ford to use a Chevy oil filter."
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @08:13PM (9 children)
If you approach your vendor with "I already have a license and would like to switch that to Linux; I'm willing to pay a small processing fee." and they say "No", then, again, your software vendor sucks.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday October 22 2017, @08:37PM (8 children)
Then all vendors of professional grade CADCAM suck by your definition, as well as most software vendors in general.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @09:42PM (7 children)
The US Army developed their own CAD software (BRL-CAD) and made that GPL.
...so, no.
There's a bunch of pros who value their freedom and don't chain themselves to closed-source proprietary apps.
FreeCAD, LibreCAD, OpenSCAD, or QCAD are more examples of FOSS software that does all that they need (blue in the License column). [wikipedia.org]
At the Linux Mint forum, I used to regularly see posts by (now-retired) architect vrkalak, noting that he was a FOSS-only guy. [google.com]
I used to read sci.eleectronics.design regularly and there was a contingent of my compatriots who used (FOSS) gEDA or KiCAD.
Those did all that they needed, making them lots of money while being gratis and libre.
N.B. At one time, I used (proprietary) Cadsoft EAGLE, but the bastards have since put DRM in that (and they don't mention their evil in the license).
I've had my fill of proprietary software and the assholes who produce/market/concoct licenses for it.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday October 22 2017, @09:48PM (6 children)
Not one word in that whole message had anything to do with professional grade five axis CAM.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @08:43PM (5 children)
Yeah, that's right, 5-axis CAD/CAM is THE killer app that is keeping 90% people tied to windows. Sort of related, I tried to get Grandma off of her Win10 box but she had sunk too many resources into her nonlinear hydrodynamic simulations of her tea kettle that she wouldn't dare consider it.
Fifteen or so years ago, there were a bunch of tech-scared pussies on Slashdot and other places that tried to be all Linux hip, but didn't have the balls to actually try it out. It was always something to the effect of "Man, I'm dying to ditch Windows and run GNU/Linux, but I'm really stuck against my will because I absolutely NEED it to run Quicken, but FOSS all the way!" (Half of the idiots who insisted on "GNU/Linux" were clueless rebels without causes, and the other half were posers who thought adding the "GNU" gave them instant FOSS cred)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @10:31PM
Fifteen or so years ago, there were a bunch of tech-scared pussies on Slashdot and other places that tried to be all Linux
So, around 2002.
Quicken of that vintage runs via WINE according to my research. [google.com]
One wonders what WINE support was like for that at the time.
I would have linked to CodeWeavers' page but, since the last time I visited them, their pages have taken to requiring JavaScript.
Even after taking it to archive.li, they're using emojis or a font that I have no interest in installing--rather than plain text, as intelligent people would have used.
...and that was after archive.li downloaded a shitload of webfonts.
Just pathetic.
idiots [...] posers
Back then, they also didn't have AlternativeTo. [alternativeto.net]
{Rodney Dangerfield voice} I tell ya, things were tough back then.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday October 23 2017, @10:50PM (3 children)
Am I talking about 90% of users? No. I'm talking about my needs. I need professional grade five axis CAM, or I'm not in business. Said software ONLY exists as Windows software, and no matter how much I might like to I cannot afford to pay a team of developers to redo fourty years of development from scratch and wait for the possibility that they might succeed.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday October 24 2017, @02:41AM (2 children)
Just so you don't think we're a deaf echo chamber, I have the same issue working with multi-axis robots and welding equipment. The utilities and even some of the robots themselves run windows. At least some of the newer welding equipment has migrated away from the Windows binary configuration utilities to providing a HTTP interface. I think the whole 32/64 bit Windows XP/7/8/8.1/10 thing got to them and R&D decided it was easier to build a cross platform website than support all the permutations of Windows. The problem is these companies building industrial tools are very much Windows shops with no interest/experience in embedded Linux or open source. Then only headway I've made is discussing the permissive licensing models like BSD rather than reselling Windows licenses such it is such a PITA.
As a customer, the other thing you can try is require your vendor to agree to an impossible SLA that only allows for a 2-hour down time while waiting for parts, like what IT often requires. They will tell you it is impossible, because it really is unless you're Dell. The key is the next step, you'll provide the hardware and OS and you will maintain that, but the vendor must supply a version of their application for the platform you choose. You'll have to compromise, and so will they, but that might get you closer to the OS of your choice. If anything, that could at least get you off of Windows and onto something better, like OS2/Warp (I'm looking at you, CX3010 [ebay.com]).
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @04:33AM (1 child)
Yup. I've said similar things WRT OS support and RFQs for hardware.
...and if you never let your suppliers know that you are not contented with the available choices (an OS that is spyware; an OS that is a malware magnet; an OS that requires you to wait until the 2nd Tuesday of next month for security patches--if then), you can bet that nothing will EVER change for the better.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:32AM
I and others have let them know. They don't care. None of them has motivation to do it unless a competitor does it first, and nothing you or I can say will change that. As I said, they're still using DOS code from 1980, with thousands of layers of duct tape on top. They will not rewrite from scratch to appeal to a tiny niche market. If Linux wants to be viable in my field it must run Windows programs period.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday October 23 2017, @03:45AM (1 child)
$60k: so you mean cheap software?
I work in an industry where a single seat can cost $500k to $1M and more.
None of that high end software runs on Windows. It never has. There was a transition from Unix (mostly Sun) to Linux as Sun dropped into irrelevance and Linux on x86_64 became available. Before that, it ran on VAXes or IBM mainframes.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday October 23 2017, @08:44AM
If you pay a million, there's a good chance your vendor cares what you think. No CAM vendor cares about what any individual customer wants, they only care about the big picture and the bottom line. Reprogramming from scratch to add Linux support doesn't support that.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday October 21 2017, @06:54PM (3 children)
holy shit, that guy thinks that 'middle button mice are rare' and its an 'edge case'??
damn. go to macOS if you don't like extra control on a mouse (I can never use those dumbed down macs).
windows also seems to not want to use a middle mouse button.
I primarily buy ONLY thinkpads for laptops since they have the middle mouse button on many of the business class systems.
going to a 2 button mouse, after over 20 yrs of using 3 button mice - that's just absurd. that guy's an idiot (or a kid; same thing, sometimes).
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 21 2017, @07:10PM (1 child)
The cocksucker who thought a no-button mouse was a good idea should be strung up with one and hanged. I once had to do a temp gig managing a lab full of Macs, all of them with the no-button mice, and it was by far one of the most infuriating experiences of my life.
Apple == annoying homosexuals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @05:56PM
I wanted to mark your post insightful. I hate no-button mouses with a passion. But you seem not to be able to help yourself and had to end the comment with some weird, bigoted remark about OS's and sexual predilection. Just... odd.
Seek help.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:18PM
damn. go to macOS if you don't like extra control on a mouse (I can never use those dumbed down macs).
Gnome3 seems to really appeal a lot to people who love Macs or are admirers of them. The mindset is exactly the same: "you will use *this* workflow that we have decided is best for you, and you will not deviate from it, because we developers know better about how you should use your computer than you do." Except I think even Macs have a little more configurability than Gnome3. Gnome3 users like being condescended to.
windows also seems to not want to use a middle mouse button.
For copy and paste, no, that's purely a Unix/X11-ism. However, many applications in Windows happily use the middle button. Firefox, for one, lets me open links in new tabs right out-of-the-box with the middle button in Windows (not sure about Chrome, but I think so).
(Score: 4, Informative) by Bot on Saturday October 21 2017, @10:24PM
> as I use "hard-to-discover easter eggs" such as mouse paste
That link to the gnome wiki is APPALLING.
Let's see good ol' X with a password unintentionally selected and then exposed by mouse paste, behold:
•••••
such insecure, much info, wow
Note I did it through the revolutionary use of both trackpad buttons emulating the missing middle button (BTW I have a lenovo, it has 2 fucking middle buttons, one over one below the trackpad, it must be an obscure brand to gnome devs huh?)
Let me also show you my personal and biased desktop productivity index, in easily understandable bar chart format
Mac(system 9) :####################
Mac(osX) :##################
Windows :###
Linux :##
Linux + mouse paste :##################################################
Let me also show you how many different clipboard items I usually need at the same time
1 ##########################################################################################
2 ###
3+ #
guess what, I get the first item by selecting, the second by ctrl c, control shift c. If you want to see info leakage go see that clipman thing (if it is gnome's, I have it on xfce)
What's gnome devs' ideal of desktop interaction? I thought the macintosh, but it must be the playstation.
Yeah yeah the adage is, they are devoting their free time, if you don't like what they do don't use it. I don't. Long live xfce. I don't believe in incompetence either. Incompetents get it right 50% of the time.
Anyway it's not their fault, it is ubuntu integrators'. But then again, ubuntu is the distro that once ditched gimp and kept a 50mb note taking app written in mono on their CD. I got back to debian for that very reason. Pessimism pays (sometimes).
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 22 2017, @09:01AM
Mouse paste is a hard-to-discover Easter egg? Actually it took me years to find out that it was not the only way to do Copy/Paste under X.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @06:17PM (2 children)
Not just Wayland, but also systemd... The rats have escaped the lab!
If you don't use Slackware, the one true Linux (though BSD is even more UNIXy), you're totally wack...
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday October 21 2017, @06:29PM (1 child)
been using devuan on one of my laptops, lately. with some help and tuning, its been ok. and systemd-free, too.
usb camera was not working OOTB and needed lots of backports, but it was about an hour of stackoverflowing/etc and I had all the backports I needed to get 'cheese' (etc) working. that was the only real issue (3d gfx libs and drivers).
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 3, Informative) by jmorris on Sunday October 22 2017, @04:56AM
I had to Google up some magic (rebuild three packages) to get MATE working on a Thinkpad with power management. But it has been a year now and Praise Bob it 'just works!'
Devuan is the answer to "What the Hell happened to Linux? How do I get a traditional distro back?"
And if Stable is too old for ya, my test VM install of Ascii finally updated cleanly this weekend so they solved the problem with rsyslogd. With luck that will roll on out as "ready for production" soon.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Sunday October 22 2017, @01:30PM
This simply isn't true. I'm sitting here on a fresh install of 17.10 and the default installation includes X:
It even has to option to start the default desktop environment with X right from the login manager if you prefer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @03:54AM (1 child)
Stepping away from Unity is good as Unity made myself and many others step away from Ubuntu. Also good to see Wayland coming into use. But Artful IS the first, so bugs will be found. I think a massive priority will be given them as 18.04 is an LTS release. I tend to stick with those releases for stability and just plain less admin work.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday October 23 2017, @04:42AM
I'm honestly glad these changes came now instead of the LTS. It lets the bugs get sorted out and prevents the long term support of bad implantation choices.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday October 21 2017, @05:31PM
The new release has been...... wait for it...... released!
Thank you to all the Wayland testers, I hope it goes well. If I hear really good things I might upgrade this 15.10 to 18.04.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @05:43PM (5 children)
The Windows10 of Linux distros
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @07:45PM (2 children)
The April 2016 release disabled the Ubuntu Shopping Lens by default. [google.com]
It was something they tried and they responded to the negative feedback appropriately.
Get over it already.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @08:34PM (1 child)
fool me once, shame on ... uhm... you can't get fooled twice
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @09:42PM
Dubya didn't get the old saw right and he didn't remember the song lyrics [songlyrics.com] correctly either, but he got closer than you did. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @12:57AM (1 child)
Nothing ever anywhere is comparable to Windows 10. Even a badly broken Ubuntu is paradise. An early 80's TRS-100 running CP/M is better than Windows 10. A ZX-80 hooked to a TV is an improvement over Windows 10. The only thing that could be a bigger abomination than Windows 10 is whatever the hell Microsoft fart up after it.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday October 22 2017, @05:00AM
No. A TRS-80 better than Windows 10? Yea, it actually does something useful and doesn't betray you. A ZX-10? I played with one of those once. Oh Hell no.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @07:54PM (4 children)
Having come back around to Artful Aardvark, here's a memory test:
Among the alliterative pairs, which letters were used twice and which weren't used at all the first time through the alphabet?
To ask it a different way, what were the names of the first 4 releases?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @01:00AM (3 children)
So the 18.04 LTS (which I would wait for and not install betaware) will be codenamed Bashful Bear or Basking Baboon? Followed by Cunning Centipede, Darting Deer, ...
(Score: 2, Funny) by DECbot on Sunday October 22 2017, @03:51AM (2 children)
Barfing Butterfly
Crapping Camel
Domineering Donkey
Eloping Earwig
Ducking Ferret
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @06:05PM (1 child)
ucking rog?
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday October 24 2017, @01:58AM
The lawyers say we have to keep Kermit out of it. Don't want to give them the idea that there's royalties to be collected if they send in the goon squad.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base