Guest post by A Fedora user takes a brief look at what he considers 13 of the prime features in the upcoming Fedora 10 release on end of November. “Fedora has many a projects finished or in the queue for Fedora 10. It is a mammoth and obviously unimportant to take all of them out here. So I have sorted some to best of your interests. If you are a developer, then don’t worry. You have your goodie too.“
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.p…
I used to love fedora since it was redhat that got me into linux back in the days…but now these days I seem to get more and more error messages when booting for every new release
It would be quite nice if the feedback was reported to http://bugzilla.redhat.com appropriately. This isn’t a guarantee of fixes but increases the collective chances of the problems getting fixed, quite a bit. Thanks.
pasuspender (or just disabling PA) gets you back the old reliability.
I would be perfectly happy if we could just get the *reliability* of our sound support on Linux back to where it was 2 years ago before I’d ever heard of PulseAudio. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Edited 2008-10-24 22:52 UTC
Ah but see, this is because programmers just can’t resist reinventing the wheel (Linux programmers probably more so than their proprietary software developer counterparts).
It gives them a “new project” to work on, rather than fixing the bugs in the old project. Not that proprietary software is much better, it does the same thing, but for different reasons (profit/marketing). As Linus has said in the past, programmers prefer to work on something new, than do boring things like fix bugs.
The development cycle should work as:
develop project > fix ALL bugs > add feature(s) > fix bugs > add feature(s) > fix bugs and so on and so forth. That’s how it should work.
How it does work is:
develop project > fix a few bugs > add a $hitload more features to make it look better > ignore bugs > add more features > fix a few bugs to keep the users happy > add more features > fix a few more bugs to keep users happy and so on and so forth.
This is a generic comment on programmers, not just Linux programmers.
The old k.i.s.s principle is ne’er the truer.
Dave
develop project > fix a few bugs > add a $hitload more features to make it look better > ignore bugs > add more features > fix a few bugs to keep the users happy > add more features > fix a few more bugs to keep users happy and so on and so forth.
While the process flow you have suggested is common I wouldn’t blame it on the programmers. Adding new features instead of fixing bugs often times comes from a push from the marketing dept. I once had someone look at something I wrote that was 50% faster in loading and the marketing manager said to me: “It needs more zip, sex-it-up, give it sex appeal.” Efficiency falls on deaf ears with marketing types. Believe it or not, but in a lot of software companies engineers don’t get to decide if a bug is fixed or a feature is added instead. Sales and marketing departments often times win and bugs that are easy to fix just flap in the wind. It was one of the reasons I got out of software. Other companies give their engineers more control over the process. In companies making a profit, if marketing can show that shiny gel buttons will increase sales 5% then gel buttons it is.
Edited 2008-10-25 02:13 UTC
And yet the Linux kernel schedule is based upon Linus’ lesson from the old days of multi-year release schedules. If you hold up the inclusion of new code, your devs don’t fix bugs in existing code. They keep writing new code… and new bugs, and/or get *really* mad at the project leader and threaten to quit contributing.
It seems as if FOSS project leaders feel the same pressures from their devs and make the same decisions… possibly for different reasons.
Which matches my observations.
Software is software, whether it is open source or proprietary. The reason for creation is irrelevant, the process is identical. Influencing factors, whilst different, still play a part on determining the shaping of the software.
Marketing departments the world wide are responsible for many lies, a great deal of bad products, and a great deal of software bugs.
I suspect that one would find the number of bugs, and code bloat to have dramatically increased in the Linux kernel, as impact and influence from big iron business started to effect the kernel development process. We no longer have a stable/unstable kernel development path, one which supported the Linux kernel development process for a good number of years. This would have bee no doubt due to pressure from big iron, who didn’t want a stable/unstable moniker to work with, as it woudl be deemed “bad” for the Linux image, and thus effect their corporate images.
It’s one of the reasons why I no longer really like to use Linux – it’s no longer the “people’s” operating system, but the child of corporate interference. Sure, we get some benefits, but I’ll hedge my bets that big iron gets far more benefits out of it than you or me do. SCO was right about one thing – IBM supported Linux to deliberately kill off UNIX and thus it’s opponents like Sun etc. AIX, IRIX, HPUX are all but dead. Sun is barely holding on. Since IBM has so much invested in Linux, and was an early adopter, they stand the most from reaping the benefits of Linux replacing proprietary UNIXes. This is, in effect, no different to Microsoft killing off competing versions of DOS.
It’s interesting, cos Microsoft has control of the OEM market, IBM control over Linux kernel development (well, I’d hedge another bet and say that most of the kernel developers are on IBM’s payroll) and Apple just does its own thing, in a locked, proprietary, closed hardware system. Who’ll get squeezed next?
Dave
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Edited 2008-10-27 08:48 UTC
I would be perfectly happy if we could just get the *reliability* of our sound support on Linux back to where it was 2 years ago before I’d ever heard of PulseAudio. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
That certainly is the problem with new features. With more advanced systems comes complexity. Higher complexity increases interaction problems with supporting libraries and applications (bug fixing). If you are an Ubuntu user upgrade to Intrepid Ibex. The latest update picked up glitch-free Pulseaudio. This solves most of my stuttering sound issues. It is interesting that the latest Pulseaudio is a complete rewrite. The developer says that it is more similar now to the way OS X and Vista manages sound. I just like that it finally works.
I just want to say that more advanced does not necessarily mean more complex.
It would have been nice to have had a nicer introduction to the audio subsystems, their differences and wrapperings, legends of what happened to ALSA’s brood, etc. As it is it’s like I have a cluster of nuked burritos and churros and wrappers to fake takeout with, and I’m going to hand them back to the distro and hope it goes down.
Convenience and Market Domination models are kind of close to call the way you have; just the same it would be enjoyable if there were an actual distro crafting system to manage the risk models in system complexities. As it is, it is hidden in less-inspectable resources (coders) who know what bombs are connected where. Risk checking got a bit more care when VMs became a market with authority.
Even better; get people or bots to take ownership of the bugs! Whether or not the programmer or make manager set to make them, getting a neat pattern bug system and a way to know whether it was fixed beats explicit user test, with bells on.
I should be able to click and have a sprite Bob Villa walk me through connecting 5.1 headphones, then go on to polish up the volume management chain and general offloading of the CPU for full polyphony, poly-channel, metered, mixed and environment-mapped sound.
I’ve noticed that sound stops working in F9 after waking up my laptop. Logging out and logging in or restarting X fixes it, though.
I think this should be foxed in Fedora 10 – previously, PulseAudio was not set to restart when it crashed and you could suffer from a lack of sound. Now it is set to autospawn.
This fixes some issues covering situations where the daemon crashed but that may create other problems.
Is it me, or is this just plain UGLY:
http://blog.taragana.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/82_10.jpg
That looks just as crappy as CDE did 20 odd years ago. Your ordinary average user doesn’t give a **** about the underlying technologies, they care about it working, staying working, and most importantly the looks.
The old saying “first impressions count” is very true.
If it looks like this, send Fedora (and Gnome) to failboat.
Dave
Edited 2008-10-25 00:02 UTC
If you find something not appealing, you can discuss the specific details with the volunteer Fedora art community.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork
Themes like any piece of art are however is a very subjective detail and some people will absolutely love it and others will continue to hate it but fortunately it can changed in a few seconds easily.
Why is every complain reagrding anything opensource meant with “don’t complain file a bug report!” or “well, fix it or contribute your own code/art/whatever”?
This makes one of two assumptions about the person complaining:
A)That they haven’t already gone through with said action
or
B) That if they are just someone interested in USING the software and lack time/expertise to make changes/improvements that their opinions is invalid.
Very annoying and off-putting. Please stop.
How is discussing the problem with the people that actuly can fix it anything lika A or B that you described.
If i dont like how the new version of windows default look is i dont call apple to complain.
I need to call microsoft.
the same with feodora if i dont like the default theme and want it changed i need to talk with the ones that decides how it should look. In this case http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork
seems to be the correct place for that discussion.
You cant expect the devs to search the whole internet for opinions since that would be a huge undertaking annd would leave little room to actually improve anything
In this case, the OP almost certainly has not gone through said action, or s/he’d have mentioned it.
There’s a huge difference between complaining about a default theme (highly subjective) and complaining about a broken application (objective and reproducible). Let’s illustrate:
Scenario A
——–
geek1: “That girl is hideous.”
geek2: “You’re crazy; she is attractive.”
Scenario B
———-
geek1: “foo truncates input at 2400 characters, and here is the proof…”
geek2: “Egads, you’re right.” (or: “Your proof is bogus.”)
Frankly, I thought it was pretty encouraging that OP was referred to an appropriate discussion forum.
Don’t worry, it’s just you. There are better-looking distros, that’s true, but CDE…
Quit trolling, that screen shot looks like CDE about as much as Windows Vista does. Not to mention I don’t think that is the default theme for F10. Even if it is, it doesnt have compiz-fusion running so of course it isnt gonna be fancy.
Tis a screenshot, it’s fair game. It’s PLAIN ugly. Square corners are harsh on the eyes, rounded is far better. As an example
http://www.mie.utoronto.ca/computing/grads/Images/cde-fullscreen.pn…
Sure, it probably can be dolled up and made to look a bit prettier, but still, that’s plain ugly.
Dave
Pretty, Ugly, Aesthetically pleasing, it’s all extremely subjective. Although I agree with you that most people do interpret visual polish and appeal as quality and a reason to use a product or software, almost everyone of those people have a different set of ideals for themselves in visual polish and UI.
For example, the most beautiful desktop to me is a simple one. One panel, easy access to most often used programs, a way to manage open windows, and that’s mostly it. After that comes theme, in which I prefer very subtle coloring and simple backdrops.
Others, however, often prefer to configure everything, to have every option available to fit it how they want, and prefer the visual effects for the “wow” factor.
And as long as operating systems ship with default themes, there will always be arguments about it.
I remember back in the Windows95 days that we used to chide Windows users for their penchant for “playing” with their themes. We valued “getting real work done” instead. That was long before we got themes. Then we went stark raving mad with themes and started bragging, pretty much incessantly, about our configurability and themability. Now we post about how much all that themability increases our productivity.
I still prefer to get real work done. I do not care much about themes.
Not subjective; usability and design is all a dismal science now, sorry. Look in a theatre near you for stories of a once brisk business that rounded window corners gone terribly awry.
I for one welcome our new 27-cornered windows.
I don’t know… the Windows 95/98 look, or “Classic” as it’s known now, probably didn’t have a single curve in sight and I admit… I like it. Especially the Win95 style, which uses a darker gray than newer ones (retroactively named “Standard”). I actually always felt that it was quite pleasing on the eye. I wasn’t happy when they brightened it up, but at least it’s always been an option.
CDE, on the other hand… that one really is a strain on the eyes to look at, and I doubt that I’d be able to bring myself to use it at all. My biggest problem with Fedora’s look is the title bar, the way the minimize/maximize/close buttons look… they just don’t seem to fit in. Still, it’s not even in the same league as CDE…
I kinda like the CDE look actually… It kinda reminds me of Windows 3.1
… Ah, those were the simple days…
I find the huge, coloured window border in that screenshot much more jarring than the lack of founded corners.
Oh, and…
I tend to agree, but the Fedora screenshot you linked *does* have rounded corners (on the titlebars at least).
FWIW, the screenshot looks decent to my eyes (the Fedora screenshot, not the CDE one). The blue could be toned down a bit, the gradient on the active tabs is unnecessary, and I don’t find that the text on inactive titlebars stands out very well, but it looks fairly clean otherwise.
To me Fedora looks pleasant. It’s not that shiny, but I like their minimalistic approach to skinning. Maybe they should provide a few more color schemes though. But I like the blue colaration much more than Ubuntu brown/orange for example.
It is just you, I think.
If you want to be constructively critical, could you elaborate a bit more ? What exactly do you find wrong in that screenshot? Colors, the Fedora F logo, or what exactly? What kind of looks would you prefer Fedora to have? Or maybe you just prefer some other distro or OS to Fedora?
The Fedora screenshot sure doesn’t look even remotely similar to CDE. And you seem trolling only.
When one compares the Fedora screenshot to these other screenshots
http://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/xp/without.jpg
http://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/3.1/fullsize/4.png
personally I cannot find anything particularly ugly in the Fedora screenshot compared to the other two (or actually even so very different from the two others).
I agree on the importance of “working, staying working” part, but – most importantly the looks?? No wise person bases his decision to buy or use some particular product over another on how the products happen to look on a photo only… It is, of course, nice if the product also looks nice but usually many other more relevant criteria are much more important than looks – and especially so if you can also change the looks quite easily.
I suppose you think a crap stain on your wallpaper along with orange and brown everywhere else is just the cat’s meow… It’s a theme bud, go ahead and change it how you like. Personally, I think it looks great.
It is you
what is the difference btw dbus and this AMQP? ..
what can AMQP do that dbus cant or vice versa?
of the two, which one came first and why did those that follow felt the need to start another messaging system?
can these two be merged? both seem to be dealing with messaging, why cant there be just one system and only extended ..this seem to be yet another attempt at having more than one implementation that does the same thing ..forcing developers to choose what system to support and what not to unnecessarily increasing complexity in software development in linux ..
DBus seems to be for messaging within one computer and AMQP is for clusters. I think DBus came from GNOME and AMQP came from the financial community which would explain why they are separate. I’m sure there are feature differences, too, but I don’t know what they are.
Improved shit is still a shit, drop PulseAudio that caused and still causes a lot of problems and use corssplatform OSS4 which just works without several++ userspace layers that does not work …
that is unlikely to happen, since iirc PulseAudio’s author works for Red Hat, and since he seems to be in the position to dictate what is and what isnt, to go into the system
moreover, he has quite clearly expressed his position on OSS4 , which he believes a “fundamentally wrong” design, mainly because:
it does not “allow for virtualization of the sound card” (i have yet to understand the technical reasons behind this, though )
and requires FP computations in the kernel (for inter application audio mixing without a userspace daemon), which “heaven forbids” (again, i still fail to understand why)
Using the ‘pkill pulseaudio’ command enables a working audio system on my install.
There is nothing ‘shitty’ about Pulse Audio. It’s incompatible with applications which access hardware in a way that can’t be virtualized (at least without ugly workarounds which may in turn break some other apps).
Problem here is that older sound systems weren’t designed in a way they could be forward-compatible with redirection needed for software mixing (both OSSv3 and parts of ALSA).
Even OSS4, which many trumpet as a perfect solution, will still introduce small invisible latency for many OSS3 apps, because they normally calculate latency by directly querying hardware buffer pointer. Adding software mixing inevitably makes sound appear on speakers a bit later because you _need_ additional intermediate buffer(s) for it (apps will be redirected to query playback pointer of software buffer thinking it’s a hardware buffer that sound card forwards directly to DAC, and assume there is not latency added afterwards).
I agree with you that it is an advantage to use cross platform sound systems, as it would reduces the work needed to port applications to different platforms.
PulseAudio has been tested on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It should also run on all other POSIX and Windows systems, so in this respect Pulseaudio is an excellent choice.
As I uderstand it pulseaudio could actually use OSS4 (among many others) as backend. Pulsaudio also supports network transparency that not is available in OSS4 alone, so removing Pulseaudio in favour of just OSS4 would probably not be a very good idea.
No it hasn’t. They claim portability on their website, yet trying to actually compile the source for systems other than Linux will fail because assumptions for Linux are made in code, code snippets that simply would need #if-def’ing, yet aren’t.
Edited 2008-10-25 18:43 UTC
Defending PA again:) Although PulseAudio developer was targetting cross-platform support, he is a Red Hat employee now and obviously doesn’t spend time on ports. However he suggests to application developers against using Pulse API directly and promised to provide a cross-platform API that will be sound system agnostic.
You don’t honestly expect this thing to be properly cross-platform, when the developer’s carrying mantras a la “Slowlaris” and “BSD is dead” around. And I don’t consider Windows as cross-platform option, since it is the last operating system on a long list that’d need something like PulseAudio.
Using the ‘pkill pulseaudio’ command enables a working audio system on my install.
FYI, pulseaudio has its own kill command. Just issue pulseaudio –kill. The Glitchfree branch has improved a lot. I used to have to kill pulseaudio and restart it every day. I think I restart it every 2 or 3 weeks now. Much better. Of course, when I was just running Alsa I never had to restart my sound system. Ah, progress, sweet progress.
1) F10’s visuals. Well, it’s GNOME. Deal with it. If you want a different theme or different wallpaper, don’t be crybaby. Change it yourself. If you can’t manage to even do that, you shouldn’t be using Linux in the first place. Seriously.
2) PulseAudio. Well, my Magic 8 Ball has revealed to me that like it or not PulseAudio is here to stay. Let’s face facts, Linux is still back somewhere in the 1970’s when it comes to having a “modern” sound system. PA is our next best attempt at getting it right. Unless you think the perfect sound subsystem for Linux is gonna just fall out of the sky, I suggest you suck it up and get used to it. Maybe in 2 years or so, I’ll be decent enough. Until then, just cope.
Correction:
“Maybe in 2 years or so, *It’ll* be decent enough. Until then, just cope.”
– and maybe in 2 years, I’ll be more decent too
Stop whining about how it looks, the art is not even finisched yet. And hell it’s Gnome/KDE you can change it to your own style…. cheap trolls.
Accept that Fedora is bleeding edge, it’s always first in emplenting new things (not always working good in the first version but …). Let me say:
– networkmanager
– selinux
– pulse
Oh well …