Linux - Software that doesn't deliver

[Frank Bright]

Thanks for sharing your real life experience on professional works.

Much appreciated.

You're welcome! Thanks for reading my post. I have a couple of qualifiers I
need to add:

- I stand corrected on saying there are not templates for On-CD Printing in
the Open Office Drawing program.
Turboprint mentions them in their help section. There are templates both
for Epson and Canon On-CD printing. So I may just give this a shot in the
next week.
- In terms of Macromedia (now Adobe) software, the whole Macromedia Studio
MX program (includes Flash MX, Fireworks MX, Dreamweaver MX, Freehand MX)
runs well in CrossOver in Linux. CrossOver is a windows emulator program -
CrossOver is the pay-for version, while 'Wine' is the free version. Note
here: I refer here only to Studio MX, NOT Studio MX 2004. Studio MX 2004
does NOT WORK in Linux.
- Adobe Photoshop 7.0 works well in CrossOver.

Thanks, Frank

 

[Lang Murphy]

Thanks to anyone who read this long post,...Frank B.

www.frankbright.com

Frank,

Great post. Your detailed reasons as to why you find nix a hard row to hoe,
so to speak, indicate to me that you've spent far more time trying to get
nix to work for you than I have spent trying to get it to work for me. And
that's the point I made earlier in this thread... nix takes too much time
from one's life if one has issues with it. Sure, do email and surf the web
and you're a happy camper with nix.

I've been playing with FF for the last week or so and I'm having problems
just posting to ng's. Is it the ng app I'm using? Dunno. I'll admit the
folks in alt.os.linux.ubuntu are attempting to assist, but, boy, it's taking
30 minutes out of my day, each day, just to try and get a ng reader working
as expected. Well, sorry to say, but that's too much time in my book.
Especially for such a "basic" function.

Anyway, thanks again for the post... I know, as you said, you're OS
agnostic. I consider myself to be OS agnostic too... but when I run into the
kinds of problems I've run into with trying to get nix distros "usable,"
even for the most basic of operations, then it's back to XP or Vista for
me...

Lang

 

[xfile]

Hi Frank and Lang,

Thanks for the updates and I sincerely appreciate people like you who are
kind enough to share your knowledge and skills with us.

I see myself as a firm believer in technology and a practitioner at the
same, and I always feel sad for people wasting so much time on debating and
defending which technology and/or product is the best, in real life as well,
and forgot about why we use technology in the first place.

Again, thanks for your kind sharing.

 

[DanS]

Only if you want to see animated ads on every web page you look at. I
don't so I don't need Flash either.

As a note Mike, for people using FireFox, there is a great extension called
AdBlockPlus.

What this extension does is filter out (from what I've seen) just about
all ads from a webpage. It will then even collapse the page over where the
ads were and you never even know they were there.

 

[Stephan Rose]

Frank,

Great post. Your detailed reasons as to why you find nix a hard row to hoe,
so to speak, indicate to me that you've spent far more time trying to get
nix to work for you than I have spent trying to get it to work for me. And
that's the point I made earlier in this thread... nix takes too much time
from one's life if one has issues with it. Sure, do email and surf the web
and you're a happy camper with nix.

I've been playing with FF for the last week or so and I'm having problems
just posting to ng's. Is it the ng app I'm using? Dunno. I'll admit the
folks in alt.os.linux.ubuntu are attempting to assist, but, boy, it's taking
30 minutes out of my day, each day, just to try and get a ng reader working
as expected. Well, sorry to say, but that's too much time in my book.
Especially for such a "basic" function.

Well Lang, honestly...I do think the problem resides on your servers end,
not with Ubuntu nor Pan. The error you are seeing *is* a news-server
returned error and not an application / os specific error. Now you might
not encounter the error with OE, but there's no reason to say that you
might not encounter the identical problem with a different newsreader
under windows.

--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6

å›ã®ã“ã¨æ€ã„出ã™æ—¥ãªã‚“ã¦ãªã„ã®ã¯
å›ã®ã“ã¨å¿˜ã‚ŒãŸã¨ããŒãªã„ã‹ã‚‰

 

[Stephan Rose]

I'm a technological agnostic, so I go for what works and runs well. I am a
dual-booter. (Vista/Mandriva & XP/Ubuntu Studio) That said, I do identify
with the author of this forum, although I won't get into dismissing Linux
the way he seems to do. I try to keep an open mind, so...

I've been fooling around with Linux for 3 to 4 months now. Ubuntu IS easy
and I've learned a lot from it. And while I am grateful to Ubuntu for
helping me enter the Linux world, I must say this in all honesty: Ubuntu is
UgLy!! (Studio is a lot better) Please, get a web designer in here fast, a
color coordinator, anything !! And for those who love the 'Eye Candy'
argument, since when do people NOT care how their OS looks and operates? It
IS important, especially if I'm staring at it for 2+ hours a day. Sure, I
can customize my desktop in Ubuntu Feisty, but there's only so far one can
go unless you use Compiz or Beryl, and that software is still very much in
the beta phase.

Beryl actually works very well on a standard setup. It gets a bit
difficult though with my dual screen setup at home, which will be
addressed with the next major version release though.

That said, I personally find Ubuntu Studio to be absolutely hideous! I
think it's tough to make a UI uglier than Ubuntu Studio. Seriously....it's
way way way way way too dark. I have it running on my laptop and I don't
even wanna look at it for more than half an hour at the most.

User interfaces are very dependent on perspective. What I find ugly you
find great looking for example. =)

No single UI will ever please everyone. That's though the nice thing about
linux that you *can* choose the UI you like! Unlike windows where you
either like MS' latest or are pretty much screwed if you don't.

I believe the predicament of Linux is not entirely Linux's fault - in other
words, combine an Open Source Philosophy with a free market and mix in
intellectual property and stock shareholders and you get Linux's justified
feeling of alienation from a market that only cooperates when it has profits
coming in as a result. As a result, most hardware developers have no
interests in sharing vital information with driver developers in the Linux
community. So developers must sometimes work backwards to develop drivers
for Linux and that takes ......time.

That said, Linux has a long way to go to satisfy my needs as a professional.
I'm a professional musician/publisher and so I use many different functions
that cater to musicians/publishers. And the nature of technology is to be on
the cutting edge, to offer things that one has Not been able to do before.
Here are some of my functions that Linux as yet cannot supply:

1) I use Finale to do music notation and write charts on my computer. I've
tried to get Finale/Midi configured for this in Ubuntu Fesity and others
have as well. We have not found any solutions thus far. There ARE music
notation programs for Ubuntu, but they look cheesy and amateurish in
comparison to Finale. Charts ARE about looks and presentation, and anyone
who claims that other music notation programs can come close to doing what
Finale does simply does not know what they are talking about.

2) I use my computer for Pro Audio and use Sonar 6 Producer Edition on XP.
Linux has Ardour 2.0 which looks impressive. But the quality of plugins
cannot even come close to what I get with my Waves Audio Plugins, which are
used by many professionals in the business. I have tinkered with Ardour and
found that I'd be searching the web night and day to find half-way suitable
plugins, and even then I question that. I hold a little bit of a grudge
against the author of Ardour because I made a generous donation and got no
thank you whatsoever - no acknowledgement of my gift or anything. And yes, I
wrote him about that directly. I don't care who you are. One should say
'Thank You' when they receive a gift.

Can't comment on that. Not something I do. The only music instrument I can
play is my CD player. =)

Open Office did say 'Thank You' to me and for that, they will probably
receive more money from me in the future.

3) I do OnCD printing for many of my projects. Turboprint for Linux actually
supplies this driver now and I bought it as well. However, I asked
Turboprint what program to use here (thinking templates etc) and they could
only suggest Gimp and Open Draw. With no templates I'd be shooting in the
dark for half a day and wasting CDs in order get the printing aligned
right, not to mention lack of color/resolution control.

4) Turboprint recently completed making the driver for my Epson RX580, but
as yet they cannot support the scanner function of this Epson model. While I
AM grateful that they have made a driver for this (I bought it remember?),
supporting half a product is kind of typical in Linux.

But here I have to quote the Vista fanbois. It's a driver and manufacturer
issue, not an operating system issue as they didn't implement the scanner
functionality in their driver.

5) I can get Flash MX to work in Linux through CrossOver but my project is
more advanced and requires at least Flash Studio MX 2004. That version will
not run on CrossOver, nor will other, more recent versions.

I really could add more but I hope my point comes through. I really do like
Linux and for the record, I think Mandriva is just as easy as Ubuntu Feisty
to use and is a LOT better looking. I dual-boot with Vista/Mandriva on my
desktop at this point, although I did have to relocate my modem and go in
wired to the internet as a result. I have yet to get my wireless Linksys
WMP300N to work with Mandriva (or Ubuntu for that matter).

Thanks for your post, very nice to have a civil discussion with someone
about stuff like this! And you know, like I said above, that's the great
thing as far as Linux goes. You have a choice! You prefer Mandriva over
Ubuntu so use Mandriva. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. =)

--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6

å›ã®ã“ã¨æ€ã„出ã™æ—¥ãªã‚“ã¦ãªã„ã®ã¯
å›ã®ã“ã¨å¿˜ã‚ŒãŸã¨ããŒãªã„ã‹ã‚‰

 

[Frank Bright]

Beryl actually works very well on a standard setup. It gets a bit
difficult though with my dual screen setup at home, which will be
addressed with the next major version release though.

That said, I personally find Ubuntu Studio to be absolutely hideous! I
think it's tough to make a UI uglier than Ubuntu Studio. Seriously....it's
way way way way way too dark. I have it running on my laptop and I don't
even wanna look at it for more than half an hour at the most.

User interfaces are very dependent on perspective. What I find ugly you
find great looking for example. =)

No single UI will ever please everyone. That's though the nice thing about
linux that you *can* choose the UI you like! Unlike windows where you
either like MS' latest or are pretty much screwed if you don't.


Can't comment on that. Not something I do. The only music instrument I can
play is my CD player. =)


But here I have to quote the Vista fanbois. It's a driver and manufacturer
issue, not an operating system issue as they didn't implement the scanner
functionality in their driver.


Thanks for your post, very nice to have a civil discussion with someone
about stuff like this! And you know, like I said above, that's the great
thing as far as Linux goes. You have a choice! You prefer Mandriva over
Ubuntu so use Mandriva. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. =)

--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6

å›ã®ã“ã¨æ€ã„出ã™æ—¥ãªã‚“ã¦ãªã„ã®ã¯
å›ã®ã“ã¨å¿˜ã‚ŒãŸã¨ããŒãªã„ã‹ã‚‰

Hi, I thought this reply went thru yesterday but it apparently did not.
I put in some qualifiers:
1) I looked into it more thoroughly and I stand corrected. Open Office
Drawer DOES have OnCD Printing templates,
so I may yet give this a try. They are in the Turboprint /doc folder.

2) I wanted to add that the WHOLE Macromedia Studio MX (NOT Studio MX 2004)
works well thru CrossOver on Linux.

Many Thanks, Frank B.

 

[Lang Murphy]

Well Lang, honestly...I do think the problem resides on your servers end,
not with Ubuntu nor Pan. The error you are seeing *is* a news-server
returned error and not an application / os specific error. Now you might
not encounter the error with OE, but there's no reason to say that you
might not encounter the identical problem with a different newsreader
under windows.

--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6

å›ã®ã“ã¨æ€ã„出ã™æ—¥ãªã‚“ã¦ãªã„ã®ã¯
å›ã®ã“ã¨å¿˜ã‚ŒãŸã¨ããŒãªã„ã‹ã‚‰

Stephan,

I won't argue that the error's being generated by the news server. That
said, if I never see that error in OE, and I haven't thus far, after years
of using OE to read various ng's, then I must assume that the server's
throwing the error because it doesn't like some yet undetermined issue with
the post coming from Pan/FF. So... when I compare the issues I've had with
OE in Windows (always a different kind of -OE-, if you get my drift...)
compared to the problems I've had with Pan/FF and the amount of time
expended trying to get that to work, nix comes up a little shy of "easy to
use." For me.

Which comes back around to my original complaint about nix: too much time.
And, as previously stated somewhere upstream in the thread, I realize,
beyond doubt, that belonging to the "Gee, Vista works for me" group slants
my point of view differently than those who have experienced problems
getting even basic things in Vista to work.

My comments are based solely on my personal experience with any of the
above. Folks can take, or leave, my comments as they will. I've never said
nix sux, as I think you'd acknowledge... and I've never said Vista is
problem free. I'd be a dope to make either claim. (And, no... I'm not
intimating that others who make those claims are dopes... although with the
flame wars in here, I'm sure either side would claim victory and point to
the opposing side [what a concept] as dopes. Well, gee, nevermind, that
happens already. Too often, imho.)

See ya over in alt.os.linux.ubuntu as we try to figure out my ng reader
issues.

Regards,

Lang