On 3 Sep 2001, Ben Rosenberg wrote:
->> StarOffice is nowhere near as fast or feature-full as MS Office,
I've worked in big corps and small offices. In IT, helpdesk and other such roles..never have I seen even the most heavy of power user..use all the features. Often I heard complaints about the bloat and their confusion over having to sift through all the features just to find the "one" thing they need. Tons of features does not a wp make.
Please note that I also mentioned that StarOffice is not as fast as MS Office (at least Office97). As a StarOffice 5.2 user, I sincerely hope Sun deals with this (which they said they will). As many have noted, StarOffice fulfills 99.9% of the market demand for MS Office. As soon as the current SO flaws (e.g. import / export problems for word, excel, powerpoint, etc.) are fixed, I firmly believe it will be hailed as an excellent product. Most home users, however, will not tolerate SO's limitations. Why bother when you can just "borrow" a copy of Office2000 from your friend, which has more features and is faster. These kinds of care-free (and illegal) actions is what allows MS to still maintain its cut-throat hold on the word processor / presentation maker market. Approximately half of MS's revenue comes from Office sales.
->> IE is nowhere near as stable and fails to render all pages ->> perfectly, fonts (even anti-aliased) look like crap compared to ->> the latest WIndows / Mac desktop (my win95 installation has ->> better / more fonts than my SuSE 7.2 installation)
Well, this is because of proprietary tags that just work in IE such as iframe. It also has to do with the fact that IE ignores bad code which Netscape/Mozilla doesn't. Mozilla can do just fine rendering most anything that IE can. The problem we run into is that developers of these websites do not test with Mozilla/Netscape6 and they use "user-agent" strings to identify the browser. When the server gets a response of "mozilla X.X" from a browser it registers this as Netscape..and doesn't much care what version because the people who put it together do not make any distinction between 4.XX and 6.X .. if it's Netscape then it can handle only blah..blah. So we users who don't have a proprietary browser w/ proprietary tags can't view the site correctly.
Do this as an experiment. Go to www.techweb.com w/ Konqueror...you will see that the page is ALL frelled up. Click the icon with the little hat (to change the user-agent) and change the user-agent to IE 5.5 under Win2k and it will auto reload the page and it comes up PERFECTLY. If you use Netscape 4.X or Mozilla's string..it's still frelled up. It's because they don't test for anything but IE under WINDOWS. Even IE 5.1 on MacOSX..a truely modern browser by your standards can't render a lot of pages because it's not tested for fonts or anything else.
It's to Microsoft's financial advantage to ship an inferior and belated product for a competing platform...
What your saying is bullshit. You condemn the software when the true root of the problem is the so called " web developers " out there..they are the issue. My wife worked for a HUGE web dev firm..and they were so lazy that they really only tested on IE under Windows.
Yes, I agree, the problem is a social phenomenon and not a software limitation. Please note that I did not state the Linux has shitty web browsers (before Konqueror and a usable Mozilla, such was the case). I was simply describing the current situation: many sites don't render properly no matter what web browser you use in Linux. Now try describing this to the infamous "average Windows user". Even if you manage to get past the user-agent strings, you still need to convince them that Linux is a good web browsing platform (many sites don't view correctly although it's not its fault, many plugins don't work, etc.). Good luck...
-> no standard package format
RPM and DEB. A standard doesn't mean just one way of doing things otherwise we would have 1 world language, 1 culture ..etc..etc. The Nazi's tried to make it this way..we stopped them for a reason..
Windows does have a standard package format (albeit its not a very good one). It's a simple EXE. Game patches install from them; critical system patches install from these as well; any software on the platform (whether its freeware, shareware, commercial, GPL, proprietary, etc.) installs using these painless and carefree files. Linux, however, currently lacks something of this sort. Redhat uses RPM, Slackware uses PKG (gzipped tar), Debian uses DEB. Thankfully SuSE decided _not_ have their own package format (the "Yet Another..." method of naming software speaks to this situation in Linux). Yes, RPM is the "standard" (LSB), but what good is it if the other distros don't all use it (e.g. Debian and all the variants such as Progeny, Storm, Corel, etc.)? Some software writers prefer to only distribute source. For example, a new cdrtools version became available recently. No RPM was available of that version, so I compiled my own, thankfully without problems (unlike the previous version). Being the average "Windows user", I would have no clue how to do that. I would probably then wait for the major distros to compile their own RPM's (or DEBs, or PKG, or whatever), if ever, and then download them. The problem is eccentuated even further because the distros aren't compatible (using RPMs from RedHat on a SuSE system could have disastrous results). That's why there need to be at least 3 (more if you want to be serious) RPM versions (just RPM, not mentioning DEB, etc.): Mandrake 7.2, Mandrake 8.0, SuSE 7.1, SuSE 7.2, RedHat 6.2, RedHat 7.x. What if a new version of a standard library breaks current apps (as happened with libc)? All hell breaks loose. SuSE (fortunately) never accepts the lastest and greatest and always tests software before distribution (unlike RedHat...).
-> no standard GUI
KDE and Gnome..they ship with EVERY distribution.."see above reason"
AFAIK, a qt / KDE theme does not change the appearance of gtk apps. It doesn't even change apps like Netscape (which uses Motif). So much for "standard"... which toolkit should I learn? I will soon have to make that decision, God help me...
-> no standard video / audio API (a la DirectX)
OpenGL and ALSA .. they can be used on every distribution..and even Win/Mac can use OpenGL ..wow multi-platform..now THAT's a standard.
Why not use Loki's SDL and OpenAL? What if your card doesn't support OpenGL very well? What if your sound card doesn't have good Alsa support? If you use Microsoft, the questions are superfluous: DirectX or no DirectX. I do, however, agree with you in that OpenGL is definitely the way to go in terms of graphics API's. Just one more question: QT or GTK?
Your arguements are weak and very easy to dismiss..if you want to troll about how GRAND Microsoft software is...please do it in your own forum.
Oh, please: not once did I "praise" Microsoft software. All I did was illustrate the situation, in whatever form (pro / anti Windows) it presented itself. I can tell from your sig (" cat CE|ME|NT|XP > /dev/null ") that you're not the biggest Microsoft fan. My initial response was to the topic stated in the Subject line (Linux for home desktop). As such, it is not up to par with the Windows counterparts. My comments were simply to explain why: it has nothing to do with quality of software. The messages' content has started to fade away from the Subject line. If they continue that way, I will not respond out of respect for the suse-linux-e@suse.com subscribers who do not want YA-FW (Yet Another Flame War). Personal responses are welcome [ noodlez84@earthlink.net ]. -- noodlez: Karol Pietrzak PGP KeyID: 0x3A1446A0