RE: [SLE] OO: If you can make it, I can break it!
I hope I am not just stepping in a pile steaming doo, but ...
-----Original Message----- From: David Culp [mailto:dculp@charter.net]
<snip>
Excel in Windows on the same PC opens instantly, even on cold boot. So does Lotus123 and the spreadsheet app in Wordperfect Office (I never use it, can't remember the name).
1) M$ spends a lot of time to make you think the system is up when it is not yet complete. To their credit, some functionality becomes available very early even though not everything is ready. Any app written with their development tools will likely take advantage of the same kind of early partial availability -- or see 2). 2) Windows loads a lot of bloat (even right in the operating system kernel) -- which means a lot of stuff, libraries, etc ... is pre-loaded and all you are doing is starting a thin interface to it.
OpenOffice has come a very long way. But to be taken seriously it needs be a hell of a lot better. I sometimes think about getting into programming for no other reason than to work on projects like OOo.
/rant off I have to agree completely. I love Linux but it seems the application load time is absolutely unbearable. Why should it take 10 seconds to load Firefox or Evolution, on Windows or Mac OS X the browser and email client load in a few seconds. It seems this has been a problem for awhile, I have been away from Linux for a couple of years and I can remember even back then that the application load times were inexcusable. Someone (and maybe someone has) needs to work on that.
The difference is in structure -- Linux is a different choice -- if you want these type of Microsoft-y things -- such as a faster *perceived* application load time, you can probably achieve that on your own, by -- perhaps getting firefox and OOo to load themselves when X starts up. As far as making some of the functionality available to the user prior to load completion, you will probably need to talk to the coders. /prognostication on As a business -- Microsoft had done some very good things -- they have addressed some major pain points for end users. As desktop OS's go, XP isn't half bad (maybe only 30% bad) -- although for myself, I much prefer Linux. The thing is -- they haven't done anything *technologically* superior, per se -- the problem you complain about is about more about customer perception. When the market is right, the likes of Novell and RedHat (etc... possibly a third party specializing in such things -- like crossover office ...) will introduce distros or packages which tune a desktop this way. When that happens, there will be parity for ease of use in the desktop market, and Linux will explode on the desktop. Linux will not take over the desktop, most likely -- but it will make a big dent. MS will remain dominant on the desktop as long as they are a viable company -- the difference will be that there will be real choice for Joe-end-user. Probably, Windows will still grow on the desktop as well as Linux -- in absolute numbers, because global penetration of PCs will continue to increase -- MS will lose relative ground for a while until the market equilibrates. Windows will probably stagnate in the enterprise market, since (mostly) only slow-moving bureaucracies that are already entrenched in Windows will continue to buy MS server products. MS is pushing hard to be on the handheld -- and I think they are doing well there, too -- If that doesn't muddy up the water, I think you'll see MS expose some of their source (I'm not sure if it will be OS source, Office source -- or what, but I suspect OS -- although it may be an old revision, or a separate tree from their actual products). I think the reason they will do this, is that the market will have proven to them that you can make money with an open source model -- if it is structured right -- the pressure to do so, will be their desire to focus on their more profitable elements, and the increased need to either interoperate or lose *all* of the business (not just os or app or whatever) when they *force* businesses to choose. /prognostication off <snip> Well, I smell doo -- I, indeed, stepped in it. PATRICK FREEMAN,
On Tuesday 27 December 2005 9:23 pm, Patrick Freeman wrote:
MS is pushing hard to be on the handheld -- and I think they are doing well there, too -- If that doesn't muddy up the water, I think you'll see MS expose some of their source (I'm not sure if it will be OS source, Office source -- or what, but I suspect OS -- although it may be an old revision, or a separate tree from their actual products). I think the reason they will do this, is that the market will have proven to them that you can make money with an open source model -- if it is structured right -- the pressure to do so, will be their desire to focus on their more profitable elements, and the increased need to either interoperate or lose *all* of the business (not just os or app or whatever) when they *force* businesses to choose.
Most of this won't happen as long as Gates and Ballmer are in control. Ballmer is an ego maniac of the "highest level," and WON'T buckle to market pressres, if at all, until it's too late. Once the gaming community gets their heads outta their hind ends and produces a couple of "killer" games for Linux, and once there's a good tax package for Linux, MickySoft WILL loose desktop domination. Fred -- Paid purchaser of ALL SuSE Linux releases since 6.x
On Tuesday 27 December 2005 11:43 pm, Fred A. Miller wrote:
Once the gaming community gets their heads outta their hind ends and produces a couple of "killer" games for Linux, and once there's a good tax package for Linux, MickySoft WILL loose desktop domination.
I'm kind of surprised that the gamers haven't taken Linux to their hearts, since for apps that demand lots of computing power and top performance, it's the natural choice. But it seems they haven't. Paul
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Wednesday 2005-12-28 at 00:02 -0500, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
I'm kind of surprised that the gamers haven't taken Linux to their hearts, since for apps that demand lots of computing power and top performance, it's the natural choice. But it seems they haven't.
Perhaps because 3D video is still a problem. And because they use a closed source model as well. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFDsoZvtTMYHG2NR9URAr7gAJ9jXQmYovA2XEJunV3DMIw2Q+BDFwCeKA4e MGUnksyarKrZUDHB8jW/C3o= =pQGI -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Tuesday 27 December 2005 23:43, Fred A. Miller wrote: [...]
Most of this won't happen as long as Gates and Ballmer are in control. Ballmer is an ego maniac of the "highest level," and WON'T buckle to market pressres, if at all, until it's too late. Once the gaming community gets their heads outta their hind ends and produces a couple of "killer" games for Linux, and once there's a good tax package for Linux, MickySoft WILL loose desktop domination.
But Fred, who will write the "killer" game, or the tax package for Linux? What would be their motivation? The graphically luxurious games that are the big dollar earners for Windows all seem to make full use of the latest, greatest video cards and chipsets. How many Linux games do that? This list has endlessly belabored the market realities that dictate that Linux support for new hardware usually lags Windows support. MS and the hardware and software makers actively work together before new Windows versions come out, before new hardware comes out, before new "killer" games come out. Linux distros are gathered together as snapshots of what already exists (kernels, drivers, desktops, apps) -- never what's yet-to-come over the horizon. What would need to change in order for Linux games to develop that way? What do you think would drive that change? As for the tax apps, we've been having that discussion in a separate thread, this week. I don't recall you answering any of the objections that were raised. (The value-added aspect of a tax-prep software is that it helps you to get the best result -- keeping more of your hard-earned money away from the tax man -- much like paid professional accountant help does. Unlike what somebody suggested, the value that people pay for is _not_ merely a forms-filler... at least, not the better tax programs. They want, and get, a virtual tax accountant on their desktop, asking the right questions, steering them toward the biggest refund... or at least the smallest pay-in.) Obviously, existing tax-prep vendors don't see an incentive to port to Linux, so that leaves OSS people... who don't have the tax-accounting and tax-law skills to complement their programming skills. Tax accountants and tax lawyers are not coming out of the woodwork volunteering their services, in the manner of programmers and tech writers.) Personally, at least with regard to the tax stuff, I think that it will be a change somewhere else that will take away the on-PC tax application from everybody, rather than that Linux users will suddenly have a tax package to compete with what's on Windows. Probably somebody will do something in the web-submitted tax arena that will make on-PC software unattractive regardless of who sells it or which OS it supports. Maybe Google will start making deals with various governments or some such.
Fred
-- Paid purchaser of ALL SuSE Linux releases since 6.x
Kevin (Paid purchaser of all SuSE Linux releases since 5.2 [or possibly 5.1])
On Tue, 2005-12-27 at 23:43 -0500, Fred A. Miller wrote:
On Tuesday 27 December 2005 9:23 pm, Patrick Freeman wrote:
MS is pushing hard to be on the handheld -- and I think they are doing well there, too -- If that doesn't muddy up the water, I think you'll see MS expose some of their source (I'm not sure if it will be OS source, Office source -- or what, but I suspect OS -- although it may be an old revision, or a separate tree from their actual products). I think the reason they will do this, is that the market will have proven to them that you can make money with an open source model -- if it is structured right -- the pressure to do so, will be their desire to focus on their more profitable elements, and the increased need to either interoperate or lose *all* of the business (not just os or app or whatever) when they *force* businesses to choose.
Most of this won't happen as long as Gates and Ballmer are in control. Ballmer is an ego maniac of the "highest level," and WON'T buckle to market pressres, if at all, until it's too late. Once the gaming community gets their heads outta their hind ends and produces a couple of "killer" games for Linux, and once there's a good tax package for Linux, MickySoft WILL loose desktop domination.
How about Quake its a great game if you have broadband for the online part. -- ___ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ | | | | [__ | | | |___ |_|_| ___] | \/
On Tue, 2005-12-27 at 21:23 -0500, Patrick Freeman wrote:
Excel in Windows on the same PC opens instantly, even on cold boot. So does Lotus123 and the spreadsheet app in Wordperfect Office (I never use it, can't remember the name).
1) M$ spends a lot of time to make you think the system is up when it is not yet complete. To their credit, some functionality becomes available very early even though not everything is ready. Any app written with their development tools will likely take advantage of the same kind of early partial availability -- or see 2).
I mentioned the other office suites specifically for this reason. Even with the quickstarted (which should give OOo the same advantage), it still takes a good while longer than any other office suite to start. Heck, Word/Excel even starts faster through Crossover Office than OpenOffice does. Which pretty much eliminates the OS aspect of the argument, doesn't it?
2) Windows loads a lot of bloat (even right in the operating system kernel) -- which means a lot of stuff, libraries, etc ... is pre-loaded and all you are doing is starting a thin interface to it. Doesn't change the fact that OOo starts slow. I really don't care what they do to make it faster. On my notebook OOo takes 8 seconds to display the spash screen, and another 5 seconds from there to bring up the Writer interface. That is unacceptable. Also doesn't change the fact that, once started, OOo *is* slower than any other office suite to use. When I click on the file menu for the first time, for example, there is a noticeable delay before the menu appears. I just checked, after opening Writer, I click on the "open" button. 4 seconds before the open dialog appears. It feels like working Windows 95 on a 486. Of course, once it is open and running and you've used it a little, things speed up a little. But that's no justification for the really slow start up times.
*technologically* superior, per se -- the problem you complain about is about more about customer perception. No it's not. A 12 second difference in starting time is way more than can be blamed on perception. It's very difficult, for example, to persuade my dad to try out linux on his PC, when I show him all the apps on my computer and they're all much slower than what he's used to, considering he's using a 400mhz celeron with 196mb Ram. There's no way you can explain that kind of difference away.
I don't mean to diss OOo in any way, it is a good product. But it's has a long way to go to catch up with the commercial offerings, and they keep improving to, so it keeps lagging behind. And saying "but Microsoft cheats/does this or that" doesn't do anythign to excuse OOo's shortcomings. I believe in Linux, it is my operating system of choice. My notebook came with WinXP Pro installed, and I've booted into it only once - to use Partitionmagic to resize the ntfs partition (SUSE installer failed) so I can install SUSE. Not that I have anything against Windows, I agree with you that it has come a long way and XP isn't bad at all. I just bought my sister a notebook, and I throught briefly of putting linux on a second partition for her to play with, but I didn't. It's not worth the trouble, because she will not put up with the difference in speed, perceived or not. Hans
Hans du Plooy wrote:
I mentioned the other office suites specifically for this reason. Even with the quickstarted (which should give OOo the same advantage), it still takes a good while longer than any other office suite to start. Heck, Word/Excel even starts faster through Crossover Office than OpenOffice does.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the startup times of OO - it's started once, then kept running. Two particular advantages of OO - 1) it runs on Linux. 2) it's scriptable. (i.e. it can be used in batch).
when I show him all the apps on my computer and they're all much slower than what he's used to, considering he's using a 400mhz celeron with 196mb Ram. There's no way you can explain that kind of difference away.
It's probably not very useful to look at OO performance on an ancient PC much behind todays average spec. Some apps should run relatively fine on e.g. an old 486 with 32Mb, whereas others (such as desktop apps) very reasonably should be developed with a fairly modern desktop machine in mind.
I don't mean to diss OOo in any way, it is a good product. But it's has a long way to go to catch up with the commercial offerings, and they keep improving to, so it keeps lagging behind.
It seems to be that some commercial offerings have an even longer way to go to catch up with OO - did anyone mention bugfixes? I changed to use only OO around version 1.1 (mostly writer and spreadsheet), typically on 2GHz/512M machines and have not looked back. /Per Jessen, Zürich -- http://www.spamchek.com/ - managed anti-spam and anti-virus solution. Let us analyse your spam- and virus-threat - up to 2 months for free.
On Tuesday 27 December 2005 21:23, Patrick Freeman wrote: [...]
1) M$ spends a lot of time to make you think the system is up when it is not yet complete. To their credit, some functionality becomes available very early even though not everything is ready. Any app written with their development tools will likely take advantage of the same kind of early partial availability -- or see 2).
2) Windows loads a lot of bloat (even right in the operating system kernel) -- which means a lot of stuff, libraries, etc ... is pre-loaded and all you are doing is starting a thin interface to it.
OpenOffice has come a very long way. But to be taken seriously it needs be a hell of a lot better.
[...]
then that the application load times were inexcusable. Someone (and maybe someone has) needs to work on that.
The difference is in structure -- Linux is a different choice -- if you want these type of Microsoft-y things -- such as a faster *perceived* application load time, you can probably achieve that on your own, by -- perhaps getting firefox and OOo to load themselves when X starts up. As far as making some of the functionality available to the user prior to load completion, you will probably need to talk to the coders.
At work, my main desktop machine runs Win XP Pro. From the time that I press the power switch, until the time that the hard disk stops churning, takes a minute or so, including the few seconds that it takes me to authenticate. The company and I have both added some extra stuff that lives in the tray, and that has added a few seconds. When I boot SuSE 9.3 on that computer, or SuSE 10 on my home computer (the one that I'm writing from, at this moment), it takes many minutes for SuSE to load, then (after I login) it takes a further few minutes for KDE to load. The difference between starting after a clean shutdown, versus starting and re-opening apps (like multiple Konqi windows) that I might have left open at last shutdown is a very small portion of the total start time, so I discount that portion. It's been said, in this list, that SuSE loads a lot of stuff that's not needed, which accounts for much of the seeminly endless startup time. However: 1) I don't know what they are running (perhaps a barebones server with no X, no audio/multi-media, etc., etc.), so I can't compare with what I run -- when I installed, I selected everything on the DVD. 2) Even if I have items being loaded that I'll never need, I really can't tell that they are unneeded and therefore could be removed from the startup. From my limited, horrible experience, everything is connected to everything else in arcane and profoundly confusing ways, and if you aren't a guru, you remove any piece at your peril. I just hit the start switch and go for coffee (and I don't even drink coffee...). My wife (who uses the slower-loading Win2K at work slower than Win XP Pro, not Linux) pisses and moans about how lo-o-o-o-ong Linux takes to load on her home PC. Then, she starts OpenOffice and waits another small eternity.... :-) From years of being rapped on the knuckles, I simply don't click on anything -- in Windows or Linux -- until the hard disk has stopped churning and there's no more spinning hourglass/clock. That's how I measure start time. I don't know what "secret stuff" WinXP Pro could be loading after it presents a stable desktop and the "appearance" of having loaded, because whatever it might be doing, it is doing silently without the aid of the hard disk. Perception might not be everything, but it's way up there. Kevin
On Wed, 2005-12-28 at 16:55 -0500, elefino wrote:
On Tuesday 27 December 2005 21:23, Patrick Freeman wrote: [...]
At work, my main desktop machine runs Win XP Pro. From the time that I press the power switch, until the time that the hard disk stops churning, takes a minute or so, including the few seconds that it takes me to authenticate. The company and I have both added some extra stuff that lives in the tray, and that has added a few seconds.
When I boot SuSE 9.3 on that computer, or SuSE 10 on my home computer (the one that I'm writing from, at this moment), it takes many minutes for SuSE to load, then (after I login) it takes a further few minutes for KDE to load. The difference between starting after a clean shutdown, versus starting and re-opening apps (like multiple Konqi windows) that I might have left open at last shutdown is a very small portion of the total start time, so I discount that portion.
The correct places to bitch about things starting slow are: kernel.org - who write the kernel kde.org or gnome.org - whichever you use or use xfwm openoffice.org - the writers of OpenOffice Novell/SUSE only packages these items to make it easier for you to install them. They do -not- write the programs (although they contribute some code). If you want your hardware to work better write the manufacturer and tell them to write (better) drivers for their product for linux. Please do not state that device XYZ works on windows but not on linux, there again bitch to the manufacturer to write a driver just like they do for windows. MS does not write the drivers, the manufacturer does. You always have the choice to go back to MS windows and all of its virii, worms and bugs. I care not to. When you factor in all the the times you have to re-install windows it runs about even in start up times. And please there is no need to reply back to this. Happy New Year -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998
participants (9)
-
Carl William Spitzer IV -
Carlos E. R. -
elefino -
Fred A. Miller -
Hans du Plooy -
Ken Schneider -
Patrick Freeman -
Paul W. Abrahams -
Per Jessen