Comments on: Where we are going we don’t need roads

By: Mathias Hasselmann

Mathias Hasselmann — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:52:55 +0000

rodrigo: what is “supported hardware”? notebooks with more or less recent intel chipsets should, shouldn’t they? on those, but also on older nvidia hardware with official drivers in my experience its just a matter of few clicks to bring the hardware into knees without no chance for recovery (even after disabling extensions). well, another favorite of mine is the plugin for moving windows. really funny when you deativate it out of couriousity, don’t realize its purpose: few minutes later you think the mouse driver (or whatever) crashed, since you cannot drag windows anymore. yeah! total insanity.

All compiz lovers i can just suggest to read Havoc Penningtons’s free software UI manifest (http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html). IMHO it was commitment to manifest, which led GNOME2 to its big success. IMHO compiz violates takes a total opposite approach – which makes it useless for anything other but trade show booths.

By: BC

BC — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:47:26 +0000

“As for innovation, this is probably something we need to improve. There is innovation for sure (Gimmie, Pulseaudio integration, Compiz Fusion (not really a GNOME thing, but it’s got GTK-based tools that nicely integrate into GNOME), Banshee 1.0 (try it, it’s great!), Clutter, etc),”

There is absolutely nothing “innovative” about most of those.

Pulseaudio = “sound that works”– woohoo, welcome to the 1980’s.
Clutter = copying stuff that was available for OS X already
Compiz Fusion = ditto
Banshee = iTunes with non-proprietary backends

By: rodrigo

rodrigo — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:00:08 +0000

Matthias, are you running compiz on supported hardware? it sounds to me you’r not, and that’s why it becomes unusable. I am running compiz and it’s very usable here, of course, on supported hardware / drivers

By: Mathias Hasselmann

Mathias Hasselmann — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 06:56:19 +0000

…just that compiz is a giant step backward in terms of software quality. A plugin system allowing zillions of combinations won’t work, since you’ll always just test a few dozens of all possible combinations. Don’t believe me? Well, then watch Firefox falling across more than just a few trivial plugins. Well, or just install compiz and try few of its plugins: Each time i tried the machine became unusable within less then a minute.

By: pacho

pacho — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 18:46:10 +0000

rodrigo: (about session sounds) OK, I am still using 2.20 and didn’t tried on 2.22 yet. Thanks a lot for info

By: Marcus

Marcus — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:10:53 +0000

You may give tangoGPS a try. It is a GNOME app realeased under GPL and naurally supports openstreetmap. Runs on Desktop, Laptop, eeePC and the openmoko phone.

By: aguafuertes

aguafuertes — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 08:24:57 +0000

You mentioning GPS actually made me think that pervasive integration of GIS data in GNOME would be very interesting – for example, being able to tag your contacts, appointments etc. with this kind of metadata would allow for very interesting applications. So that every object in my GNOME desktop that has a slight connection to “the real world” could also come with its position in this world…

By: Jason D. Clinton

Jason D. Clinton — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 02:45:42 +0000

Innovation?

Every one of the apps you listed in your innovation section is a copy of something that already exists.

By: rodrigo

rodrigo — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:52:45 +0000

Marco, also wanted to add that the most used GPS maps in Spain for GARMIN are ones that a single guy did (getting information from several place), packed them into a nice installer ready to install for Windows. And that’s the most used (AFAIK from my experience) Spain’s maps. And they use those maps mainly because they are much better and accurate than the official Spain maps from GARMIN. So I don’t think people won’t trust maps made by volunteers.

By: rodrigo

rodrigo — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:47:25 +0000

Massimiliano, Ekiga already supports videoconferencing, but not IM, so yeah, I guess pidgin should include Ekiga video conferencing stuff (or viceversa), although all this should change with Telepathy.

pacho: you already can do that in 2.22 AFAIR

Marco: commercial maps can make you die in a river also, look here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Catalog_of_Errors

And yes, maemo-mapper looks great, although I’m starting to like Viking much more.