[Martinus]

If Maeg were still here, he'd put you in your place faster than you can say, "Open source does not make a product better."

Yes, yes he would. (claim that open source does not necessarily make a product better)
I'd have got here faster but my spider-sense is a bit rusty these days.

A recent development looks likely to make things interesting for x11 as a whole: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xorg_wayland&num=1

[Fury]

Your spider sense might have gotten rusty, but your ability to search certainly has not.

[Martinus]

Your spider sense might have gotten rusty, but your ability to search certainly has not.

Well I figured I'd start on the most relevant topic I could think of...

[Flipside]

Heh, my first experience with Linux was trying to update the ATI Graphics drivers, there are better ways of starting Linux, like ones that actually leave you feeling like you had a clue what the hell you were doing...

Though I did learn that 'Sudo ku' is not valid command

[Daniel P]

Heh, my first experience with Linux was trying to update the ATI Graphics drivers, there are better ways of starting Linux, like ones that actually leave you feeling like you had a clue what the hell you were doing...

Though I did learn that 'Sudo ku' is not valid command

It took me two day just to figure out how to install Ubuntu 8.04. And 2 hours later it crash so bad it need to be reinstalled.

I hate those Sudo commands. IT made be to go back to Windows vista. At least Windows Vista is more user friendly.

[Martinus]

Heh, my first experience with Linux was trying to update the ATI Graphics drivers, there are better ways of starting Linux, like ones that actually leave you feeling like you had a clue what the hell you were doing...

Though I did learn that 'Sudo ku' is not valid command

It took me two day just to figure out how to install Ubuntu 8.04. And 2 hours later it crash so bad it need to be reinstalled.

I hate those Sudo commands. IT made be to go back to Windows vista. At least Windows Vista is more user friendly.

I have to admit that I pretty much suggest Ubuntu to every linux virgin that asks me about it. That being said it isn't perfect, I've had issues with installing it on esoteric hardware and pulseaudio is a royal pain in the arse.

I am utterly perplexed at the concept of Vista being easier to use. I consider XP to be, for the most part a stable and useful OS, Vista by comparison is so utterly broken in practice and theory that it boggles the mind that anyone aware of alternatives would want to use it. When Microsoft are their own greatest competitor you really don't need to ask 'is it broken'.

I find trying to coerce people into using linux is counter intuitive, as a person who doesn't like an opinion stapled onto me I'm loathe to do the same to others.

[KewlToyZ]

I've used Ubuntu, SUSE, RedHat, even fiddled with Knoppix, but I'm still using Vista. It really depends on where you gain the most productivity. I don't like the pricing of MS, but unfortunately industry standards for compatability with Autodesk AutoCAD projects & its AEC content libraries force me to remain in Windows. Industry software pretty much everywhere has bloated severely without really making very dramatic gains in productivity vs the amount of resources they consume. It's like a cancer in the commercial market. I can't stand PDF, I think that entire format can go away and I wouldnt miss it. Publishing them still consumes as much resources as a full blown overgrown image file so why not just use TIFF images of a word document and be done with it ??

[S-99]

PDF is manipulatable though. Too many free alternatives for making free pdf's. One of them is openoffice. That one has built in free pdf exportation right there. Aside from that there's online pdf converters too. Not to mention the great strides of the adobe acrobat replacers...foxit. Foxit has a free pdf creator and viewer. So light on the resources too, it's enough to make anyone switch.

Of course pdf creation does come with the box of linux gifts. It's too easy to make pdf's with linux. With or without openoffice. But, i'm still very happy with the strides foxit has put forward for the windows community. You no longer need to put up with bloated slow loading adobe acrobat pro.

[KewlToyZ]

PDF is ok with simple 8x11 media, anything towards the publishing side in large format media issues on plotters, and the mass of people using the standard cant seem to generate it properly. Not to mention end user's being totally inept and fiddling with things they have no idea about then getting all bent out of shape because they cant be published due to huge memory over runs on the print server just to render their ignorance. It's a productivity issue that gets me bent out of shape often. Everything in this little box doesn't amount to sh%$ if it cant be gotten out to the real world in tangible media in a reasonable amount of time and resources.

[S-99]

Why use pdf at all? As far as i'm concerned, exporting documents as png's or something would be a lot easier, more supported, and free. One reason pdfs are used is to preserve formatting in documents. idk any other reason why they're used. you can just as easily preserve formatting if you turned your document into an image. The other thing is that images can be of any size (you could have a billboard sized image, or an 8x11). This would be faster because you wouldn't need any extra software to open an image, at most a web browser.

Reminds me of my old classes. Where i'd have to make a powerpoint presentation for a report. I didn't see any reason for using powerpoint at all. I just hopped into gimp and made many slides for my presentation (you could easily do this with mspaint of course). I also took advantage of the windows xp image viewer for doing a full screen slide show image by image so i needn't open every image individually. The end result was that i had a much easier created slideshow that didn't have any dumb slide by slide powerpoint animations. My presentation was just as good as everyone elses aside from lacking the powerpoint slide animations (i didn't see having slide animations as necessary for a powerpoint presentation). I did have openoffice to make a powerpoint presentation with, but making lots of png's was so much easier  for what powerpoint does essentially the same thing...showing slides of images but a lot more complicated to use powerpoint than say mspaint.

[Martinus]

Why use pdf at all? As far as i'm concerned, exporting documents as png's or something would be a lot easier, more supported, and free. One reason pdfs are used is to preserve formatting in documents. idk any other reason why they're used. you can just as easily preserve formatting if you turned your document into an image. The other thing is that images can be of any size (you could have a billboard sized image, or an 8x11). This would be faster because you wouldn't need any extra software to open an image, at most a web browser.

Reminds me of my old classes. Where i'd have to make a powerpoint presentation for a report. I didn't see any reason for using powerpoint at all. I just hopped into gimp and made many slides for my presentation (you could easily do this with mspaint of course). I also took advantage of the windows xp image viewer for doing a full screen slide show image by image so i needn't open every image individually. The end result was that i had a much easier created slideshow that didn't have any dumb slide by slide powerpoint animations. My presentation was just as good as everyone elses aside from lacking the powerpoint slide animations (i didn't see having slide animations as necessary for a powerpoint presentation). I did have openoffice to make a powerpoint presentation with, but making lots of png's was so much easier  for what powerpoint does essentially the same thing...showing slides of images but a lot more complicated to use powerpoint than say mspaint.

When it comes to certain industries you can't really pick and choose the OS as the software simply doesn't allow it. Apple are clever in that way, they provide a really nice user experience and productivity software that works best in their OS (or only in their OS), DTP and artists love their stuff as a response. CAD is one of those markets that open-source has a hard time keeping up with; a lot of the software demands that you include non-free, patented or copyrighted components and this immediately makes the proverbial water murky.

I don't get your argument for PDF though. There are a massive range of tools available both pay-ware and free that can handle it, you can even embed PNG and other formats if you wish. Distributing documents in image format prevents simple copy-pasting of text and requires the use of OCR which is not 100% reliable. Most importantly, it's a documented format that anyone can create. Microsoft held off on inserting the ability into Office because they don't have the ability to control it. They're begrudgingly allowing ODF exporters because they have been given little choice.

I assume the newest versions of the software you're using are Vista only? Given that vista eats up GPU time it seems counter-productive to run an app that benefits from as much GPU power as is available (for openGL rendering, for example) in vista over XP.

[S-99]

Just my rant for hating pdf in general. The thing is for pdf you need a 3rd party program for it no matter what. I don't want to embed images in pdfs. I want to use images as an alternative to pdf. Jpegs and pngs are stuff that people can create too, and a heck of a lot less hassle too.

The new versions of software for win that i have to install for people is xp and vista compatible. Adobe acrobat 9 pro is a ***** on ice to install...then again so are all adobe products when one must install them. Whether users like it or not at my job. I always turn on windows classic mode for the gui. That's about the only thing i can really do to turn off 3d hardware acceleration for the desktop in vista. Vista runs a lot faster with aero off too.

[Fury]

I haven't had the need to create PDFs, but I believe they have one distinct advantage over images. People can use their favorite word processor or other applications, then create a PDF of it. It looks exactly like the original and all the viewer needs is a PDF reader.

So far it is similar to an image, but with PDF you can modify the PDF afterwards much more easily than you would be able with an image editor. If the file would be an image, you can't really modify it without decent skills in some decent image editor such as Photoshop. Also, PDF is good as a fill-out form. You can simply type what you want in designated areas, then print the form or send it as email.

In a nuthsell, S-99 is right in that PNG could do what PDF does, but PDF does the job it was designed to do much better because whoever creates, modifies and fills out PDFs needs much less skills to do so in PDF than PNG. Using image editor to fill out forms in PNG format would be more difficult because you can't just point, click and start typing. Nor can you edit already existing PNG file as easily as you would a PDF if you would have to, say to change a sentence. You would always have to keep the source material at hand if you ever think you have to change the PNG, otherwise it'll be a pain in the ass.

Sorry S-99, but advantages of PDF far outweights the minor annoyances of Adobe Reader. That said, PDF format is standardized and under OS X and linux you can view it without much hassle. Who knows, maybe Windows 7 image viewer will support PDFs natively.

I don't know how Vista ended up in this discussion, but you can disable desktop composition without reverting back to the ugly Windows 2000 theme by unselecting desktop composition in performance options. Still. it shouldn't be necessary unless it is a typical office workstation with sucky integrated graphics. If a computer has dedicated video card with its own physical RAM, it probably needs newer drivers. Vista composition is spiffy on my home computer and I like it.

[CP5670]

The PDF format itself is fine. Its annoyances all center around the atrocious Adobe Reader program and browser plugin. They have to be the worst examples of bloatware among any mainstream office software.

[Fury]

I agree on that. However, Adobe Reader 9 is actually better than previous versions. Doesn't feel so bloated as it used to and starts up very quickly.

[S-99]

Make sure to turn off automatic updates in adobe acrobat 9. That's also annoying.
One program i hope ms develops for windows is something similar to gnome's evince. Konqueror is also a multi document viewer, but it's also a web browser and a file browser. Very annoying. I prefer that file managers, web browsers, and document viewers not be one thing (modularity i desire if say i don't like a certain web browser bla bla bla and want to use a different as opposed to having redundant programs...one reason i hate installing real player for people as a media player when they've got media player 11 which is a pretty good  program). Evince is great, just one program for viewing documents of any kind. I use it mainly for viewing images, pdfs, ms documents, and openoffice documents. This also makes sure i don't have to download a viewer for each different file format and file type. XP's and vista's image viewer is a great program quick and easy to view images and simple full screen slide shows. It'd be even more cool supporting more than just images

[Silent Warrior]

Didn't I read somewhere that Vista's Aero-sparklies off-loaded the CPU (greatly reduced software-rendering of 2D) and thus made Vista run a bit faster? *Shrug* Either way, I'm a proud operator of Ubuntu64/GNOME, Ubuntu32/KDE and WinXP SP3 32.
I like it when the OS doesn't screw me to high heavens.

S-99: Good job on your ex. Think I'll have similar luck with my parents?

[Janos]

*searches for word in PNG*
"FFFFFFFFFF"

[Fury]

Think I'll have similar luck with my parents?

Definitely. I've converted my parents and one of my two sisters to Ubuntu and they've been using it for years. The other sister has husband who is pretty good with computers, so he takes care of their computer stuff.

[Janos]

Think I'll have similar luck with my parents?

Definitely. I've converted my parents and one of my two sisters to Ubuntu and they've been using it for years. The other sister has husband who is pretty good with computers, so he takes care of their computer stuff.

"converted".

"My parents converted to Protestantism."
"WELL, MY PARENTS CONVERTED TO UBUNTU!"

herecy