How Hardware Companies Determine Their Linux Base

[crazycheese]

In fact, MS is the very definition of anti-competitive behaviour.

Erm, wrong. Anti-competitive behavior is MS.

[deanjo]

Given that Intel is the undisputed king of desktop 3d, I expect that your estimates of how many people really need ultimate CAD performance at absolute 101% of the maximum diesel power are vastly exaggerated. Just like the vast majority of the people are not using 100% of their CPU and don't care, they won't care about 100% of the GPU performance ,as long as it is fast enough. What they will care about is stability, out-of-the-box operation, ease of upgrade, and similar things.

And there is the "if we don't offer ityou don't need it" arguement.

The popularity of the blobs can be directly traced back to the long-standing issues with the open stack (which have largely been addressed recently) and the lack of documentation and manufacturer involvement, which is also changing, at least with AMD.

And they are still nowhere close to being feature per feature wise and performance is still lacking.

No, dude, all the GPL projects steal code from each other all the time, and they are competing happily.

You can't steal what is offered. That is collaboration.

Nobody steals from Microsoft. In fact, MS is the very definition of anti-competitive behaviour.

MS is the very definition of company that is providing what the end user wants.

Claiming that the GPL is more anti-competitive than Microsoft is far out, even coming from you.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html

"and GPLv3 is designed to turn them against Microsoft,"

[deanjo]

Then, you fall under my "pretty narrowminded, egoistic persons" criteria, I mentioned before.

Hardly, that puts me in the "realistic and understanding what the end user wants" persons category vs your "anybody that disagrees with what I say has to be wrong".

Thats not bad at all, but people that act like this are VERY easy to manipulate. Remember how americans purchased land from native americans for several dollars? Do you know how Doog were enslaved by Ploxis in Star Control 3 using similar situation? With each such purchase, you doom yourself even more.

Yup sure do, after the purchase the vast technical advances that were made improved the life of millions exponentially.

Of course, if there is no alternative solution available at all, and if there is no perspective at all (such as currently with gpu drivers), then you are pretty much monopolized and put on straight rails. By somebody and for a reason.

Your suffering from pure denial. The biggest single most reason that companies support the likes of microsoft is that they want to maximize their return on investment. MS did that like it or not starting as small or even smaller then many other companies when they started out. They did it smarter then Apple did, and MS brought it to the masses with IBM. If linux came out at the same time it might of had a chance of dominating the desktop world and as long as linux is playing catchup on even the most basic functions you cannot expect any for profit company to invest heavily in it.

[deanjo]

Detecting and bypassing bottlenecks has nothing to do with code license! The completeness of the driver depends solely on: amount of hours is spend X mean average of professionalism of developer X amount of developers. Who should develop the driver? The manufacturer, right! How many manufacturers refuse to develop, support or simply polish windows version more than linux???! Is linux bad, because it is not involved in this? If you are ignored by group of people, are you BAD solely because of this?

Bullshit, anytime a "generic" type solution is planned as the "defacto" standard it is going to bottleneck the performance of the higher end product where optimization is needed.

This is not related to the original question. The original question was about linux hackers to develop feature that you just want them to develop so. Which sane human would develop you features for free, spending his own money on electricity? Be realistic.
If you log on MSDN or whatever that crap is called with similar question, you will either be ignored, or someone will silently develop the feature, patent it and SELL it. Is this different with linux? No.

I can tell by that reply you have no experience on MSDN.

Yes I used Libre Office on windows in the workgroup(because it was full of shitista laptops with MSO crap and I could not do anything, but either run portable version of libre office(so much for security!) or save in ODF) and worked further on my gentoo machine. There was no difference! Maybe except some copies of MSO sometimes refused to open ODF generated on MSO from nearby, but lets forgive them that it is not new that microsoft ignores international standards if they don't belong to them.

Lol, first of all LibreOffice is much slower on linux. Not only that it has had/has some really nasty bugs such as pasting a large png into a Impress. Paste........... go for coffee.............check the mail.............catchup on sports highlights................it finally pastes. WTF? Isn't Impress supposed to be a presentation application? Same thing happens with tables.

Firefox is FINE on both windows and linux.

LMFAO, you obviously have never benched the two versions, you are talking about a 3x decrease in speed is items such as javascript by using the linux version.

CADs are FINE.

Another area that you have no experience in. The last good cad in linux was Pro/E. It got cancelled. Why? Here let me quote the press release.

Pro/ENGINEER and Linux
May 2007
In response to the changing technology landscape and the increasing consolidation of
MCAD customers around a smaller number of platforms, PTC will discontinue
Pro/ENGINEER support of the Linux operating system with the release of
Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 will run on a variety of other
operating systems, including Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Vista, HPUX 11i,
Solaris 8, and Solaris 10. This decision to discontinue Linux support enables increased
and more efficient support for the vast majority of PTC customers.
PTC has provided support for Linux since 2003, and has seen very limited adoption by our customers. We recognize that discontinuing support for Pro/ENGINEER on the
Linux OS may be disruptive to some of our customers who plan to upgrade to future
releases. Therefore, PTC is committed to providing an acceptable migration path to all
Pro/ENGINEER customers currently running on the Linux operating system.

Multimedia software is FINE as well as "anything specialised".

OMG, you have to be kidding right? Hell there is not one video editing app out there on linux other then my own that can do very basic items like cutting mid GOP on a h264 stream. Hell even a simple application like a dvd ripper leaves much to be desired. "Lets see I want a 1/3 DVD xvid rip.... set size..... encode..... WOW a 435 Meg file.....fail" OK now lets try to do some simple photo correction, hmmmm, why can't any linux application out there make quick simple redeye correction out there but that bundled with my printer windows application can? I won't even bother going into video playback.

Just check the comment from the first paragraph of my post. Audacity for example cannot use more than one cpu core on any task. It cannot use more than one core on windows, it cannot use more than one core on linux - you feel the difference?

There is a simple reason for that. Audio compression is very difficult to process in a multithreaded manner without sacrificing quality. On the other hand a product like Audition, Bandcamp, etc etc where you are playing compressing multiple streams well there you have something that you can multi-thread. Oh btw, make sure you recompile that linux kernel for low latency first....

Lol, GPL does not prevent competition - show me where it is said so in the license.

See above post.

GPL is copyleft and prevents stealing of IP WITHOUT all that patent crap which you all of the sudden call "holy" here and "major block" on another comment. Deanjo, please decide yourself for the side, before you say something like that. Because my 42" Toshiba regza tv just loves linux kernel and gcc running inside of it and GPL seemed not to prevent toshiba take top scores on tests.

Remove the proprietary add ons in that firmware and see how enjoyable your regza is.

Nope, this key is useless.
PAE is enabled only on specific server versions - where microsoft allows it.

For example, you cannot provide ANY 32bit process more than 2GB of RAM here of. Even if its compiled with so callled "LargePageSupport" - its useless. You can however reassign the 2GB/2GB userland/kernel division to 3GB/1GB via /3GB switch. But know what, right - hardware acceleration will be off as well as many drivers will fail to operate properly. Yet linux pae kernel works. Doesn't linux sucks and underdeveloped?

No it isn't. XP Pro has PAE support. Also how many systems had 4+ Gig of ram in 2001. By the time PAE could remotely come into play in the desktop crowd there were already 64-bit systems out where PAE wasn't needed at all.

And of course you can pay the programmer, you are actually doing this when you purchase any "product". But when you purchase "product" the programmer gets around 5% of the sum you pay. Let me summarise it that way:
On opensource, if you want to have specific feature, you either:
- work on it itself
- join a group that work on it themself
- pay to person or group that work on it themself
- pay to organisation that works on it itself
- engage in other options of support, such as rising the attention of people that may be interested too
- PURCHASE a product that has this features(surprised?)

On closed source, if you want to have specific feature, you either:
- purchase a product that has this feature
- ask manufacturer (who in case of microsoft is the only one available) to add this feature in next version which you will be required to purchase, and pray that he actually implements it, let alone HOW he implements it may be totally different from how you wanted it to be implemented.
- *if you dont want a feature* you will still be forced to by next version, since previous versions will be not supported anymore

Bullshit you can pay a programmer just as easily to develop a closed source app as a open. It is done all the time. With closed source you can as well:
- work on it itself
- join a group that work on it themself
- pay to organisation that works on it itself
- engage in other options of support, such as rising the attention of people that may be interested too
- PURCHASE a product that has this features

Now compare 999$ spending on target thing that interests you or 999$ spending over totally unrelated next version you are required to purchase anyway.

Again, you can pay anyone to do anything open or closed. It is done all the time.

Because you should understand that in case of opensource development, you pay the developer directly. In case of closed source development, the original coder gets 7% hence he can only survive in india.

Again BS, in closed source these "we will pay for this feature" is done all the time. Now what the company wants to develop that feature is completely up to them just as it is for a opensource developer to determine what is his price to implement that feature.

Yes, the infrastructure what you mention, as in connection between people wanting features and programmers doing that professionally is heavily and regularly damaged by microsoft on purpose. For example, the Nokia sabotage that resulted in destroying of Symbian, Meego and Nokia reputation was exactly on the period when ios, android(linux), blueberry and mentioned systems were to occupy and fight for the market - based alone on their features.

So what does microsheate?
Does it invent killerfeatures in WinMo? No.
Does it come to Nokia, Samsung etc and ask for WinMo phone line, so users can decide for themself the advantages of the platform? No.
This is development - the microsoft way. You don't need to prove you are better, you hideously eliminate opponent with 40 stitches and say it was suicide.

And by the way, my (originally) linux powered Toshiba TV worked without fixing or anything you mention.

Nokia put themselves in that position by not doing enough to satisfy what users wanted. Nobody's fault but Nokias.

[pingufunkybeat]

And there is the "if we don't offer ityou don't need it" arguement.

No, it's not, I'm not saying YOU don't need it, you have your blob.

I'm saying that I don't need it, and I won't make the same sacrifices that you are making just to get a few more FPS. And given the popularity of Intel, I'm not alone.

And they are still nowhere close to being feature per feature wise and performance is still lacking.

They are close in terms of features (other than with the very latest hardware), but not in terms of performance. The Intel drivers fully use all the features, and the AMD drivers are very close to full OpenGL 3.3 compliance. Video decoding is also not far, even if it only supports MPEG2 at the moment.

But they have other advantages, such as full integration with the system and the desktop environment (xrandr), integration with the kernel so you don't have to compile kernel modules by hand if you don't want to, and the freedom to check and redistribute code. For many people (not for you, but for many others), this is worth more than having 90 FPS instead of 70, when both are capped to 60 anyway.

You can't steal what is offered. That is collaboration.

That's an open license. You can use GPL code, you can not use MS code. This is very basic stuff, dude.

MS is the very definition of company that is providing what the end user wants.

Red herring. You were talking about Microsoft supporting competition with their source code, not the end users.

Seriously, claiming that MS is better to their competition than the FLOSS community is a brainfart and you should just admit that you were careless when writing it, instead of digging yourself in.

[devius]

Another area that you have no experience in. The last good cad in linux was Pro/E. It got cancelled.

There is a proprietary CAD program for linux called Bricscad which is pretty good. It implements the standard Autocad commands and a similar workflow, and although it's still not feature parity with the windows version of the same program, it's getting there. They also state thay are commited to the linux version, as AFAIK they seem to be getting enough subscriptions to keep it profitable. I already did a full architecture project using this program on opensuse.

OK now lets try to do some simple photo correction, hmmmm, why can't any linux application out there make quick simple redeye correction out there but that bundled with my printer windows application can?

Have you tried Digikam?

Also how many systems had 4+ Gig of ram in 2001. By the time PAE could remotely come into play in the desktop crowd there were already 64-bit systems out where PAE wasn't needed at all.

That's the "it's not there because you don't need it" argument that you keep using against OSS. It seems that argument can be used on both sides of the fence.

You also use the "it's what users want" argument a lot. It's not what all users want. It's what you want, what your friends want or what your neighbor wants. Whenever I have to use windows it's like trying to type poetry on a touchscreen while using boxing gloves. Even simple things like copying files from one place to another involves opening multiple explorer windows, to do any kind of office work requires installation of additional software, manage a photo collection = look for and install 3rd party software, connect to SSH/SFTP server = look for and install 3rd party software, etc... couldn't they manage to fit these kind of things on the absurd 15gb a basic vista/7 installation takes up?

[pingufunkybeat]

Nice catch, it's bizarre that professional-level CAD and GPU computation is what the users need and want, but using 4GB of memory is something nobody needs

I'd agree that the 4GB limit was not pressing 10 years ago for MANY users, but surely it was at least as important as running AutoCAD on your desktop is today?