Fedora 18 Will Get 256 Color Terminals

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 18 Will Get 256 Color Terminals

At today's FESCo meeting it was approved that Fedora 18 will aim for 256-color terminal support by default...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEzNjQ

[halfmanhalfamazing]

Terminals are so 80's. Sure, they do and always will have their uses, but user interfaces are simply the superior way of doing things. Linux isn't intended to be confined to geeks, it actually has a future.

Overall, I'm not very enthused about F18. F17 had a ton of features that were immediately beneficial to a user, but most of the stuff in 18 seems to be plumbing stuff, or something like this for the terminal.

OTOH, I'm sure that many of these F18 features will make F19 fantastic.

[Ex-Cyber]

Terminals are so 80's.

Or, as Ron Minnich put it, "Type 'stty' at an xterm and tell me why a window has a baud rate. [...] Wow, how advanced. 1,000,000 times the performance and there's still an ASR-33 in the middle". Of course, he was questioning the usefulness of pretending that you're talking to a terminal, not the usefulness of textual interfaces generally.

[enfocomp]

This seems rather irrelevant when we don't even have AMD/NVIDIA graphics drivers that can perform even close to Windows. Forget about the terminal colors and focus on the #1 lacking area for Linux : proper graphics acceleration.

[ryao]

Gentoo has had this for years.

This seems rather irrelevant when we don't even have AMD/NVIDIA graphics drivers that can perform even close to Windows. Forget about the terminal colors and focus on the #1 lacking area for Linux : proper graphics acceleration.

What are you doing to give us proper graphics acceleration?

[not.sure]

Terminals are so 80's. Sure, they do and always will have their uses, but user interfaces are simply the superior way of doing things.

Terminals ARE user interfaces. And if you mean "graphical user interfaces", no, pointing at graphical representations of things is caveman technology and generally a far inferior method of communication compared to language.

[TechMage89]

I say this every time the topic comes up: for tasks that are not inherently visual, a graphical user interface is likely to be far more arcane and difficult to use than a well-designed text interface. There is, after all a reason we have a language based on logical semantic (symbolic) structure and not pictography or imitative sounds.

[Hamish Wilson]

Overall, I'm not very enthused about F18. F17 had a ton of features that were immediately beneficial to a user, but most of the stuff in 18 seems to be plumbing stuff, or something like this for the terminal.

While I am quite pleased with how Fedora 17 turned out I am actually skipping it in favour of Fedora 18. Mostly looking forward to Xfce 4.10 and Mesa 8.1, plus any other graphical enhancements that are in the pipeline.

This seems rather irrelevant when we don't even have AMD/NVIDIA graphics drivers that can perform even close to Windows. Forget about the terminal colors and focus on the #1 lacking area for Linux : proper graphics acceleration.

Once again a simple answer to an all together all to prevalent misconception: this is not an either or thing, and one does not take away effort from the other. One developer can not take on all problems. Some can work on graphics and others can work on other things. It is amazing how hard this can be for some people to grasp.

I say this every time the topic comes up: for tasks that are not inherently visual, a graphical user interface is likely to be far more arcane and difficult to use than a well-designed text interface. There is, after all a reason we have a language based on logical semantic (symbolic) structure and not pictography or imitative sounds.

Well said.

[TobiSGD]

Terminals are so 80's. Sure, they do and always will have their uses, but user interfaces are simply the superior way of doing things.

http://www.catb.org/~esr//writings/u...rogrammer.html

[abraxxa]

I doubt it will ship Perl 5.6 but 5.16.