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It's nearly the end of the year. I noticed I average about a post a year now on this once so fantastic news site that I barely check up on these days. I haven't seen the oodles of good posts that whooshed by, nor have I seen the inventive new types of trolls that lurked here since when I was in University. That's a perplexing 10 years ago by now.
Watery steps across the sky,
drops of naked new surprise,
smiled into the megaphone,
home onto my mind's throne.
Excited! That's the word.
It has that funky flavour of good vibes, but it also contains that aftertaste of some lesser vibes. It has Obama making us forget previous steps in the evolutionary chain, it has economic meltdown, it has a planet with a weather fury, it has outrageous coding pleasure as well as millions of unpaid hours of monkey work. It has a whole new world and a new fantastic point of view. And it has Isabelle, a girl I will marry in about 1 month!
Not wanting to start a war on anything:
I fully agree with the argument that professional development applications such as 3DMax still have not cut it into the UX realm, except from the usual suspects like Gimp and Renderman. Developing games for other platforms could easily be supported on Linux - ps development - if only the tools were up to par. Meaning: saving time rather than costing it.
That sort of givens automatically drive your decision making process as to what platform you'll be using when developing games. There are alternatives. Like there are alternatives in choosing your workforce, or spending lots of training to convert to Maya or Houdini, but that is not the cheaper solution, and it kind of voids the whole argument.
That said, I really think most of the arguments are really quite minor, except for maybe 1: a regression suite that can detect hardware incompatibility problems.
Another one that would be easy to come up with is a test-suite that streamlines the development of application configuration through both command-line and GUI. Helpful, but not crucial.
Reading the other items, I had an idea: What if distro's refer to a sort of xml configuration file with a shared / common format that specifies how exactly each distro has to set up it's files and dependencies, such that such configuration grief and the fact that 'each distro organises things differently' could be overcome in true linux style: maintaining uniqueness of the software (kernel) AND being flexible about the details (data).
All yours for the bashing..
Ask not what's inside your head, but what your head's inside of. -- J.J. Gibson