Been a long time fan of Sluggy Freelance. Even bought the megatome hardcovers (and waiting patiently for the next one). I sometimes wonder how easy it would be for a new reader to get into it, as there's a large amount of back story. Definitely worth the effort though. Quality web comic!
E17 is aimed at the kind of person who likes to configure and tweak their system. I don't think it's trying to progress The Linux Desktop for the masses. It's just trying to do its own thing, and explore its own style of window management/desktop environment.
These things are always subjective, so it's understandable if you don't like E17. I can assure you though, it does fill the needs for a segment of Linux users out there, and they think it's an excellent step forward for their personal Linux Desktop.
E17 conforms well enough to the freedesktop.org standards. Even though it's not really a standards body, freedesktop.org is readily used by modern window managers, and is becoming a defacto standard. E17 does still store its config in the $HOME/.e directory though, instead of $HOME/.config/e . Can't wait until all unix utils use the
Games run perfectly well under E17. I have dozens of games, bought via Humble Bundle, and every one I've tried has worked fine with E17 (barring game bugs, of course). I had a problem once, with keyboard only games not getting focus when they run fullscreen. It's working fine now.
I use E17 on my work computer. Have done so for years. Any instability in my working environment has generally come from me, not the window manager. I think it's only ever crashed once in that time, and even then, I could press F1 to recover (as instructed by the crash dialog), and the window manager restarted itself with all windows intact.
The parent post was trolling. Probably best not to feed the troll.
Nope. Hasn't needed ESD for years. It works perfectly fine with ALSA or Pulseaudio.
Meh. It's not an issue. The package was designed for Ubuntu, not Debian.
When Valve release a Debian version of their client, installing it will be a matter of click on link and select the install option.
Sounds like a great idea for speaker cables. You can stretch the cable to whatever distance you need!
Is it oxygen-free? I hate how oxygen ruins the timbre of my cables.
Oh, I forgot to mention, another annoyance with installing Steam under Debian, is that it requires libc6 >= 2.15 . Debian testing and unstable only have 2.13. Experimental has libc6 2.16 though, so you can either install that, or download the ubuntu libc6 and copy the lib files to where steam keeps its library binaries. I ended up doing the latter.
I'm running Steam on a 64-bit Debian system. I had to enable multi-architecture for i386, and manually install the 32 bit version of the glx libraries for the driver I'm using. Other 32 bit drivers needed were automatically installed with a simple "dpkg -i steam.deb" / "apt-get -f install" combo. Also, specifically for debian, I had to modify the steam package and rename a few dependencies by hand.
All good and running TF2 beta beautifully. Also, Cogs was another game that worked. Many other games on the "Linux" list aren't installable just yet. I believe that Valve have to properly link them in their system first.
The good news is that E17 is not only pretty, it is very configurable. Which means, it can be very usable, or extremely tough, to use. It all depends on how its configured. Every keystroke, every mouse click (and mouse/key combos), even the behaviour when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, it can all be tweaked to behave in a large variety of ways. I maintain that E17 is one of the nicest WM systems to use, especially if you prefer to use the keyboard for most actions. That makes it better for getting work done.
Apparently it will be possible to achieve network transparency with Wayland, through a program external to the core of the system.
I disagree that X is showing its age badly. I think it is showing its age gracefully. Through its extensible design, it has been able to step up and cope with the demands of the modern desktop. Wayland will be more efficient, of that there is no doubt. I wonder if Wayland will cope with future demands anywhere near as well as what X has.
Yep, I received my invite 4 or 5 days ago, when I mentioned I was running Debian testing/Wheezy.
Just a note about the steam deb package. It contains dependencies that Debian doesn't have, like libc6 2.15, and libjpeg-turbo8, or something like that. You'll have to open up the deb file, and alter the control file to change the dependencies. You'll also have to download a copy of the ubuntu libc6, and throw it into the user steam directory where it stores its dynamic loadable files. Also, steam is a 32 bit package. If you're running 64 bit, you'll have to enable multiarch support by adding the i386 architecture to the dpkg system. You can then do a dpkg -i / apt-get -f install combo to install the (modified) steam deb and all dependent i386 files. Oh, and if you're running proprietary drivers, make sure to install the i386 version of the glx drivers.
So, in summary, it takes a bit of fiddling, but I'm running steam fine on Debian. Works quite nicely, in fact. TF2 is very smooth.
Well, the Windows group has always been the lowest average in Humble Bundles. The Linux group, and to a lesser extent, the Mac group, have always pushed the bundle average up. So, the results aren't much of a surprise.
I can't imagine the effort of porting all those games to other platforms. Give 'em a year, and it could probably be done. I'm sure THQ couldn't wait that long, though.
Your anger is somewhat justifiable. This sets a precedent. Now, other game publishers, who may want to use Humble Bundle, will not feel the need to put in an effort to make their games cross-platform.
Having said that, I'm grateful to Humble Bundle for pushing their cross-platform philosophy as much as they did. It's efforts like that which provide the initial step in generating a flood of games supporting Linux. I'll keep on supporting them, in future bundles, when they once more release cross platform bundles. I genuinely believe they've pushed Linux gaming to the next level, and have greatly influenced developers on the potential of Linux gaming. This will bear fruit soon.
According to the general comments with the article, the book has a creative commons license. The author commented that she will release a copy soon, when she fixes the website to go with it.
Over the years I've been running Linux, the only time I've ever had driver availability issues with Linux has been with one brand new wireless card. It now works fine. Otherwise, driver availability has been perfect in my experience.
An anecdote: one time, one of the FreeBSD guys here at work gave up in frustration trying to get FreeBSD working on an IBM server. He was having scsi card driver issues. He had to install Linux instead. It just worked under Linux.
Usually when people talk about shitty driver support in Linux, they're referring to graphics drivers. I wish they'd just say "graphics drivers", instead of implying that the whole Linux driver system is abysmal. Linux drivers are top notch. The graphics drivers are not even part of the kernel. They're part of the Xwindows system. They're still excellent, except when it comes to 3D acceleration and power saving, and then, only with ATI and Nvidia. The proprietary drivers still have the edge there.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
