WhatANerd wrote:

Anyway, thought you guys might want to see this.....I had a killer mock OS X FreeBSD desktop years ago, back when Aqua copycat t […]
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Anyway, thought you guys might want to see this.....I had a killer mock OS X FreeBSD desktop years ago, back when Aqua copycat themes were very few in number and required lots of manual fiddling to work:

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Good effort man! Although I'd forgotten how garish pre-Leopard OSX looked!

elementary OS is probably the best looking Linux distro inspired by Mac OS:

I think Mac systems have good desktop environments, but I honestly don't like any of them after OS 9. But I don't like desktop environments because they're old and/or retro, it's only the bloat and clumsy interface that irks me (not that Mac OS 10+ are clumsy, but sometimes being too simple makes it less flexible). If I want something with fancy clean HD graphics, I'd rather watch a Bluray or play 3D Video Games. Pure gui tools without fancy graphics are usually considered retro and useless according to computer users now days unfortunately.

Think CDE is a good environment for Linux:

CDE is somewhat famous:

Jurassic Systems

🤣

Holering wrote:

If I want something with fancy clean HD graphics, I'd rather watch a Bluray or play 3D Video Games.

I don't understand this statement.

What about Mac OS 8/9 'Platinum' interfaces? I miss how hard edged that gray thing was. I'm not sure if current-day Linux WMs even support such a thing given the whole vector DPI scalability fads, stripping basic features for 'sleekness' (like wallpapers and customizable color), and such.

Haha, love how this thread is taking so many twists and turns.

Regarding Jurassic Systems: are you sure that's CDE? Didn't Irix use it's own window manager on its interactive desktop? That doesn't look like the CDE I am used to, but then again CDE was supposed to be "Common".

What about Mac OS 8/9 'Platinum' interfaces?

I always thought they were beautiful, and much better looking than anything OS X ever had. Aqua has not aged well at all imo; looking back at my screenshots makes me gag! 🤣.

There was (is?) a GTK/XFCE theme called Platinum, but it isn't as polished as Apple's, of course. I was using it last year but it's not the most functional thing to use.

Having the right fonts matter too. I found it very hard to locate the Charcoal font (COMMERCIAL FONTS YAY) but Virtue, which is derived from it, is pretty easy to find for free - which makes no sense to me at all. oh fonts and their strange and confusing legalities. it's a wonder how so many companies got away with font collection shovelware CDs in the '90s....

and personally i'm not fond of all those bitstream vera derivatives that define every Linux WM. Too wide and thin for my liking, like some hipster variant of Verdana. but Free!!!!!!!!!!!

There's also FreeSans which is a decent font, except its hinting sucks and looks terrible without anti-aliasing.

Interesting conversation so far. I was expecting there to be a higher concentration of Linux users among retro gamers.

I switched to Linux in 2009 when I got tired of dealing with Vista. It turned out to be a good move. I took mostly computer science classes in college, and would have been royally screwed if I didn't have some Linux experience. I started with Ubuntu, then switched to Xubuntu after the Unity fiasco.

I like Linux overall, but there are some things that drive me crazy. I can certainly understand some of the frustrations expressed in this thread. Go ahead, try to play an encrypted DVD on Linux. I dare you. Try to get that USB wireless dongle working while you're at it. Some things never seem to get any easier.

There are also some design aspects of Linux that rub me the wrong way. The way files are barfed all over the hard drive, for instance, or the over-reliance on the command line. Package managers are great when they work, but installing programs by hand can be hell. (God forbid I have to compile something from source.)

Still, I wouldn't go back to Windows. I love Linux for the whole "free and open" thing, the lack of malware, and the generally superior performance, even on marginal hardware. The OS really shines on netbooks and older PCs.

Bottom line: there are good and bad things about every operating system. Use whichever one annoys you the least. 😀

WhatANerd wrote:

Regarding Jurassic Systems: are you sure that's CDE? Didn't Irix use it's own window manager on its interactive desktop? That doesn't look like the CDE I am used to, but then again CDE was supposed to be "Common".

Yeah, it looks like I was wrong.

maximus wrote:

Go ahead, try to play an encrypted DVD on Linux. I dare you.

Even with libdvdread & libdvdcss2?

WhatANerd wrote:

Who have you spoken with? Are they other college students? See, we've been hearing this since at least the late '90s. It's the same old story - that's why we're jaded, so you'll have to excuse us for that. This was supposed to happen when Novell took over Suse. Then again with Ubuntu. It's the same old bologna. You'll get disillusioned with the hype, too. The problem is that all the nerdy coders think they know what is best, so they all work against each other or substantially alter things/start from scratch. I don't see the cycle being broken. There's no visionary to bring it all together like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ray Noorda, or the IBM suits. The Linux guys wouldn't listen anyway, it's like herding cats. Like SquallStrife said, it probably won't happen in our lifetime.

+1. You also forgot Corel, Xandros, Sun, etc who were all supposed to herald the end of Windows and rise of Linux as the new world order. It never materializes, and I think it's because of the exact factors you outline - a decentralized lack of direction. 😒

As far as using linux/the thread's original question - I'd say on and off over the years; I was never very taken with Ubuntu and all of the "stuff" I've heard recently doesn't improve on that. I've had decent luck with Gentoo and Puppy over the years though. I'll agree with the "life's too short for Gentoo" jokes though - at least with older processors. 🤣

WhatANerd wrote:

I always thought they were beautiful, and much better looking than anything OS X ever had. Aqua has not aged well at all imo; looking back at my screenshots makes me gag! 🤣.

Tiger and earlier looked rather garish, but Leopard onwards is pretty good.

obobskivich wrote:

WhatANerd wrote:

Who have you spoken with? Are they other college students? See, we've been hearing this since at least the late '90s. It's the same old story - that's why we're jaded, so you'll have to excuse us for that. This was supposed to happen when Novell took over Suse. Then again with Ubuntu. It's the same old bologna. You'll get disillusioned with the hype, too. The problem is that all the nerdy coders think they know what is best, so they all work against each other or substantially alter things/start from scratch. I don't see the cycle being broken. There's no visionary to bring it all together like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ray Noorda, or the IBM suits. The Linux guys wouldn't listen anyway, it's like herding cats. Like SquallStrife said, it probably won't happen in our lifetime.

+1. You also forgot Corel, Xandros, Sun, etc who were all supposed to herald the end of Windows and rise of Linux as the new world order. It never materializes, and I think it's because of the exact factors you outline - a decentralized lack of direction. 😒

I for one prefer a lot of nerdy coders doing whatever they think is best to a "visionary" deciding what is best for me. This lack of direction and the resulting diversity is one of the strong points of Linux and open source software in general. In that sense, I'm glad the "year of the Linux desktop" never came along.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Distributions like Linux are great for people that just need Internet access and want to save money in licensing costs. But as soon as you want to something even remotely complex you quickly run into something that doesn't work.

I don't know, Linux works great for servers. I once deployed my web GIS application on my client's server. It already had quite a lot of server apps running at the same time, and I had to use separate Apache installation because my client didn't want their web server get touched. Yet, my web GIS app ran fast and rock-stable.

5u3 wrote:

This lack of direction and the resulting diversity is one of the strong points of Linux and open source software in general.

I would suggest the contrary. It would surely be far better to have 90% of collective effort directed to solutions that work for 90% of the people rather than having a diverse selection of software programs, none of which work quite right.

I like this bit:

The complaints up-thread about juju and pulse are entirely valid, but the solution is not to try to deliver two things at once. If you try to deliver both at once you have to also deliver a way of switching between the two. Now you have three moving parts instead of one, which means the failure rate has gone up by a factor of _six_ (three parts, and three interactions). We have essentially already posited that we have insufficient developer effort to have 100%-complete features at ship time, so asking them to take on six times the failure rate when they're already overburdened is just madness. Alternatively, we could say that we're integrating features too rapidly, but you do that at the expense of goal 1, to be the showcase for the latest and greatest in free software.

Software is hard. The way to fix it is to fix it, not sweep it under the rug.

There is a legitimate discussion to be had about where and how we draw the line for feature inclusion, about how we increase and formalize our testing efforts, and about how we develop and deploy spike solutions for corner-case problems like the one device class that juju happens to do worse than the old stack. But the chain of logic from "Linux is about choice" to "ship everything and let the user chose how they want their sound to not work" starts with fallacy and ends with disaster.

From http://linuxhaters.blogspot.ca/2013/05/an-old-gem.html

See also http://linuxhaters.blogspot.ca/2008/07/fallac … -of-choice.html .

Firtasik wrote:

maximus wrote:

Go ahead, try to play an encrypted DVD on Linux. I dare you.

Even with libdvdread & libdvdcss2?

In my experience, libdvdcss2 always takes a half hour minimum to get working. With every release, it seems like the installation routine changes just enough to throw me off completely. I mention DVD playback because it's one of the things that really should just work out of the box. Nobody wants to have to futz around with it.

maximus wrote:

I like Linux overall, but there are some things that drive me crazy. I can certainly understand some of the frustrations expressed in this thread. Go ahead, try to play an encrypted DVD on Linux. I dare you.

Actually you can watch encrypted movies my friend, all you need is to install the libdvdcss package. 😁

(I had this same problem with linux when I moved to it full time earlier this year. My freind who is a Gentoo wizard steered me straight to the fix. 🤣 )

EDIT I just noticed what you said about it taking a long time and I'm not sure how it is in ubuntu but using fedora it was quite simple. I literally added RPMFusion to the repo paths (With an easy to use RPM package) and then simply searched "libdvdcss" in the package manager. When it produced a result I installed it. Easy as pie.

Also there are legal (Patents and liscensing) reasons linux cannot include a DVD dycryption package by default (However they can't stop you from installing one. Free as in freedom. 😉 ).

maximus wrote:

Firtasik wrote:

maximus wrote:

Go ahead, try to play an encrypted DVD on Linux. I dare you.

Even with libdvdread & libdvdcss2?

In my experience, libdvdcss2 always takes a half hour minimum to get working. With every release, it seems like the installation routine changes just enough to throw me off completely. I mention DVD playback because it's one of the things that really should just work out of the box. Nobody wants to have to futz around with it.

I'm glad to see so many realists! A lot of things change just enough to throw us off completely, making us re-memorize a bunch of new steps all the time.

The majority of this happens every eight months or so:

1) Decide to install newest version of Linux. Ok, for the past 2 releases, configuration has been the same; this shouldn't take too long.

2) Network installer has changed and I can't use UNetBootin to extract the image to my USB stick like I have been for the past few years. Waste close to an hour trying to figure out why.

3) Give up and burn a DVD with the network install ISO, which almost defeats the purpose of installing from gigabit ethernet.

4) Install the system. It asks me if I want to upgrade. HELL NO, as the last two times it royally screwed up everything Linux and I had to end up reinstalling from scratch anyway (WASTING MORE TIME). So let's do a clean install from the get-go. Ok, that went well. Now let's get rid of Pulse Audio (see previous posts). Waste more time.

5) Now let's get rid of nouveau (see previous posts). Waste more time.

6) Now let's try to get these video and audio codecs installed without errors, so we can use programs other than VLC for playback. Waste more time.

7) Oh, for an "operating system" that gives me so many choices, I can only use Google Chrome as a web browser because Adobe decided to stop providing Flash on Linux for other browsers. Great.

8 ) Phew, all this was tedious, mind-numbing work...I think I'll kick back and watch some Netflix. Oh. What!? I have to go through another huge procedure that doesn't work for half the people who try it???

Luckily I haven't had to play an actual DVD on Linux in years (or Windows for that matter) - I just rip all of them with mencoder and stream them from my server. See, open source can be useful! 😊

I'm a user but not a fanboy (not implying anyone else who posted here is).

Just remember, there's no rule that says you can't use more than one operating system on the same machine. Luckily my machine can boot into Windows or Linux in 5 seconds flat (Windows actually boots faster than openSUSE 13.1), so switching between them is fast, but still annoying overall. 😎

I was expecting there to be a higher concentration of Linux users among retro gamers.

I was too. I guess it kind of makes sense, seeing that since the people here keep going back for more of MS-DOS and Windows 3x/9x! 🤣 Maybe our best memories are with the Microsoft systems, and not Linux.

Manjaro Linux (XFCE) comes with libdvdcss2 already installed. DVDs are playing fine for me.

WhatANerd wrote:

I was too. I guess it kind of makes sense, seeing that since the people here keep going back for more of MS-DOS and Windows 3x/9x! 🤣 Maybe our best memories are with the Microsoft systems, and not Linux.

Personally the fond memories I have with those systems is not so much playing games and such but fiddling with stuff to get it to work, so linux is a perfect modern replacement for fiddling with DOS or Windows 95/98 imho. That doesn't mean I'll ever stop messing with DOS computers but it means I can actually kind of move on rather than continue to wish it was 1997 still. (But then again who doesn't wish they were still a kid sometimes) 😜

However with things like libdvdcss it was an easy fix and probably took 10 - 20 minutes to at very most. (mostly waiting for the packages to install)