Accursed backdrop

[Richard Gaskin]

Richmond wrote:

 > On 26/05/15 22:17, Richard Gaskin wrote:
 >> So I know the engine team uses Linux extensively.  What I don't know
 >> is whether IDE team members use Linux at least a full day each week,
 >> as would seem useful for Windows as well.
 >
 > I am sure they don't.
 >
 > It might not be a bad idea if they were to hire one Windows expert
 > and one Linux expert "just" to run their Linux and Windows versions
 > and see what goes wrong and then liase witht he core Dev team right
 > there in the office: at which point the old "a picture is worth a
 > thousand words" thing would kick in as the expert could point out a
 > problem right there, on screen, rather than in some badly written bug
 > report by someone half a world away.

They certainly have the talent on board right now.  Dr. Brett, Fraser, 
and many others there have a deep understanding of Linux, and a very 
healthy appreciation for it.

The only element that may be missing at the moment would be allocating 
time to apply that talent for such a review and touch-up.

All told, it would seem many of the hardest things for Linux were done 
many versions back, thanks to Fraser and others who did the enhanced GDT 
integration for v7.

The remainder seem like mostly small things, just a matter of making 
sure they get time and attention.


 > I tend to think of Ubuntu as Debian's baby brother, so I wonder if
 > it differs sufficiently from Debian to justify that.

Any Debian-based distro with Gnome 3 would probably hit the most salient 
aspects well, but Ubuntu's Unity DE has been useful for exposing a few 
things like icon assignments in ways that were less obvious in Gnome Shell.

And then there's the eventual need to migrate the menuing subsystem to 
GTK or Qt to take advantage of Unity's global menu bar, but I won't 
expect that right away.


 > Or, put another way; if Ubuntu, why not MINT as well?

The oft-quoted-and-equally-misread stats from Distrowatch 
notwithstanding, Mint is popular but a very distant second from Ubuntu.

It's a fine distro, but simply doesn't have the same audience.

So...
 > At which point RunRev have to buy/rent/steal another very large
 > chunk of office space to run 25 PCs with a wide selection of
 > Linux distros - a tendency that can lead to several people
 > having nervous breakdowns.

...for Mint and the rest I'd use VMs.  Keep at least one full metal 
install of the most popular distro, maybe another with Fedora to round 
it out (different package manager and other core components), and run 
the rest in VMs - disk space is cheap, RAM almost as cheap.

 > Linux may run "on just about anything", but the vast majority of
 > current, popular distros require quite 'greedy' specs. I tried, last
 > week, to install MINT 17 XFCE on a Pentium V with 512 MB RAM and the
 > installer in the DVD drive got so sluggish that the computer froze
 > solid.

512 MB is asking a lot from any OS.  But 1 GB is plenty for most 
distros, and 2 GB is often very generous.  On a rig with 8 GB RAM you 
could run two VMs and still have plenty to spare.

 > Whichever way one cuts thing, I do believe that Linux is not just "an
 > operating system for nutters and geeks" any more and needs to
 > be taken just as seriously as Windows and Macintosh. The fact that,
 > at the moment, the Linux version of LiveCode is not up to
 > parity witht he versions for Windows and Macintosh demonstrates that
 > RunRev don't take Linux ans seriously as Windows and Macintosh.

Agreed on both fronts.  Compared to Windows, both Mac and Linux are 
niche players on the desktop.  But outside the desktop the world is 
increasingly dominated by Linux, on systems as small as the Raspberry Pi 
and as big as supercomputers.

It's no accident that so many of the PhDs working at RunRev enjoy Linux.

The only question is whether Apple can stabilize iOS long enough to let 
the team work on anything else.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com