3 ms·

Yeah thats most of my issues with Linux mostly binary blobs and not the fact that my laptop won't wake up from sleep, I have to screw around everytime I plug in

by fleitz 15y ago

Yeah thats most of my issues with Linux mostly binary blobs and not the fact that my laptop won't wake up from sleep, I have to screw around everytime I plug in a projector. LibreOffice works great as long as I don't have to open any Word docs that use change tracking, or spreadsheets that involve calculations, or god forbid a powerpoint with anything but rudimentary graphics. It's a panacea I don't know why anyone would waste 2 billable hours on paying money to avoid the embarrassment of having to fuck around with your operating system for 15 minutes while you attempt to make a presentation. It's not 1994 anymore, people expect computers to work and it reflects poorly when they don't. And what am I saving this $300 for? For the privilege of being able add the code that should have been there in the first place.

eliasmacpherson 15y ago
Stallman's GNU quest began in response to a binary blob printer driver that he had no option but to suffer under, because it was closed source. The issues you describe are attributable to what's between the keyboard and the chair. Try getting a standard mac to work with the majority of projectors, without any adapters. The LibreOffice issues you are having are due to an arms race where Microsoft break compatibility with their previous formats each release. You have to learn to use the computer you have properly or you will embarrass yourself with it. This is true for all operating systems. Not everything is going to work exactly as you suspect, at least you're in a position to do something about it on your own linux machine. That's never going to be the case with the competition. Give it another 100 years, whose software is still going to be around, Stallman's, Jobs' or Gates'? It's not as feature complete, but it has greater longevity.
Tmmrn 15y ago
On the other hand I have experienced that the blobs are actually the problem. For example fglrx fails very often to wake up the graphics card in my notebook. The open source radeon driver never had that problem. People implementing power saving seem to often complain about buggy ACPI implementations. Is this email legit? Did any action come from it? I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised. http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/... fglrx's xrandr support kind of works, but is shaky with the virtual size set to a minimum and if not set high manually needs to restart X every time one wants to set a higher resolution on a secondary screen. The open source radeon driver on the other hand has beautifully working xrandr support. Nvidia's blob... Well, the proprietary twinview doesn't support rotating single screens and when I watch videos of presentations I see mostly people trying to get nvidia-settings to set the correct resolution on the projector. The microsoft documents you speak of, are these in the proprietary, undocumented, closed formats or the new, questionably standardized, overly complex, formats? I personally think that it is microsoft's intention that you need to buy their product to be fully "compatible" with their document format and that's what they get. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_... I don't know about you but the presentations I see around here in the university are mostly with open source intel drivers (which I have not seen failing in that regard yet) and a PDF viewer showing the presentation made with the latex beamer class. I fortunately don't have to give many presentations but for some I do have used LibreOffice Impress and I was quite satisfied. Sure, it was quite buggy some time ago but it has improved much. I fail to imagine how I would spend 15 minutes "fucking around with my operating system". I simply "ctrl+r" the relevant xrandr command from my shell history (something like "xrandr --output LVDS --preferred --output HDMI-0 --preferred --right-of LVDS --rotate normal") - if you don't like the command line, just use a simple gui like arandr - and start the presentation. That takes a few seconds... Maybe you can elaborate? What are you saving $300 for? Try listening to a presentation from Richard Stallman. You may have heard of him... He speaks about that topic.

by fleitz 15y ago

eliasmacpherson 15y ago

Stallman's GNU quest began in response to a binary blob printer driver that he had no option but to suffer under, because it was closed source. The issues you describe are attributable to what's between the keyboard and the chair. Try getting a standard mac to work with the majority of projectors, without any adapters. The LibreOffice issues you are having are due to an arms race where Microsoft break compatibility with their previous formats each release. You have to learn to use the computer you have properly or you will embarrass yourself with it. This is true for all operating systems. Not everything is going to work exactly as you suspect, at least you're in a position to do something about it on your own linux machine. That's never going to be the case with the competition. Give it another 100 years, whose software is still going to be around, Stallman's, Jobs' or Gates'? It's not as feature complete, but it has greater longevity.

Tmmrn 15y ago

On the other hand I have experienced that the blobs are actually the problem. For example fglrx fails very often to wake up the graphics card in my notebook. The open source radeon driver never had that problem. People implementing power saving seem to often complain about buggy ACPI implementations. Is this email legit? Did any action come from it? I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised. http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/... fglrx's xrandr support kind of works, but is shaky with the virtual size set to a minimum and if not set high manually needs to restart X every time one wants to set a higher resolution on a secondary screen. The open source radeon driver on the other hand has beautifully working xrandr support. Nvidia's blob... Well, the proprietary twinview doesn't support rotating single screens and when I watch videos of presentations I see mostly people trying to get nvidia-settings to set the correct resolution on the projector. The microsoft documents you speak of, are these in the proprietary, undocumented, closed formats or the new, questionably standardized, overly complex, formats? I personally think that it is microsoft's intention that you need to buy their product to be fully "compatible" with their document format and that's what they get. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_... I don't know about you but the presentations I see around here in the university are mostly with open source intel drivers (which I have not seen failing in that regard yet) and a PDF viewer showing the presentation made with the latex beamer class. I fortunately don't have to give many presentations but for some I do have used LibreOffice Impress and I was quite satisfied. Sure, it was quite buggy some time ago but it has improved much. I fail to imagine how I would spend 15 minutes "fucking around with my operating system". I simply "ctrl+r" the relevant xrandr command from my shell history (something like "xrandr --output LVDS --preferred --output HDMI-0 --preferred --right-of LVDS --rotate normal") - if you don't like the command line, just use a simple gui like arandr - and start the presentation. That takes a few seconds... Maybe you can elaborate? What are you saving $300 for? Try listening to a presentation from Richard Stallman. You may have heard of him... He speaks about that topic.