On 02/08/2013 11:17 AM, shane richards wrote:
I unfortunately had to download/code "new" versions of software recently due to burglary in what used to be a studio. This is what I found: 1. I never realised just how much time I had spent writing freaking .desktop files, designing icons, creating MIME types, associating programs, and mucking about with menus in general. Of course, where does one send their bunch of xdg files for others to use? It's not like packagers accept outsiders commenting on their sub-standard packaging. I have binaries installed right into /usr/share - how did that happen? I told the packager and was told basically where to go "NOOB". (30 years of CM production, 15 of those years on Linux. I'm a noob, ok, sorry).
Yah, I've gotten those kind of responses from developers. Not from packagers, though.
2. What happened since 2010? About half my VST and windows programs stopped working. New wine sucks; lots of xruns, plenty of crashes, some programs won't even install or run. New kernel blows hard, I'm getting Xruns on a machine that's over 4-times as powerful as the last. Never, ever had that before. Why do we always have to have "cutting edge"? Screw the 1.5 release, the last good one was the 1.1.13/28/32, series. Use THAT tried and tested version for your install and allow upgrades later.
Hardware changes seem to have big effects on xruns.
3. So far, NONE of my old multi-app projects have been immediately useable, due to the above. An OS upgrade has killed some projects. It shouldn't happen. So I went searching for Ubuntu Lucid/KXStudio, just like I ran without incident for 3 years...it ran everything I could throw at it. There seems to have been an all-out scorched-earth policy towards Ubuntu Lucid. It no longer exists. KXStudio just wants to "upgrade" me - the original repos have been razed as well - but I don't want "upgrade", I want a wine that works and a kernel that can keep up on hardware that is 4 times faster than before.
I don't consider Ubuntu a good choice. Easy to use, but they're definitely heading an unfriendly direction.
4. And now to the biggest gripe. On my laptop, I decided to create a login for my partner so she could quickly check her mail without me having to unblock facebook etc. When I finally got her to log in, the DEFAULT BACKGROUND WALLPAPER HAD A HENTAI CHICK IN A SUBSERVIENCE POSE. WTF!? Partner not amused. Are all the distro people 15 year old losers?
Yah, some seem to be. Which distro was that? Have never seen one that had any background graphic that original.
I have a Live CD version of Aptosid. When you boot it, the first thing you notice is that the trash can has a huge pile of stuff in it. Didn't anyone think of simply emptying the trash before they made their live cd?????
5. Related to 4 and 1: can we just spend an hour checking the defaults on the desktop before releasing stuff? KDE as presented by the distros is worse than XP off a Dell ghost disk. Horrible, horrible, horrible defaults. Nepomuk/Strigi disaster turned on by default. Why? We already knew it was a disaster. If you're gonna say "we're a music distro", then set it up for MUSIC not for eye-candy.
In my opinion, as a former longtime KDE user, KDE4 *is not usable as a music workstation desktop*. Too many background daemons, too much eye-candy wasting processor time and memory (note: the eye candy can all be turned off), etc.
Start with an audio distro. Musix works as a music distro. ArtistX worked for me, too. Aptosid works for me, cuz I can always boot from the live CD of whatever version I had installed, and reinstall it. And Aptosid doesn't automatically upgrade items like the kernel; you have to do that manually.
Or start with a non-KDE/non-GNOME3 desktop like LXDE or XFCE and add the music stuff to it. While you're doing it - document everything you did and keep that offsite. Similar backups for /etc, all your customized .desktop files, etc. After it's all configured and works the way you want it to, boot from a live Linux CD and make an image of your system partition. Back that up and save it offsite.
-- David gnome@xxxxxxxxxxxxx authenticity, honesty, community http://clanjones.org/david/ http://dancing-treefrog.deviantart.com/ _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
