If you have used it long enough, chances that you haven't seen "xyz does not match even after sync" message is minimal. It's big, bloated and slow application full of bugs. Sadly, there is no graphical MUA on Linux that satisfies me. OK, Sylpheed is close enough, but some of it's interface and functionality is awkward and broken.
2. OpenOffice
Good for writing small documents, 50 pages at most. I wrote my diploma thesis in OOo and it was a painful experience. The funniest thing was when I tried to turn the changes tracking on document with 70 pages. After I have made some changes, I noticed that disk I/O indicator on my laptop is constantly turned on. A minute later, the only thing I could have done was to press the power switch. Apparently, OOo ate all of my memory (1 GB of physical RAM + 1 GB of swap), just to track few changes. I usually don't have praises for Microsoft's products, but Microsoft Office is miles in front of OOo, and it will probably stay so for a long time.
3. Dia
Related to previous rant on OOo, there is Dia. There are simply no words to describe the difference between Dia and Visio, Visio is better for several orders of magnitude. Dia's functionality is broken and it's symbols are just ugly. Many common symbols can't even be found in Dia.
4. KDE
I really don't see what is so cool with KDE. It's slow, most of it's applications are pointless, uses too many libraries so when I use apt-get to update the system I always need some new KDE libraries, it looks too baroque, uses stupid K* names for applications, imitates features from other GUIs instead of focusing on developing new ones etc. There are dozens more reasons not to use KDE. I stick to lesser evil (GNOME) simply because I'm too lazy and don't have time to configure fvwm. Hopefully I will do that one day and get rid of KDE/GNOME junk forever.
5. Rhythmbox, Amarok, etc.
What's the point of having a music player which uses RDBMS?!? I have 20 GB of mp3 songs and I still don't have need to use a DBMS to organize my music or find a specific song! For that purpose I systematically save my music using the filesystem hierarchy, and that's enough!. Both Amarok and Rhythmbox use idiotic interface, use fat too much memory and CPU and try to be smarter than it's user (automatic album cover downloading, song rating... come on!). I'm fan of Winamp/XMMS style of programs, but unfortunately it seems that XMMS has stuck in development (still using ugly GTK 1.x). Recently I've discovered audacious, the XMMS fork - it looks nice and has nice plugins. I'll give it a chance, it looks promising.
12 comments:
Yeah... I know. I'm thinking of selling my PC, then my home. Modern life really sucks. When I'm done, I'm gonna live in the forest and howl at the moon.
;-)
What about mpd (http://www.musicpd.org/) in conjunction with Sonata (http://sonata.berlios.de/).
What's the purpose of this entry? You are basically critizising what the Linux community calls usability in Linux. To some extend I agree with you but I don't understand why you don't suggest some alternatives.
You're kidding, right? KDE sucks? Oh, my...the laughter! You just keep plodding right along with fugly Gnome, which uses a lot of applications that start with a "G" instead of a "K". You just keep limiting your configuration and personalization options - they know better than you. Have you even seen KDE 4? It breaks new ground in UI. I know it's not complete yet, and despite having a version number 4.0, which would indicate that it is finished, it's got a long way to go to actually be useful. Still, it does some stuff not found in any desktop on any OS. Isn't this what you complained about? If you're gonna make a statement that KDE sucks, you could have, at least, looked at the latest version. What a joke!
Open Office sucks? Earth to bloggger: Running the newest Office in Vista you'll need at least 2GB of memory to be of any good. You can't compare Open Office with Office '97, you know... Besides, your computer must be too slow to even run Vista, since KDE bogs it down so much.
Amarok (a KDE app not starting with a "K") is THE BOMB. I've only seen one other application that's better, IMO, for your music collections, and that's iTunes.
If you want lightweight apps, use them. Apparently, your hardware must still be in the early 90's or something...
Also, what were you doing trying to write a thesis in OpenOffice when you could have used LaTeX for a much more hassle-free and professional-looking result?
The solution to Evolution is to simply not use it. Use Thunderbird instead. If you can't use Thunderbird because you are on a Microsoft Exchange server, then chances are you are going to have far more problems with your email server than your client, so you should move off of the Exchange server immediately.
I cant comment on your first three points as I dont use those. A least not enough to comment.
Your fourth point is ridiculous. The statements you make about KDE are on the whole untrue. KDE is the most advanced and refined desktop environment in use today. If having configuration options confuses you its probably best you stick with gnome. I must admit though in my opinion I personally found gnome to be far to restricted in functionality for my needs and just too butt ugly for my tastes.
Your fifth point I actually agree with. I see no need for all that bloat on an audio player. I generally use Xmms or Kaffeine for all my audio.
#6: Acrobat Reader 8. acroread 5 was my default choice for viewing PDFs. Acrobat Reader 8 is next to unusable. Takes ages to start, is is extremely sluggish when I drag the scrollbar to browse the PDF, does not want to remember between sessions that my default page view is "Single Page" (somehow it always reverts to continuous), etc. Shortly: CRAP!
OK, this is the stupidest article about Linux software I've ever seen... I made my diploma thases, with OpenOffice, on Linux, and a P3 with 512MB RAM. It was a 100+ pages document with images, drawings, screenshots etc. I can't tell it worked super-fast, becouse on a P3 you can't expact things to happen instantly. But OOo was more than usable under decent circumstances and with a decent speed and NO it didn't ate more than about 150-200 MB RAM... your OOo observations are just stupid, or you have a crappy install or version or .. whatever...
Than KDE, I will not repeat what others told, I agree with them...
As for Amarok, I'm not listening as much music and when I do I prefer mplayer. Still, Amarok is almost as good as Apple's players...
Dia isn't that bad too. Also your comparition with Visio is probably good, but they are just 2 application too far apart to be directly compared. Maybe in a few years, if Dia evolves more.
If KDE is slow for you, your PC must seriously blow..and I don't mean that in a good way. KDE runs decently on my laptop which has 192mb of ram. It runs amazingly on my PC with 1gb. I think you're nuts.
I can't understand why people say that Evolution is buggy. The only bug I've ever seen in Evolution is the "Expunge failed, even after a sync", which is unacceptable considering it's been a serious bug for years.
I'm surprised Banshee didn't make the list as well. If you make the mistake of opening an MP3 in Banshee, you then cannot drag and drop more MP3s from Nautilus straight into the Banshee playlist. No. That gives you an error message "File is already in library". Instead, you have to find it in the Banshee library and add it that way. It's the most brain-dead interface failure I've ever seen.
The only reason I still have Banshee is because it's good at ripping two CDs simultaneously. But then all the MP3s made from the CDs open by default in Banshee. It's like a virus!
I'm not going to criticise your comments regard the software that you don't like, it's entirely your choice and I think that the majority of people who've commented have forgotten that within the Open Source Community, opinions matter, regardless of whether they're positive, neutral, or otherwise.
If you don't like AmaroK 1.4.7 'Fast Forward', I think that you may take a liking to Exaile Music Player 2.12. It has a similar UI layout to that of AmaroK 1.4.7 'Fast Forward', however its feature set is much more concise. It features Last.FM integration, automatic music album artwork collection and an unusual tabbed playlist feature which I like.
I'd also suggest the use of KOffice as opposed to OpenOffice.Org if you prefer.
Post a Comment