hello from linux !!

I have switch to Linux.

All I see is incredible far from what I have seen on Linux few years ago.

I run an OpenSuse 10.3 and all my bad point on Linux have disappear :

• The starting time have now reduce to about 30 seconds thanks to the SUPER project
• The delay and freeze that you have with yast have disappear… No need of smart!
• The installation system in general have been really improve. A single click is just what you need to install nvidia non oss driver!

There is a lot of other things which is really user friendly. Like the small textbox which appear when you are in a folder and hit some key to find a file. You will not just search with first letter but with you can hit more than one letter to find what you search. Yast is a lot easier and faster than previous version. You have search engine everywhere to find what you search quicker.
EDIT:

this is my desktop

yast:

start menu:

control center:

With only a small time I can only conclude that MS Windows is far from what we have now on Linux. It is amazing! Few years ago, we have a system where you have to use console every-time you want to do something and here you have a real desktop with 3D effect!

fish in the cube

cool animation when you close a window:

The first thing I do is get my rsa key from my windows partition and get svn/compile Mono It is faster than cygwin and easier

Rem: all screenshot come from opensuse site because I have not found how done screenshots ^^ (will try with print screen tonight). But I install compiz fusion and I have the same effect

Rem2: the only issue for moment is that I have no sound on flash player ( I have no sound for all at start but it is just because I have 2 sound card and I select the good one in admin panel)

Compiz Fusion video

Compositing have bring a lot of thing in desktop experience.

Beryl which is a fork of Compiz have now fusion with Compiz Extra for plugin package part and have bring some features in compize core. To sum up, compiz is core with just few stable plugin and Compiz Fusion is a package of plugin which can be unstable on some plugin but which bring a lot of features to desktop.

Some video to show you progress of Compiz fusion and Compiz:

Gnome 2.20 is out!

Gnome have just released the new version 2.20.

You can found here the full release note.

Else here is a quick summary:

Evolution (mail client)

• Auto detect missing attachments
• Mail received notification
• Backup & Restore system
• Magic space bar (by pressing space bar you can see all your mailbox)
• Calendar/Events improvements

Epiphany (browser)

• in-line completion improvements

Multimedia

• Eye of Gnome is faster and more stable
• Eye of Gnome have easier access to basic information and metadata
• Eye of Gnome transfer image to other image application
• Video & Audio codec installation work-flow

Back office

• Support for interactive PDF forms
• Note synchronization
• Syntax highlighting in text editor improve
• File management
• Improve user friendly/accessibility
• Switch between account in password management
• Better support for right to left language

linux marketshare

I have found a beautiful survey which show the market-share of Linux distro and Linux main tool ( windowing environment, browser, email client,…)

All this analyse is done by collecting vote in community so it is not a real market share but it can show you a good view thanks to the number of vote.

So first, we can see that Ubuntu is the first one (no surprises) but we see that SUSE have taken the major step forward (compare with 2006 survey).

The third place is Debian which is imo good for server but really bad for desktop. But it is only my opinion.

For windowing environment, we see that KDE and GNOME take quite all the market share ( no surprise too).

And Gnome take the lead over KDE. It seems OK because Unbuntu (and debian families) is really big and SUZE (out of Europe) is by default on Gnome. You can see all distribution with Gnome as default desktop here.

For browser, it is quite simple

Firefox have take all and let dust to other. Mozilla have really done a great job and have change the flat world of browser with Firefox.

Linux have really done a big step forward big get it more user friendly.

A lot for firm use it as server for long time but now with all good job done by Ubuntu, Suse,… team we have a easy OS that can be used by any person and not just engineer and IT people.

After user friendly effort, we have the virtualisation which provide a real windows emulation (not as wine).

I am more and more thinking to take the time to install a Suse on my pc to replace my old windows because I do not want Vista cause of the 1Go of ram taken by it at start. I have a VM player with a Suse under Windows, I will switch to Suse desktop with Qemu or vmplayer for windows

vala

vala is a new programming language which bring performance of c++ and user-friendly of the C#.

In fact, Vala is very closed to C#in syntax. It contains even the most recent thing of C# as :

• Lambda expressions
• Type inference for local variables
• Generics
• Non-null types

And a lot of other features from basic C#:

• Interfaces
• Properties
• Signals
• Foreach
• Assisted memory management
• Exception handling
• Type modules (Plugins)

But it only bring language features. We have no virtual machine, no framework!

This language just try to make the life easier for people who want to build compiled assembly.

Vala is a great language to build application with very good performance or wich interact with low level layer (hardware). Mono/DotNet is quick to develop, easy to maintain, user friendly and bring a big toolbox to not have reinvent the weel…So, Vala & Mono is at the end not for the same use. But it bring to developer who want to do low level thing or embded thing or developer who do not want to have VM.

Rem: A lot of developer are still saying that VM is bad for performance but a lot of snipset have shown that it is not so slow and can even be better in some way because the compiler JIT optimize things. so, if you do not want VM just for performance, it is not so simple… But there are a lot of other good reason to not use VM.

It is great to see that even low level language can become easy and powerfull with a good ratio of line of code by features.

Monotorrent GUI

As some of you know, I have work on Monotorrent to make a winform GUI. A big news is that now I have an opponent

Jared have done GTK# GUI for GNOME.

His GUI seems more advanced than my previous one with category, RSS and plugin system.

Here you can see the full res demo.

or in low res.

Jared, you have done a great work. Hope I will find time to improove my own GUI.

So, here I post some screenshot of my winform GUI:

REM: In fact, both GUI ( winforms & GTK#) have quite the same design

Happy birthday to Gnome!

10 years of freedom.

Many thanks goes to Miguel to have launch this amazing project.

This is one of the most known (with KDE) desktop. It is really cute and a lot of people have ever switch to linux and use Gnome. I will do the switch soon. I have a multiboot and I use more MSwindows but I will leave it.

You can see a small presentation of gnome evolution here.