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I Could Not Agree More...

Kromaethius 21st Jan 2009

Considering the growth rate of any Linucks Distro and Linucks in general as a whole, yeah looking over that last two decades, you bet. Linucks is moving up. Now at a whopping 3% in over twenty years and with Microsoft screwing the pooch by making anyone with a PC more productive than the Nix users, gosh you have a flipping' valid point.

With Microsoft blundering things up, and looking at the historical growth rate of Linucks, yeah buddy, in about 300 years, Microsoft will have a valid competitor.

Unfortunately, anyone reading this post of yours, or mine for that matter, won't be around to see it.

I have a few favorite devices, guess what, none of them work in the latest Ubuntu Distro, not one of them. But yet when I plug them into my Windows Box, or my Apple Mac Pro, they work great. My iPhone, my iPod, my Palm, my... I think you get the picture.

Linucks is a niche OS, that's the the plan and design of the antiquated C code the kernel is written upon.

This is a short section, which is a good thing. I'm not going to bother with the "omg linux has no gamez!!1" stuff here because that is pretty much given knowledge.

I mentioned this briefly up there: Installing software. Aside from stand-alone binaries, your only option is to compile from source if you want to use an application that isn't available in the repositories or .deb packages.

I only attempted to compile two programs from source: LinuxDC++ and a Quake 1 sourceport known as TyrQuake. LinuxDC++ was only partially successful; I got the program up and running, but ran into snags when I attempt to run it through the GUI or making a shortcut for it in the GNOME Menu.

It wasn't until after all of this that I realized it was in the repositories all along. Meanwhile, TyrQuake was an outright failure. Compilation would halt, leaving it unfinished.

I had no idea what was going on. Thankfully, someone sent me some TyrQuake binaries and those were the ones I used to play the game. There simply isn't much documentation on this stuff, and any that do exist are rather vague.

I would also like to mention that there was absolutely no way I was getting any decent multimedia functionality on my own if it wasn't for the how-to I linked above.

Here's what really killed me: Gapless playback. I love my music and, being a big fan of Pink Floyd and Dream Theater, and owning various live albums, seamless playback between tracks is an absolute must. Well, nothing I tried works. I have used several Linux music players including (but certainly not limited to) Exaile, RhythmBox, and Banshee. Not even the evidently "Godly" Amarok could satisfy my hunger for gapless playback, no matter what settings I tried. According to the Internet, gapless playback is essentially ignored in Linux. However, there is one thing: Music Player Daemon. MPD is the only Linux audio player that provided gapless audio playback.

This isn't a proper "media player" per se, but instead a sound server used to host playlists for access through local networks. Several GUI frontends exist for it, but none of them really have a full featureset expected of a dedicated music player.

So, what did I do? I installed foobar2000. Yep, that's right, no native Linux application provided true gapless playback.

Instead I had to resort on running a native Windows application through a virtual Windows environment using Wine and even then it performed better (aside from slow startup and global hotkey access) than any native Linux music player. Herein lies a problem, I believe.

I'll stop here... Linux sucks, plain and simple. It should be a niche OS, and of course, it will stay there in the dark.