(Untitled)

[inferis]

Awesome - I finally managed to get the flex SDK working on my EEE 901. Admittedly, I had to figure out

Comments

[flavius_m]

Which is the crux of the conversation that keeps coming back with Linux-head friends, more notably Clive: however nice, easy front end there still are plenty of traps for the unwary...

[merlinc]

I can't remember what I did on mine ... it was fiddly but not too bad I think.

Compiles rather slowly though :(

[merlinc]

How fast are your compiling speeds btw? (both with mxmlc and fcsh)

[inferis]

Not really comparable to my machine at work. I tried compiling the project I was working on and it took about 30 seconds :/

Mind you, the machine at work is (i think) a dual core 2.4GHz machine with a much faster disk.

[merlinc]

Slightly happy to see that the Atom processor isn't doing much better for processor speed.

My project at work takes a minute or two to compile, I'd hate to see how long it took on the Eee.

You might want to take a look at the fcsh command - it'll keep most of the classes in memory and only *actually* compile the ones that need reloading.

[monted]

I'm not sure Linux will ever be ready for the average user. That's part of its appeal I reckon... An OS by developers for developers.. why add frills and ease-of-use things that would 'get in the way' for half your target audience? Like herding cats.. think up one way to make things easier and you'll have 4 others with another way to do the same thing.

[inferis]

Ease of use and good design aren't things that "get in the way". Not all developers want to have to dick around with an OS in order to actually *do something*.

I think the appeal has a lot more to do with stockholm syndrome than the the actual benefits of the system.

[anatosuchus]

On the contrary, I just hate the way Windows does lots of things, and I can get Linux to work the way I want. Note that I don't tend to recommend it to many other folks though because you absolutely need to be prepared to get your hands dirty.

A lot of people do actually seem to think that ease-of-use does involve "hiding" stuff (i.e. 99% of the options I want to tweak) from the user, and that isn't just limited to Windows. See the difference between Gnome and KDE on *nix platforms for a clear example of these different approaches.

The other thing that make me use Linux is the fact that I can get a lot of high-quality applications I couldn't hope to afford were I to purchase the Windows (or, presumably Mac) equivalents. Cheap? Maybe, but I have to be practical.

[inferis]

Ah, but if you're a victim of stockholm syndrome, you would say that.

:)

Hating the way windows does things doesn't make it wrong. As regards hiding things completely, the UI design issue isn't exactly a solved problem, but in general what exists is a great improvement for 90% of users.

Ideally there would be a configurable sub-system for power users and a slick UI for everyone else with a set of functional interface guidelines for application developers - something like OSX, probably.

[inferis]

Possibly true, but I could replace "flex SDK" with almost anything that isn't in a standard repository and it would still be true.

Simple things like configuring which internal drives are actually available after boot-up shouldn't be only configurable through some arcane system.

Also, man pages suck. Linux needs some professional document authors.

[monted]

Mostly true.. the openssl one has to be one of the worst!

[drreagan]

Aren't all of those things done via a gui these days, just like other OS's (well.. except for the $PATH thing.. which is mostly command-line specific...)?

[inferis]

1, 2 and 3, not as far as I can tell on Ubuntu. 4 was part of the instructions to install the JRE - the problem there being that there's no other way to tell everyone how to change permissions without getting into details about every possible GUI out there.