About 2 years ago I wrote a piece called Five things that Desktop Linux really needs, attempting to air out my five biggest grievances with Desktop Linux. If you follow FOSS news, every year is heralded as “The Year of the Linux Desktop,” although such a thing clearly hasn’t happened yet. Now, two years later, I thought it would be interesting to revisit those five problems and see what kind of progress has been made in two years.

Linux needs a good CD ripper

When I last wrote, the favorite CD ripper for the GNOME environment was grip, which had the benefit of being extremely customizable, even if its ripping was plain-Jane cdparanoia. Grip is still used, I imagine, but the default ripper with the GNOME desktop is Sound Juicer, which is a gstreamer-based ripper/encoder that abstracts everything quite heavily and gives damn few options.

The good news is that the semi-abandoned cdparanoia project at least saw a maintenance release that fixed some bugs; the bad news is that the promised further revisions have failed to materialize, meaning that there’s still no compelling cd ripper available for Linux. The Exact Audio Copys and the dBpoweramps remain Windows-only tools.

Also in these past two years, however, a new ripper has emerged: RubyRipper, a Ruby/GTK2 program that tries to emulate EAC’s approach to ripping; that is, it reads segments multiple times and compares them using Ruby’s checksum matcher. While there are some audiophiles at HydrogenAudio who insist that this isn’t a perfect approach to ripping (of course it isn’t), it’s still far more than any of the desktop-standard rippers can come up with. Ideally, it will eventually feature AccurateRip support, though this is tentative.

So, I’m happy to report that some progress has been made in this area, though Linux is still a second-class citizen when it comes to CD ripping.

Linux needs good and consistent font rendering

You wouldn’t think it, compared to issues like multimedia codecs, but font rendering is awash in legal issues. Be it Apple’s patent for BCI (byte code interpreter) or Microsoft’s patent on TrueType (both of which are legally dubious), it’s legal threats and not technical problems that keep the default font smoother for most distros from producing nice, clean, antialiased fonts. The code already exists in the upstream source code for TrueType, but it’s disabled by default. Ubuntu finally made the decision to enable it by default in their distribution, for which I applaud them. Packages exist for many other distributions, which is still a damn sight better than the typical “compile it yourself” response, which always strikes me as utterly absurd.

In my previous post, I highlighted the discrepancy between various types of programs in Linux when it comes to font rendering. I can say without hesitation that the situation has improved since then, though I’m not entirely sure where the responsibility for the fixes lie.

What you see is my blog in Firefox 3.0, some source code in Netbeans 6.1, and the template picker in OpenOffice 2.4. Notice that the font rendering is pretty similar in all three of them. I can tell you that Netbeans looks that good because I’m running it with the Java 6 JDK, which finally added decent font antialiasing. Running it with Java 5 produces some pretty obnoxious font quality. As to OpenOffice, they either fixed font rendering on their end, or else OpenOffice benefits from the larger system font smoothing included in Ubuntu.

Linux needs better inter-distro compatibility and less dependence on repositories

My choice of Linux is Ubuntu; this decision is spurred largely by some æsthetic choices, and the truly orgasmic package management system. If it were not for this, I might very well be running OpenSUSE, which has greatly improved its package management with v11.0. One of OpenSUSE’s more compelling features is that they’re more willing (and the community is more willing) to add new software to the repositories. It’s significantly easier for me to get the latest and greatest software for openSUSE, often by dint of either Pacman’s wonderful repository or the openSUSE build service, which Ubuntu has responded to with the Personal Package Archive (read: build service).

The one benefit of the Ubuntu’s approach is that packages tend to play nicely with each other, whereas with openSUSE and it’s build service, there are sometimes overlapping dependencies.

But there are still a bunch of different package types and packages managers; even among package types, there are incompatible versions. And because of the shared nature of Linux libraries, each distribution’s release will likely have a narrow slice of software versions that will work for that particular library. Say what you will about the Windows approach, but when I install the latest FileZilla on Windows, I don’t get bitched at by my system for needing newer wxWidgets libraries (and therefore necessitating that I either compile my own version or wait 6 month until somebody does it for me). Similarly, installing new graphics drivers doesn’t mean I have to also set up the latest kernel headers and reconfiguring my display configuration file so that it doesn’t fail spectacularly when I reboot.

Initiatives like LSB, FreeDesktop, and PackageKit have made bold steps to make Linux play well with itself. But there’s no middle ground with Linux: you either let distributions do all the work for you, and limit yourself to the particular software, and the particular versions, that they feel like offering you, or you can do everything yourself, compiling and installing your software manually.

Linux needs better multimedia

OK, multimedia on Linux still sucks, and it still sucks hard. Even providing that you’ve enabled extra (legally dubious) repositories for your installation and downloaded all of the plugins and codecs that are available to you (after, of course, you’ve decided to use either GStreamer or Xine as a video engine), you still have the unfortunate issues of video in Linux being slower and of an inferior quality to video on Windows. Is there a reason that rendering with Totem-GStreamer is blocky and awful, and rendering with The KMPlayer is picture-perfect? Even xine is far from perfect.

Then there’s the age-old problem of the X server and the graphics stack on Linux being shit to begin with. Compiz is great, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time watching my windows wobble and painting fire on my screen, but is there a reason that emulators perform so much worse in Linux? Is there a reason that I can’t switch tabs in Firefox with a several-second delay before the page contents are written to the screen? Is there a reason that the X server breaks at the slightest provocation? Is there a reason that the graphics stack offers so little to developers when compared to DirectX on Windows? Is there a reason that all the good-looking audio players on Linux can’t offer me anywhere near the same functionality that foobar2000 does on Windows?

I see individual programs making great progress, but there are fundamental flaws in the Linux approach to multimedia that aren’t going to be solved no matter how many widgets we give our apps. Multimedia on Linux still has a long way to go.

Linux needs disk image mounters

I’m pleased to report that since I last talked about this issue, there have been a couple of programs written to provide just this functionality. Programs like Daemon Tools or Alcohol 52% on Windows provide a way to mount virtual copies of CD or DVD images, allowing the computer to interact with them as though they were physical discs sitting in the drive.

On Gnome, there’s the Furius ISO Mount; on KDE, there’s AcetoneISO, which is also gaining burning support a la Alcohol 120%. Both of these programs function pretty much exactly how you would expect them to. Of the five issues I highlighted last time, this appears to be the most completely resolved; unfortunately, it was also the least important of the issues, and has gotten even less important to me personally since my previous writeup.

Conclusion

My biggest problem is that although the open source community continues to produce extremely compelling software, it suffers from the same fundamental flaws it did years ago: its X server and graphics layer are slow and difficult to work with, which is why you’ll find much better software emulators, games, and video playback on Windows than you will on Linux; its distro-centric repositories are both a boon to the end-user and a version lock-in that eliminates the “Go to the vendor site and download an .exe” ease of Windows. Linux is still a “Do It Yourself” operating system, meaning that despite all of the work being done, there’s not necessarily a complete and versatile environment for developers to program against. Certainly, there isn’t a consistent environment, and things are constantly changing in the world of Linux.

But I agree very much with Jon Stewart’s view of the media as feckless and overly corporate—not everything, as he says, should be reported as a Pepsi v. Coke sort of news item. Sometimes it is the job of journalists to call stupid or crooked people to task.

As an illustration, let’s take this recent puff piece on MSNBC Arian Campo-Flores.

In the rapturous eyes of his flock, Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda is, in fact, the second coming of Christ. As the head of the Growing in Grace International Ministry, he presides over a sprawling organization that includes more than 300 congregations in two dozen countries, from Argentina to Australia. He counts more than 100,000 followers and claims to reach millions more through a 24-hour TV channel, a radio show and several Web sites. He is supported by the generosity of his devotees, who have launched some 450 businesses to pour cash into Growing in Grace’s coffers. Though de Jesus’ followers worship him, others denounce him as a charlatan. Everyone, however, agrees on one thing: his teachings are incendiary.

If it weren’t for the fact that de Jesus was claiming to be a reincarnated Christ, you might read most of this paragraph as a simple description of a charismatic preacher. But then comes that line, “others denounce him as a charlatan.” Why do they do this?

A native of Puerto Rico, de Jesus, 60, spent his youth drifting from the Roman Catholics to the Pentecostals to the Baptists. Then one night in 1973, he says, he awoke to a vision of two hulking men at his bedside who announced the arrival of the Lord, who, says de Jesus, “came to me and integrated with me.” In the early years after founding Growing in Grace in Miami in 1986, de Jesus didn’t claim to be Christ. Instead, he worked as a pastor spreading his doctrine: that under a new covenant with God, there is no sin and no Satan, and people are predestined to be saved. But as his following expanded, his claims did, too. In 1998, de Jesus avowed that he was the reincarnation of the Apostle Paul. Two years ago at Growing in Grace’s world convention in Venezuela, he declared himself Christ. And just last week, he called himself the Antichrist and revealed a “666″ tattooed on his forearm. His explanation: that, as the second coming of Christ, he rejects the continued worship of Jesus of Nazareth.

Emphasis mine. So, an aimless Puerto Rican claims that the Lord (or perhaps just someone named Jesus) with two burly bodyguards “integrated” with him one night in 1973. Is it just me, or does it sound like this guy is repressing something?

In all seriousness, it’s clear that in fact de Jesus is a charlatan: he’s not even competent enough to make the same crazy claim consistently—he’s Paul one minute, Christ the next, and then apparently an Antichrist, for some wholly strange reason. He’s either a poor liar, or he’s a wackjob in the most severe sense. Remember the last time we had an “I’m Jesus!” cult leader with a large following? It ended in a large fire and a lot of death.

Clearly, de Jesus has nothing new or interesting to say, besides being charismatic and preying on the gullibility and general ignorance of over 100’000 people.

All members of Growing in Grace are expected to tithe—which, along with offerings, yielded $1.4 million for headquarters last year. One of the first orders of business at every service is the collection of money (credit cards accepted). Those who have pledged their businesses to de Jesus donate much more. Alvaro Albarracín, a savvy, successful businessman given the title Entrepreneur of Entrepreneurs by de Jesus, is an example. Over the course of Albarracín’s 14 years in the church, he estimates that he’s given roughly $2.5 million. Such funds help underwrite a lavish lifestyle for de Jesus, including diamond-encrusted gold rings and fancy cars.

It should come as no surprise, then, that de Jesus milks his stupid constituency for their money to fund an opulent lifestyle for himself. Like any evangelist selling his snake-oil as holy water, I would trust him about as far as I could through his pudgy, lying ass. But after telling us about his “doctrine” and his crooked finances with a straight face, what does the author of the article say? “Some observers call Growing in Grace a cult.”

Not “Growing in Grace is a cult,” or anything like that. “Some observers…” as in “It’s one side of the story, but it would be equally valid to say that de Jesus really is the incarnation of Christ.”

What kind of tripe is being fed to us? This sort of sugar-coated journalism is why I hate watching the morning news with its “human interest” stories. In my mind, there’s very little difference between “Look, the dog thinks it’s people!” and “Look, the Puerto Rican thinks he’s a god!”

2006 was not a particularly impressive year for music—I can’t recall a single release that really blew me away as in past years. I suppose it’s still likely that I’ll find an undiscovered album, or listen to one that grows on me in such a way as to become my favorite (it wasn’t until this year that I really learned to appreciate Ulver’s Blood Inside for instance). I had to really work to come up with just ten albums I thought were really worthy of a “best-of” list. Then, too, I was rather conservative in my finding new music this year, so perhaps that has something to do with it.

It could be worse, however: I could be the sort of hack who includes goddamn Justin Timberlake on a Top 50 list. Not even that, but one who ranks Timberlake ahead of acts like Danielson or The Decemberists.

So, without further ado, here are the albums (remember that these are in no particular order).

The Good

Comity • As Everything is a Tragedy

The real tragedy here is that Comity’s new album isn’t yet available west of the Atlantic. Comity, for those who don’t know, are a hyperliterate hardcore act from France. Their first EP, Andy Warhol Sucks was released with extra tracks in America by United Edge, but I’m still waiting for such an event with the new one.

This time, the album takes the form of a single long song, split up into 99 short tracks. The breadth of material doesn’t differ significantly from their debut, but Comity knows how to grindrockfunk it up with the best of them, and As Everything is a Tragedy doesn’t resort to any sophomore half-measures like clean vocals or ballads: this is 40+ minutes of solid, polyrhythmic madness.

Regina Spektor • Begin to Hope

Now that the opening track “Fidelity” has appeared on Grey’s Anatomy, Regina Spektor is everyone’s new darling. It doesn’t help that she’s a fox like Fiona Apple without the scariness and waifishness.

But as is sometimes the case with indie pop, her acclaim is well deserved: Begin to Hope is a really solid pop album, with Spektor and her piano at the helm, belting out songs that manage to be both light and quirky (“Fidelity”) and dark and moody (“Apres Moi”). If I may continue my comparison to Fiona Apple (and it’s my blog, so I may), she doesn’t have the sultry pipes that Apple does (though she comes awfully close), but Spektor uses her voice in many more ways than Apple has dared to in years, and to her credit, she manages to pull it off splendidly. This latest album also sees her experimenting with some less organic flourishes that weren’t present on her previous Soviet Kitsch, but not in an obnoxious way.

Red Sparowes • Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun

Whatever genre it is that Isis pioneered (post-something, I suspect. Post-hardcore? Post-metal?), the Red Sparowes take to new artistic heights, with the help of some of Isis’ members. This latest album from the group doesn’t blaze any new territory w.r.t. their debut, but given how damn good the debut was, that’s just fine. Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun uses as its conceptual fodder Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward; more specifically, the “Great Sparrow Campaign,” in which it was decreed that everyone should kill sparrows in order to stop their eating of grain. As a result, millions of sparrows died and even more locusts—now in the absence of their natural predator—came in, causing a famine in which millions of Chinese died. The concept forms a simple fable—ostensibly, one that remains topical even now—but of course if you didn’t read the long song titles, you’d never guess, because the style of music is soundscape-influenced instrumental.

The Decemberists • The Crane Wife

I had the pleasure of seeing The Decemberists play in Chicago last month, and it was truly awesome. Now, of course, they’ve been catapulted higher than ever by their brilliant (staged? genuine?) marketing ploy with The Colbert Report. I think that The Crane Wife is easily their best album, not only because their skills are more sharply honed each time, but because their songwriting chops are really getting a workout: the major thematic piece is a 3-part song based on a Japanese folktale, whose constituent parts comprise 15+ minutes of music. Add into that another 12+ minute prog rock piece based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and you’ve got a combination of funky indie rock and hyperliterate songwriting that would make even the most hardened and cynical of music trendwhores squirm with auditory glee.

Kayo Dot • Dowsing Anemone With Copper Tongue

As much as a mourn the loss of the particular lineup, philosophy, and/or æsthetic that brought us Maudlin of the Well, I admit that I thoroughly enjoy its new incarnation, Kayo Dot. Browsing Anemone with Copper Tongue veers dangerously close to noodling itself into oblivion. The band’s figurehead, Toby Driver, is such a fan of odd and experimental musicmaking (in the spirit but not the style of Mike Patton’s weirder stuff) that he takes Dowsing… to some pretty dangerous precipices. It’s considerably less immediate and listenable than the previous offering, Choirs of the Eye, and it’s certainly not for everyone, but I still find it fascinating and layered enough to be an amazing album.

Magyar Posse • Random Avenger

As if there was ever any doubt that Magyar Posse would make my Top Ten list, I now introduce Magyar Posse’s Random Avenger, the strangely-named Finnish group’s third album. It’s something of a departure from Kings of Time, insofar as the latter was more epic in feel, almost like a soundtrack, and Random Avenger has considerably more atomicity, even though the songs themselves are still long.

It feels like a genuine pop album this time, because the music is infused with a ceaseless beat, and is orchestrated such that it sounds bright and piquant, even when it’s supposed to be dark and brooding.

Russian Circles • Enter

This is another band that I’ve had the pleasure of seeing live (and buying their demo). They’re an upstart local band from Chicago, playing instrumental rock in the vein of Isis or the Red Sparowes, but not so grand or epic in scope. It’s rather grungy, actually: thinly scored and muddy (in a good way), stripped-down art rock. Enter, the band’s commercial debut, builds on the 4-song demo/e.p. that they self-released: it polishes the sound (it didn’t actually need much polishing) and added some more songs—nothing surprising or different—which makes for what I think of as essentially a 40-minute song.

I picked Enter not because I think that Russian Circles necessarily bring anything new and exciting to the table, but because they are a local band in its infancy that has already managed to pull off a really solid album (and a great live show), and I’m suitably impressed.

Tool • 10,000 Days

2001′s Lateralus might go down as one of my favorite albums of all time. It also makes it extraordinarily difficult to follow up. In the interim, frontman James Maynard Keenan has spent a lot of time recording with A Perfect Circle and doing other projects. When 10,000 Days finally came out, I was a little leery, and not without good reason. It’s a divisive album, and I find myself really liking only the first half (see the following section for more). The opening, “Vicarious,” hearkens more to the confrontational style of Ænima or even the more mild “Judith”-style spleen of A Perfect Circle. The highlight of the album for me is the two-part “Wings for Marie,” which Keenan wrote about his mother, Judith Marie. It has some really great motifs going on.

For a more in-depth look at 10,000 Days, see my earlier review.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw • The Way the Wind Blows

I am a relative newcomer to A Hawk and a Hacksaw, having only recently learned to love Darkness at Noon. To my considerable surprise, I learned there was a new album this year and rushed to find it. It is, if possible, even better than its predecessors, introducing an album-wide theme and other musical flourishes that make it a joy to listen to.

The style of music is still largely instrumental, incorporating plenty of Hispanic musical elements as well as those of Eastern Europe, but introduces some vocal work in the mode of A Silver Mt. Zion: rough ensemble singing that has a certain warmth and softness to it. In this case, it’s used as the introductory and concluding themes, when listeners are told, “May you live every day of your life.”

The Bad

Muse • Black Holes and Revelations

I said it before, and I’ll say it again: the new Muse album bit the big one. Unless you pine for the 1980s, there’s very little on Black Holes and Revelations to like. It’s a vastly overblown, exaggerated, synthesized… comic. Any of the solemn bombast of Absolution has vanished like a table cracker in a sandstorm. It would perhaps be tolerable if the album was merely boring, as most of the songs are: disposable rock ballad pieces, the sort which Muse does (already did) so well. But they don’t stop there; rather, they manage to go over the top and become completely tacky, be it in minute ways, or the entire length of “Knights of Cydonia,” which more or less defies description.

It’s either a novelty, or it’s a coaster. A serious album? Never.

The Mars Volta • Amputechture

Even though one commenter thinks I’m an “idot” for not liking it, I have nothing good to say about the latest Mars Volta album. Certainly, I liked their first two albums, even though they had begun to indulge in their own excesses by the time Frances the MuteAmputechture is a feckless rehashing of old ideas, without any of the neat hooks or interesting musical ideas that were present before. Oh goodness, they still try: Amputechture is full of the same 10+ minute songs, the same indecipherable I-have-a-dictionary-and-I’m-not-afraid-to-use-it approach to lyricism (which, ok, can be charming in an esoteric kind of way), the same musical postmodernism. But it never makes me want to rock out. I never feel like popping in Amputechture while I’m driving and pound the steering wheel in rhythm with the drumset, like—I admit it—I’ve done for both Deloused… and Frances the Mute.

Maybe it’s just a slump. Or maybe The Mars Volta always simply had a limited stock of ideas that have now been expended. At the very least, it seems that they can ride their accumulated good will with the indie crowd for another few albums, but I’m going to be wary from now on.

Tool • 10,000 Days

It’s something of a surprise that the same album should be on both my Top Ten list and my Most Disappointing Five (as it were) list at the same time. This year, Tool manages it.

I mentioned that the first half of the album is actually quite good, either with singles like “Vicarious” or the mini song cycle “Wings for Marie.” But after track 5—”The Pot”—the whole album slumps in irrelevance. It’s comprised of odd and unfulfilling interludes (one about LSD, apparently) and the 11 minute “Rosetta Stoned,” which might very well be the most boring Tool song ever put to tape. It feels like Tool just ran out of steam, recording something formulaic just to fill out the rest of the album. I can’t even bring myself to listen to the whole album anymore, generally just taking the first five tracks and excising the rest from my playlist. What a shame.

Mastodon • Blood Mountain

In today’s lesson, Mastodon show us how to get worse by not changing at all. Long the darling of metal magazines in the way that The Mars Volta were fellated by every trendy pop and indie columnist in existence, Mastodon must figure that the best way to stay on top is to record the same album every single time. I loved Remission, and even Leviathan was great, despite the fact that it only blazed new territory in the sense of being a concept album for a classic work of literature. Now, Blood Mountain, Mastodon’s first album for major player Reprise Records, is the same thing all over again. If you really, really like Mastodon, I suppose this is just fine, but you could save money just by listening to their first two albums an extra time.