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.
Eh. It’s good, I suppose, and I’m sure its much-vaunted performance is there, but this is very much a service pack dealing with O/S guts, and not a massive feature pack a la SP2. I can’t immediately tell any difference.
In other news, Hardy Heron is released! And its software is already out of date.
I love Jeff Atwood’s blog, and can even accept that he’s drank of the Microsoft Kool-Aid seemingly for both desktop and server because he’s a great writer and a great programmer.
But I admit to being troubled by his recent post. I might think it to be an April Fool’s Day joke, except the post is dated 31 March 2008. After quoting a couple of Linux upgrade horror stories from a software-engineer-turned-club-owner, he concludes:
I can’t fault Jamie’s approach. A clean install of an operating system on a new hard drive — for kiosks running controlled hardware, no less — that’s as good as it gets.
Apparently, Linux is so complex that even a world class software engineer can’t always get it to work.
I find it highly disturbing that a software engineer of Jamie’s caliber would give up on upgrading software. Jamie lives and breathes Linux. It is his platform of choice. If he throws in the towel on Linux upgrades, then what possible hope do us mere mortals have?
After a number of delays, OpenOffice 2.4.0 has been officially released. Get it here. Check the mirrors for your own OS and localization. OpenOffice 2.4.0 has not quite been released yet. Some major new features include OpenGL transitions for Impress, some major charting improvements for Calc, and block selection for Writer.
Just a few days ago, I compared the relative sizes of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) and OASIS’s OpenDocument format (ODF). I noticed that while OOXML was smaller for smaller amounts of text, ODF was smaller for larger documents. I was curious as to the turning point for this curve, which I hypothesize has to do with the complexity of OOXML’s markup.
I ran a brief test using generated Lorem Ipsum text in approximate amounts (the leftmost column), and recorded its size (in bytes) when pasted into Notepad, and then as OpenDocument Text (OpenOffice.org 2.3.1), and then as OOXML (Office 2007 SP1).
After the data table is a graphical representation of the results. It’s clear that ODF slips below OOXML somewhere between 300Kb and 400Kb of raw textual data.
| Size | Text | OOXML | ODF |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5k | 5030 | 12209 | 29408 |
| 25k | 25158 | 14173 | 29715 |
| 50k | 50318 | 15116 | 30039 |
| 100k | 100638 | 18020 | 30616 |
| 200k | 201276 | 24901 | 31670 |
| 300k | 301918 | 31238 | 32676 |
| 400k | 402558 | 37594 | 33634 |
| 800k | 805118 | 61805 | 37418 |
| 1600k | 1610238 | 110468 | 44881 |
