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Re: 'My First Time' Posts and Other Linux Marketing Problems
Posted by: Katherine Noyes 2009-03-05 08:35:36
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In our ongoing quest to bring readers all the FOSS news that's fit to print -- with the occasional addition, perhaps, of some that isn't -- we here at LinuxInsider are always suckers for a good contest. And so we're delighted to spread the word about a contest that recently made the news on Slashdot -- involving $200,000 in cash prizes, no less! The contest comes from Ubiquiti Networks, and it's to design "the most impressive User Interface/Firmware for Ubiquiti's newly released open-source embedded wireless platform, the RouterStation."
Regarding: "An easy-to-use GUI for Wine that will allow home users to play their games and SMBs to run their office apps. 'I know there is Crossover, but even that is too complex for home users,' he asserted." We totally agree. Frankly, the ideal UI for Wine would be *no* UI at all--you'd just pop in your CD and/or invoke an executable and Wine would simply install and/or run it behind the scenes with no intervention whatsoever, transparently, automagically. Sadly, while I think we can *see* the promised land in that regard, we're nowhere near reaching it yet from a technical perspective.
Yes, Wine has made great strides recently--a *lot* more applications install cleanly and run "right out of the box" than did even two years ago. But there's still a ton of work to do, and until the basics of installing and running get covered, there's really no sense in trying to "hide" Wine any more than we currently do. For the foreseeable future, you're going to have to have an installer. For the foreseeable future, you're going to have to have *some* sort of configuration utilities to customize which flavor of Wine you're using to run a given program.
Lastly, there's a general lack of understanding in the marketplace as to just how terribly difficult Wine development is. It is quite probably *the* hardest programming gig on the planet, bar none. We're trying to reimplement the API of the world's most powerful software company, using a team of a few dozen developers. That we've gotten as far as we have is nothing short of miraculous. But we, like many endusers, get frustrated by Wine's limitations. We can *all* see the promised land. We *all* know what we want Wine to be--a magic silver bullet. And we're getting there. But it's gonna take a lot longer to get there than many people are willing to admit, and during that time period you're simply going to have to suffer with UIs like CrossOver, I'm afraid.
Thanks for the comment.
Cheers,
-jon parshall-
COO
www.codeweavers.com
Yes, Wine has made great strides recently--a *lot* more applications install cleanly and run "right out of the box" than did even two years ago. But there's still a ton of work to do, and until the basics of installing and running get covered, there's really no sense in trying to "hide" Wine any more than we currently do. For the foreseeable future, you're going to have to have an installer. For the foreseeable future, you're going to have to have *some* sort of configuration utilities to customize which flavor of Wine you're using to run a given program.
Lastly, there's a general lack of understanding in the marketplace as to just how terribly difficult Wine development is. It is quite probably *the* hardest programming gig on the planet, bar none. We're trying to reimplement the API of the world's most powerful software company, using a team of a few dozen developers. That we've gotten as far as we have is nothing short of miraculous. But we, like many endusers, get frustrated by Wine's limitations. We can *all* see the promised land. We *all* know what we want Wine to be--a magic silver bullet. And we're getting there. But it's gonna take a lot longer to get there than many people are willing to admit, and during that time period you're simply going to have to suffer with UIs like CrossOver, I'm afraid.
Thanks for the comment.
Cheers,
-jon parshall-
COO
www.codeweavers.com
