I am developing a program for textile design which involved calculations on how many yarns used, how each colors of the yarns are configured in the finished fabric, what type of weaving pattern to use, etc. In short, there are a lot of calculations involved just to put a single pixel in a picture box, but I can display a complete 575 x 487 pixels image in less then 20 milliseconds using the Advanced API.

Thank you Tanner.

I was pretty disappointed with the popular music players in Linux, I absolutely hated Amarok, banshee, Rhythmbox, I come from windows and I LOVED my aimp2, it was easy to use, it was light, it worked.

I had been just playing files with Audacious but I discovered Clementine today and thus far I have to say it’s just what I’ve been looking for. I’m going to read about Exaile, but I have to say Clementine is the music player for me. I won’t say I’m impressed by it, but that’s exactly what i need, a music player that doesn’t try to impress me, but one that does its job, which is play me some music.

+1 for Clementine

Wow,OSS guys should and must other OSS guys, if someone wants to support proprietory OS , fine but not at the cost of ignoring Linux or BSD.

that’s why GPL makes more sense to me than BSD license, though BSD has its own merits.

If you can pay for your OS why can’t for applications? Free-Software is *not* gratis software OSS devels are not slaves.

My intention is clear, write Free-Software to make money , that’s why i say make more products for enterprise , get paid(ok more work is required in supporting the product , but that’s worth it).

In mean time help your fellow mates (geeks,nerds,over-grown kids etc) by developing Linux/BSD only app or help maintaining existing software for different distros.

There is no money on desktop , for ordinary users free means gratis and over the top , they treat OSS devels impolitely.

So when you are giving away your software for gratis (free as in free drink), why not to students, fellow geeks , university staff/faculty and other OSS devels rather than arrogant and ignorant common users. Help OSS community not anyone else.

But there are serious obstacles on porting/help developing open source software under windows:

1. I heard, that open source developing tools are harder to use under Windows, than any *nix. Because of this, there are painfully few Windows only open source devs in this system. For example, the Windows version of Gimp is maintained by only one guy.

2. The immaturity of some Windows users. Many forums are spammed with complaints about how an open source app is harder to use, more clunky than it’s proprietary counterpart, and/or that the developers don’t listen to their feature requests. Most of the time however, they are just impolitely demanding to fix a bug, or add a feature, and don’t bother to add proper debugging information.

3. Those Windows users that are not like that, still doesn’t know where to start, how to do a bug report correctly, don’t know the etiquette of open source community, and doesn’t help, that there are no centralized open source app to windows porter community nor any help to get start.

4. The immaturity of some Linux users. Some (though NOT all of them) believe, that Windows users have no right to complain, because they could choose more software. They do not know, that many Windows users don’t want to pay/pirate commercial software anymore, and they want to help better the software they use.

5. An app store/package manager like frontend, to ease the install and update of many open source apps, and prevent unnecessary re-bundling of common libraries.

With respect to Linux, Microsoft platforms are far too different from Linux for any software to work well on both. If it works on Microsoft it stinks on Linux. OS-X, BSD, Solaris, and other Unix like operating systems are close enough to Linux that software can reasonably cross over to those platforms.

I always was curious about Linux and it looked ideologically correct to make the transition. I made a couple of attempts by installing Linux as dual boot. But each time was a failure, because every single staff I needed to do, I had to learn a new application. Usually, I had no time, I needed to do staff ASAP. So I was rebooting back to Windows to do that staff. And after a while I just stopped booting to Linux in the first place, as I knew that I’ll have to reboot back.

The last attempt to move to Linux was totally different, because I understood the “application issue” as the root of the problem; and, started my move to Linux not by installing it, but by installing multi-platform applications on the Windows and starting to use them. One-by-one. This way I didn’t needed to learn a lot of staff at the same time. After a few month or may be a year, I made a smooth transition to Linux. All I needed to learn is how to open applications. Well, may be I had to learn a couple minor applications too, like video player.

I’m a happy Linux user for the last 3 years or so, thanks to Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP and others.

I use several Linux versions of proprietary applications that I previously used in my pre-Linux days. VueScan is my scanner software, and Bibble is my photo browser and raw file converter. Both are available in Windows, Mac and Linux versions, and as far as I’m concerned, both are “best of breed”.