Linux is like a box of chocolates

[Cuvou]

You never know what you're gonna get.

These are some of my observations when jumping from distro to distro. As a whole, you generally know what you're going to get out of a distro, such as its software management system and repositories of things you have available to install. But when it comes down to specific programs, you never know how each program is going to work on each distro.

The biggest one of these programs that changes drastically from distro to distro is Gaim/Pidgin. More recently, Pidgin seems to have stabilized, but Gaim was soo randomly changing from distro to distro that it became annoying quickly.

One distro might have a Gaim that does background colors properly (meaning, the background covers your entire message space, not just highlighting behind the text), but does something else wrong. Another distro might have a Gaim that does something right, but doesn't do the text highlighting right. Until Pidgin came out, I don't think I've ever seen a version of Gaim on more than one distro that was the same as the Gaim on any other distro.

It might be because Gaim was trying to appeal to everybody, and so each small revision of Gaim introduced drastic changes. I liked it when Gaim would show protocol icons for all your buddies, but for a few versions they had that in and then took it out and then put it back in, because each change they make divides their users in half and each revision tries to satisfy everybody and they can't do it.

Pidgin seems to have become more stable from version to version (either that or modern Linuxes all use the same version of Pidgin).

The other program I like to use but which changes drastically is XMMS. I like XMMS because it looks and acts a lot like Winamp, and I like having a simple program that has a control window and a playlist window, as opposed to a program that has one giant window like Windows Media Player.

On Fedora 5, 6, and 7, XMMS had one pro and one con, compared to the XMMS of other distros. The con was, in the playlist window, XMMS wouldn't load the info on all your songs as they were visible in the playlist. The pro was that the X interface parts (the right-click menu and config windows) looked "normal", i.e. they had 10pt or so font size like they should.

On Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, this was reversed. XMMS would load song info on visibility, but the X interface parts had an ugly 14pt font size. It's like, you right-click to bring up the menu and suddenly you feel like you're on 640x480 screen resolution because the menu takes up such a chunk of your viewing space. Fedora 8 has a similar problem with XMMS.

So, what I want to know is: Why? It seems like, with any install of any version of any distro, you never know how each program is going to actually work.

With the XMMS problem with its font sizes, I wouldn't even know where to begin to fix that issue on any distro. I imagine it might require a recompile of X and possibly more complicated steps than that.

Anybody else have any stories about programs that behave quite differently from distro to distro?

[mbokil]

You might want to consider using Audacious for mp3 playback. It supports the newer GTK+ widgets and blends in better with the latest Gnome desktop.

The problems you pose I think reflect the controlled chaos that goes into assembling a distro. Since the applications all come from different programmers there can be problems with dependencies they used. So if one developer codes for a specific font system and the distro uses something slightly different there might be cosmetic bugs. It is amazing that things look as good as they do. I still have a couple of old GTK1 applications that stick out like sore thumbs with ugly widgets that don't pickup my theme. But hey, it is all free. It takes a tremendous amount of testing time to go through each major application and see if there are any problems with the latest Gnome, KDE setup. You have probably noticed that not all applications get tested. The ones endorsed more by the distro are usually smooth. For example Totem would never have the font problem you mentioned since it is tested against Fedora. Audacious I just noticed has a small bug where if you minimize it and then unminimize it the player disappears until you close the play list. XMMS had this problem too but I think it was fixed at some point. It has to do with the changes to window managers. The code at one point was probably altered for the window manager and the developer of the application hasn't caught up yet. See what I mean, it is amazing it works at all.

[kona0197]

No no no - Amarok rules everything...

[Thetargos]

Amarok is one NICE application, offering you both, the huge all-in window of other media players (*cough*iTunes*cough*) and also offers you a simple player view with the other huge window as your playlist window. Audacious is another fine example, much more simple, quite easy to use, and generally better than the old XMMS. XMMS is one hell of an application, mind you, but Audacious is simply an evolution of it. While XMMS still uses the GTK+ 1.2 widgets, Audaciuos is an "adaption" of XMMS for GTK+ 2 widgets. Audacious is actually based off the code for XMMS and even supports Winamp 2 Skins (just like XMMS), and a number of XMMS plugins, plus its own plugins. Audacious is a worthy successor of XMMS (I believe Audacious was at one point BMP or it was based on it).

I'm not trying to justify why XMMS might act "differently" from distro to distro, but being it as dated as it is, and being it that the application is no longer being maintained upstream (please someone correct me if I'm wrong!), you should migrate to Audacious which blends better with current versions of GNOME and GTK+ and is much better supported across the different distributions. Also many different distributions are starting to simply use "upstream" project programs, instead of heavily modifying any given version for their distribution, which then they would have to maintain, maybe that has contributed to the general sense of "stabilization" of the different apps "look and feel" across the board.

[John the train]

Originally Posted by Thetargos

I'm not trying to justify why XMMS might act "differently" from distro to distro, but being it as dated as it is, and being it that the application is no longer being maintained upstream (please someone correct me if I'm wrong!), you should migrate to Audacious which blends better with current versions of GNOME and GTK+ and is much better supported across the different distributions.

I saw a reference to XMMS no longer being maintained on the Puppy forum, so it seems you're right Thetargos.

[Trek1701]

Rhythmbox is also great and lighter than Amarok.

[Thetargos]

Lighter yes, not as functional, though. What I miss the most in Rhythmbox is the ability to sync to my MTP device (iriver Clix).

[JOHNY156]

Originally Posted by Cuvou

You never know what you're gonna get.

These are some of my observations when jumping from distro to distro. As a whole, you generally know what you're going to get out of a distro, such as its software management system and repositories of things you have available to install. But when it comes down to specific programs, you never know how each program is going to work on each distro.

The biggest one of these programs that changes drastically from distro to distro is Gaim/Pidgin. More recently, Pidgin seems to have stabilized, but Gaim was soo randomly changing from distro to distro that it became annoying quickly.

One distro might have a Gaim that does background colors properly (meaning, the background covers your entire message space, not just highlighting behind the text), but does something else wrong. Another distro might have a Gaim that does something right, but doesn't do the text highlighting right. Until Pidgin came out, I don't think I've ever seen a version of Gaim on more than one distro that was the same as the Gaim on any other distro.

It might be because Gaim was trying to appeal to everybody, and so each small revision of Gaim introduced drastic changes. I liked it when Gaim would show protocol icons for all your buddies, but for a few versions they had that in and then took it out and then put it back in, because each change they make divides their users in half and each revision tries to satisfy everybody and they can't do it.

Pidgin seems to have become more stable from version to version (either that or modern Linuxes all use the same version of Pidgin).

The other program I like to use but which changes drastically is XMMS. I like XMMS because it looks and acts a lot like Winamp, and I like having a simple program that has a control window and a playlist window, as opposed to a program that has one giant window like Windows Media Player.

On Fedora 5, 6, and 7, XMMS had one pro and one con, compared to the XMMS of other distros. The con was, in the playlist window, XMMS wouldn't load the info on all your songs as they were visible in the playlist. The pro was that the X interface parts (the right-click menu and config windows) looked "normal", i.e. they had 10pt or so font size like they should.

On Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, this was reversed. XMMS would load song info on visibility, but the X interface parts had an ugly 14pt font size. It's like, you right-click to bring up the menu and suddenly you feel like you're on 640x480 screen resolution because the menu takes up such a chunk of your viewing space. Fedora 8 has a similar problem with XMMS.

So, what I want to know is: Why? It seems like, with any install of any version of any distro, you never know how each program is going to actually work.

With the XMMS problem with its font sizes, I wouldn't even know where to begin to fix that issue on any distro. I imagine it might require a recompile of X and possibly more complicated steps than that.

Anybody else have any stories about programs that behave quite differently from distro to distro?

please help me to get a free cd of fedora. i am a beginner.

[r1348]

Originally Posted by JOHNY156

please help me to get a free cd of fedora. i am a beginner.

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora