> If you really believe a GNU/Linux system if a better choice because of its > open architecture, then hack some user-friendly tools, or ask someone > else to do it.
I am. Check my website. But I am also running out of steam (or maybe I am simply exhausted by the end-of-school-year syndrome, so everything appears to be grim to me :-), so to speak. I feel as if my efforts are on a larger scale practically pointless simply because the community is so fragmented that we have tons of redundant apps (see sound servers for example), out of which many of them are incomplete, other that work great do not have widespread use and/or purpose, and others are simply inefficient. For instance, I would love to see KDE drop the ugly artsd and use either Jackd or alsa's dmix plugin, but that is not going to happen because they believe that artsd is better (for whatever odd reason). Now for me to hack KDE to use jackd is simply too daunting a task (if not impossible), and yet to convince KDE developers to take that path has been tried in the past and has yielded even less promising results than the first option. If, only if we could do this small step of setting the platform-wide standards (and here I do not speak only in terms of audio), we would have OSX unified framework in Linux where it would make sense to make user-friendly tools that sit on top of that framework (regardless of its continuous development -- at least we would have one framework to deal with). As it is now, there is no sense of doing so when the underlying frameworks continuously change and/or compete making any kind of such tool obsolete overnight. At best one could keep on wasting time updating the user-friendly tool to keep up with the underlying changes, but that would detract efforts of many from bettering what is most important now -- a unified and powerful underlying framework. Yet, that is not what we're working on right now... Oh well, never mind. I am rambling away... Maybe I am simply impatient... I'll try to get some R&R this summer, then maybe my outlook on the whole enchilada will not look so grim :-)... Regards, Ico
