Re: Release plans for the GUI

[Chipmuenk]

All,

I really don't know where the impression is coming from that there is no
need or no market for scientific applications under Windows. In the
electronic design automation (EDA) world e.g. there has been a strong shift
towards Windows over the last 10 years.

Looking at the laptops of my students (electronic engineering, Germany), I
usually see Windows or MacOS with Linux being the exception. Most of my
students also seem to prefer a cracked Matlab license over an Octave
installation. Don't get me wrong, I'm not encouraging that behaviour, it's
just an observation.

I'm often told that one of the reasons that Matlab is being preferred over
Octave is the lack of a proper GUI - there might be a hen & egg problem
here. There also have been a multitude of attempts to create Windows GUIs
over the last decade, showing there _is_ a Windows user community for
Octave.

Having said that, I perfectly understand the Octave developers who are not
too keen on supporting a commercial operating system that they are
unfamiliar with, that requires kludges to get things going and that is not
Open Source, giving potential licensing problems. And I also understand
there are only a few people in this project who are familiar with Windows.

Still, it makes me angry to read things like "windows users are dummies who
can't tell pi and a pie apart" (my exaggeration, no offense meant against
you, Jacob) or "if they want Octave, let them switch to Linux" - I, for one,
can't (at work) and won't (at home) do that. In my case, _all_ the
scientific software I need is available for Windows (Labview, Xilinx ISE,
Actel Libero, Matlab, LTSpice, Cadence and Mentor EDA, ...), usually the
performance (stability, graphics, printing, ...) under *nix is worse or the
software isn't available at all.

I'm happily paying some money for the luxury to have an operating systems
that installs and runs with no pain and supports all my hardware. In spite
of having worked with Solaris for more than 10 years, my last 3 attempts
over the years to get a Linux distribution running all miserably failed due
to hardware issues. I like to work under *nix (when everything's working)
and I like to work under Windows; I think there is no need for the
"holier-than-thou" attitude of some people when it comes to *nix.

Maybe the Cygwin way should promoted a bit more - for Windows-only users the
idea may be a bit intimidating to install a Unix environment first, although
(in my experience) this is fairly unproblematic.

Best regards and lots of kudos to all programmers who work hard to make
Octave even better,

Christian

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