Re: Release plans for the GUI

[Richard Crozier]

 On 12/09/2011 14:29, Chipmuenk wrote:
> 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
>
> --
> View this message in context: 
> http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Release-plans-for-the-GUI-tp3790414p3807386.html
> Sent from the Octave - Maintainers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>

I tried going down the Cygwin route, I installed it and found that xterm
wouldn't even work, I just gave up as I didn't even know where to look
for a solution. I would promote Linux in VirtualBox over Cygwin any day.




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