Re: Release plans for the GUI

[John Swensen]

On Sep 12, 2011, at 12:05 PM, Richard Crozier wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 

I like virtual machines, but they are very far from a native experience.  On my 
work laptop (OSX with Core2Duo and 4GB of RAM) I can't get "zippy" performance 
of both VirtualMachine and host OSX, especially if I am running a minimal set 
of host OS programs (browser and email).  Running a single virtual machine on 
our behemoth 16 core desktop machine with 16GB of RAM doesn't suffer at all.  I 
can imagine that telling someone with a non-performance machine to "just run 
VirtualBox" can be prohibitive.  

John Swensen