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Re: Release plans for the GUI


From: Richard Crozier
Subject: Re: Release plans for the GUI
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:42:32 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.7) Gecko/20100713 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.1

 On 12/09/2011 17:20, John Swensen wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>

Agreed, my problem was that Cygwin didn't work at all, there's no 3.4.1
binary for windows, I'm insufficiently skilled to create such a binary,
and dual booting is too inconvenient.



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