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This Noob wants to know: Is eCS right for me (long-ish)?

Started by Grackle, 2009.07.24, 15:54:33

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RobertM

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.07.31, 00:51:28
Oh, this was quite an old comment. I believe it was dated some time in 2007 or so. I really hope we see a release of the updated ODIN code and possibly a migration to meld with WINE or ReactOS.

Last I read, Cairo was supposed to fix or alleviate the issue. Sadly, not quite (though it does seem somewhat better).


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Grackle

Guys, thanks for the active thread and exchange of ideas.  BUT... as a programming illiterate, I'm having a hard time following this, as it seems to have veered from my original question.  I'm willing to be a tad flexible and change some of my habits to accomodate this system's quirks, but the best I can make of this thread is that... (best case scenario) I should wait to see how good 2.0 (and possibly any follow-up fixes/upgrades) is when it gets released, and then make an informed decision if it's ready for average Joe computer users.  Worst case scenario seems to be move on to Linux and leave eCS to its core group of supporters. 

Am I off with this interpretation?  Seems a shame because I was actually interested in buying an eCS loaded computer!

G

melf

Quote from: Grackle on 2009.07.24, 15:54:33
..a system that won't let me down/lose information, dodges most viruses and hacks out there, and lets me go about my daily routine without fanfare....I was thinking eCS.  Blondeguy has been very cool in this regard, and if I am to get a eCS laptop, it'll likely be one of his pre-loaded systems, but I'll ask the board-- can a computer illiterate like me (one who's used to 100% compatibility) live with eCS, and will I be able to use it with zero changes in my daily routine?  This means using a wireless mouse (never could get the hang of a touchpad) surfing the web, playing music (i.e. visiting Last.fm, buying and playing MP3's), watching videos and movies online, writing, sending, receiving and printing documents and spreadsheets -- you know, normal duffer stuff. 

Hi, Grackle
For everyday work eCS is a perfect system. If you read my earlier posting you probably saw that opinion shining through. Those things you mention in your first posting, quoted above, is such everyday work I'm doing from my eCS 2.0 RC5 system installed on an Acer one. (To watch movies you may have to wait a few months for the flash 10 plugin, but the flash 7 works e.g.  for most youtube-videos.) What I like with eCS is that it is a responsive system, it is free from a lot of system messages and after a while you'll find it easy and reliable to use - you'll be addicted :-). If you bye a preinstalled system, well.. then you don't have to bother about hardware. What are you waiting for..go for it!

From a subjective point of view

/Mikael
/Mikael

Saijin_Naib

Grackle, I can sometimes be an avid supporter or a detractor of eCS.

I'll say this:

The WPS is unique, and has a very nice level of functionality. eCS is very responsive when an app does not decide to hang. In some cases, this can mean a hard reboot of the machine. A little annoying.

We do not have the greatest breadth of available applications, but most of what we do have run well. The Qt4 port will likely alleviate much of this gap.

It is basically completely useless for any media production and editing. Many will argue, but we lack up to date codecs for just about every file container and compression method, we have no good GUI apps for editing Video (audio somewhat better, but still outdated) and our photo editing suites are basically photo opening/closing suites. Nothing approaching the power of Photoshop/Corel Painter/ Paint.net. This can sort of be worked around using Xfree86 and GIMP or HoblinkX and Gimp but the GIMP versions are very oudated and Xfree86 has issues with Panorama Video driver.

It has limited support for non-Postscript printers and scanners and this can be a pain in the ass if you don't want to buy new hardware JUST to print and scan photos.

Firewire support is non existent, so no miniDV editing capability.

Firefox draws painfully slow, Flash is outdated (Flash 10 soon, but really I can't trust "soon" with these people any more), and no news of a modern Java Virtual Machine.

I'd caution you to try it first before you invest so as to avoid souring yourself to the OS which is just in a strange transitional state right now.

melf

Hi again,
just some small objections to sajin_naibs posting. Didn't recognize the description of FF as slow so made some random tests. Tried about ten random and uncashed webplaces. I put a "random" word in Google an surfed one at a time by Ctrl + Enter the ten first hits. Approximatyely the time to "Done" was 4 seconds. No differens if using FF in Windows (FF3.0.12) or in eCS (FF2.0.0.20 Peter W's). Both browsers was using flashblock. [On Acer Aspire One - eCS2.0RC5 vs WinXP-SP3].

About pictures: PMView certainly do more than open-close (!) GIMP through hoblink11 is ver 2.2.8 from 2005. Works seamlessly in eCS. "Outdated" but does much work; many many filters, effects and of course using layers. Queency is also an advanced image processing program and there is also a couple of Java programs still working with Java 1.4.2_09.
/Mikael

Saijin_Naib

Queency is very unstable and not exactly feature rich, but is serviceable.

Try a page like Ebay's My Summary page which is heavy on AJAX and images and tell me it draws as fast as Linux/OSX/Windows Firefox. If the tab/window does not have focus (or is minimized) the slow drawing is not so much of an issue. Let the tab in question keep focus and you'll see what I'm talking about.

RobertM

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.08.03, 00:21:27
Queency is very unstable and not exactly feature rich, but is serviceable.

Try a page like Ebay's My Summary page which is heavy on AJAX and images and tell me it draws as fast as Linux/OSX/Windows Firefox. If the tab/window does not have focus (or is minimized) the slow drawing is not so much of an issue. Let the tab in question keep focus and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I've been doing some Ajax programming and testing (and play with Facebook a lot). Ajax is not the problem.

Also, the problem is more noticeable depending on video card. VESA only support and it is like pulling teeth. It is also more noticeable on pages with either (a) poor layouts, or (b) layout elements that cannot be pre-defined (either of which cause lotsa redraws to re-adjust content position - the less supported the video card, the slower it becomes under OS/2).


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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Saijin_Naib

Sadly, the use of Panorama and Shadow Buffering will become more and more common as SNAP chipsets die and become more rare. I've noticed a marked decrease in performance when I switched to my 7600gt (Panorama) from my FX5500 (SNAP) but neither rendered as fast as Win/OSX/Linux.

If AJAX is not the problem, why are AJAX heavy pages so much slower to render under OS/2?

RobertM

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.08.03, 01:01:07
Sadly, the use of Panorama and Shadow Buffering will become more and more common as SNAP chipsets die and become more rare. I've noticed a marked decrease in performance when I switched to my 7600gt (Panorama) from my FX5500 (SNAP) but neither rendered as fast as Win/OSX/Linux.

If AJAX is not the problem, why are AJAX heavy pages so much slower to render under OS/2?

I believe you are mistaking DHTML portion of pages and such that use Ajax as a method to retrieve the updates - with Ajax itself, which is only a concept that does a certain end result. All of the code that actually does the updating, maintenance and rebuilding of pages is standard Javascript, CSS and HTML. Nothing more or less.


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Kirk's 5 Year Mission Continues at:
Star Trek New Voyages
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melf

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2009.08.03, 00:21:27
Queency is very unstable and not exactly feature rich, but is serviceable.

Try a page like Ebay's My Summary page which is heavy on AJAX and images and tell me it draws as fast as Linux/OSX/Windows Firefox. If the tab/window does not have focus (or is minimized) the slow drawing is not so much of an issue. Let the tab in question keep focus and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Hi saijin,
no it doesn't draw as fast as in windows on this page. It differs 3 s for me to "done".
I also did a new try on with pages focused, five other randomes pages. On three pages FF on windows was a second before, on one FF on eCS was a second before on the last time was the same. Not especially scientific but there is no big and clear difference as I can see. Would be interesting with more thorough tests.
/Mikael

michaelhenry

I have worked in two IT departments and have owned my own computer store for years. I really got fed up with Windows, so I just made the jump myself. Don't really miss Windows at all.

That was two weeks ago. It's working out pretty good.
Bro. Michael Henry
Pastor
First Christian Church of Sheridan

Blonde Guy

Good for you Michael Henry.

I agree with posters that say that multi-media editing is more limited than other platforms, that video drawing can be slower, that pretty much everything is slower. I could think of quite a few more cases like that. If any of those are important to you, I support your use of a platform that works better for you.

For many users, these differences are meaningless. I often give my eCS machine to people who have never seen eCS or OS/2, and it mostly works for them. I can do a lot with eCS. If I really get stuck for something, I can borrow a Mac  or Windows machine for a little while.

If you want to try something a little different, why not eCS? If you don't like it you can switch back.

What is my principle selling point? eCS is adequate for most needs, and it isn't Mac, Linux or Windows.

Neil
Expert Consulting for OS/2 and eComStation

michaelhenry

#42
Yes this is completely different. I have a very strong background in Windows, a little Mac, and a semi-strong background in Linux (My favorite was Linspire, but the negative attitude towards it from Linux users was surprising considering that it just worked, not with small things but every machine I put it on). I have an associate degree in Networking. I have installed Windows(DOS) from 3.x to XP over 1000 times. I have built hundreds of computers to run Windows in various forms.

I am not saying this to brag. I am saying this to underscore a point. Yes, eComstation doesn't work out of the box. (Licensing issues can be a pain, so I don't blame Serenity or Mensys) After finding the extras I need, I can now do everything but print. (eCups doesn't support Lexmark x2500, a cheap all-in-one I purchased to print my sermons, and Linux doesn't support it either). I have dug my older Brother laser printer out, which Cups supported when I used Linspire, so that should take care of that.

What does this mean? It means that with a few modifications, it is working for me.  There are some simple accounting options available, I am testing them to see which one fits my needs. I don't do very much picture work, so the "Older" Gimp will work just fine. Scribus, I used under Windows and Linux, which was a strong point because I do design church bulletins, newsletters, etc. and with Scribus, the transition was easier. My office work was already in OOo, so that was easy.

My main reason for scrubbing Windows was viruses, rootkits, trojans, and the constant need to keep up with security issues. I had a customer, an older gentleman btw, some years ago that hit some porn sites, got infected badly, and NO program we threw at it resolved it. We nuked and paved it, got everything up and going, ordered two commercial programs (AVG antivirus, before they did spyware and Sunbelt Software's Counterspy). The NEXT day he came in with the same issue. In one night, he had hit about forty to fifty porn sites and started to cause a commotion because we were not good enough to prevent it. Antivirus and antispyware are like the flu shot, just because you have them, doesn't mean you are not going to get infected.  A month ago, I got a rootkit out of a pdf ebook that I downloaded. Surprise, because I didn't keep up with the news, Adobe Reader has a flaw that also went into the plugin of Firefox. Sigh. After fighting it for several weeks, I jumped ships, hard.

I use Linux today on two of my laptops. As soon as I get the feel of eComstation, my main laptop will go over to eCS. The other, I dunno, might keep it for workorders or install XP in a Virtual Drive under eCS.

Don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu, et. all. I like the available programs, the stability, XFCE, KDE, etc. What I don't like is the putdowns toward newbies, the putdowns to Christians, the supposed excellent FREE, tech support that evaporates (and when companies sell tech support, the Linux fanbase get their ninnies in a wad and complain, gripe, like no one is entitled to make a living).

To make a successful transition, make a note on what you use, what you REALLY use, not the oddball application that hey it's free, cool, etc, that you downloaded once upon a time, used it once or twice but hey I NEED that. Don't make that your deal breaker.

Then think about the total cost of ownership. The need for support is REAL. The bigger companies charge out their noses for support while shareware and smaller companies for the most part love to hear from their customers. I have had a shareware or open source author bend over backwards to help me, regardless whether there was a transaction behind it. Also, the ongoing cost for updates, security programs (which considering the change in the kernel of Vista, Microsoft will be the market leader before too long and that's irony). So, if you don't have a license or an original product, there goes that support out the proverbial windows  ;D.

And finally, when you do make a decision, whether to stay or leave, either way, be careful about newsgroups and BBSs. While they are great, there will always be toads there to mock you about something or the other. I have been on newsgroups and BBSs for over twenty years, so yes it does happen.

And last but not least make the decision for yourself, not anyone else.
Bro. Michael Henry
Pastor
First Christian Church of Sheridan

cyber

With all those picture editing application miss relating posts... I only need red eye reduction on OS/2. For anything else, there is bunch of really good native graphic applications, like ColorWorks, Embelish, Photo Tiger, and Pixel (last one I try only in demo mode). So I do not understand what really You all other complain about photo editing ?  I often use just PMview, because gama/contrast/brightness/ picture resize, is only process I usually need.
But as red-eye filter is adopted in to-do PMview list, I do not see what else could anyone miss with still images ?


melf

Quote from: cyber on 2009.08.10, 10:00:45
I only need red eye reduction on OS/2.

Red eye reduction on PMView wpould be great, but if you want it NOW, you should try GBM-viewer (gbmv2.exe)
It's a picture viewer based on the general bitmap module. Look here http://heikon.home.tlink.de/. Choose "Download" and download GBM PM (1.53) As it said you also have to download the GBM package (1.63). gbmv2.exe is placed in the map GBMOS2PM153_BIN\gbmos2pm\bin.en (or bin.de) I had some hard time finding it. You can see the effect below.
/Mikael