[Tech] Tech list catch-up (sort-of))

[LM]

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:55 AM, Tai Kedzierski <dch.tai at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi LM
>
> You've some interesting stuff there I've added to my reading list....!
>
>
> >Would be curious how kompozer and/or Blue Griffon compare to Blue
> >Fish.  Personally, I use a programming editor for html editing.
>
> Personally, I use vim. Not looking to start a Holy War ;-)
>
> Bluefish is discontinued, so on the demo images I've been building I've
> been including Geanie IDE. Alternate suggestions welcome.
>

As you mentioned, at the risk of starting holy wars, I'm a huge fan of
SciTE.  Here are some things I do with it:
http://www.distasis.com/cpp/scitetip.htm

SciTE is made by the developer of the Scintilla editor widget used by
Geanie.  As a matter of fact, at one point, I contacted the Geanie project
about how I was doing spell-checking with SciTE and they incorporated my
idea to add spell-checking to Geanie.


> Never heard of Schoolforge. Thanks for the tip :-)
>

Christian posted on the Schoolforge list about this project.  That's how I
found out about it.


Never tried Rawtherapee but it's on my to-do list...
>

I really haven't done anything with Dark Table but I do like Rawtherapee.


> My intent is to create customization instructions which themselves will
> require least effort, which can then be provided as an image over the
> network - compiling from source will not fly for such a workflow, unless
> Partimus is ready to start a build service for school software. I think the
> goal is for schools to be independent though...
>

Seems like most educational projects are interested in using what's already
there and not getting into programming or customizing programs.  As I
mentioned, I run across some really interesting Open Source software and
they're not necessarily in some distribution's archives.  I'm working on
building and customizing various programs for my own use.  Would be nice to
share the results with others though and there doesn't seem to be a good
outlet for that (or at least I haven't found one yet).  For example, I ran
across an ebook reader with text to speech capability.  It's now a part of
the Rogue Class Linux distribution (because I mentioned it to the
developer).  However, I doubt any other distributions have it available.


> Maybe offering packaging is the way you're looking to go? In which case,
> better decide the distro base to standardize efforts across Partimus
> projects... :-)
>

I've tried volunteering to package projects for Vector Linux and that
really didn't work out.  I'm looking into some portable apps options for
Linux.

Windows users are used to being able to download software from any open
source project that offers an executable and have it run.  I think it's a
disappointment for some Windows users that convert to Linux that they can't
do that anymore.  I often recommend portablapps.com to teachers who don't
have the ability to install software on their school systems but still want
to try out open source options.  There are some portable apps projects for
Linux that are working on ways to make programs more portable across Linux
distributions.  The projects seem to be using different methods to obtain
portability and none of them are as straight forward as it is to create a
portable app on Windows.

Ideally, if you built a program for a 32 bit x86 machine running Linux, it
would be nice if it ran on any other machine like that (32 bit x86) without
worrying about what distribution a machine is running.


>
> Given the audience... I think sticking with Lubuntu, or Ubuntu MATE will
> be the way forward (LXDE will be being replaced with LXQt eventually, no
> idea what that's going to entail further down the road for us in user
> space).
>

I think it's mostly going to be a change from more GTK+ based programs to
Qt based ones.  There's no reason one can't mix Qt and GTK+ programs and
have both on a system.  Just takes more space offering both GUI toolkits.
Also, LXQt looks a little heavier than LXDE but still lighter than most
desktop environments.  Besides EDE, it's probably the lightest desktop
alternative.  I typically just use a window manager on low resource
machines or machines where I want to use my resources for more important
things.

Another thing to keep in mind is how things might play out in the future
with Wayland.  A few distributions are already offering it in place of X.
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