Re: ANDROID

[berenger.morel@neutralite.org]

Le 30.10.2013 18:00, Conrad Nelson a écrit :
> So far I've read nothing but bad advice for the OP in this thread.

Oh? So, do you have any feedback about mozilla OS? Does it really works 
so bad? I'm interested, I have never seen any, but must admit that I 
hope that it'll be different from other ones.

> Then again, I'm not like the typical Debian user. I don't care about
> free vs. proprietary. I care about quality, USEFUL platforms and
> software, something we won't get by blindly relying on 100% "free"
> software.

Is there is a typical Debian user?
I doubt that most Debian users uses gnash. I can safely bet that 
flashplugin is installed on most desktop Debians ( even if it does not 
works well ). There is also the famous NVidia driver. Sure, nouveau 
works, but only if you do not use 3D acceleration.

If typical Debian users cared so much about that, Debian would probably 
removed the contrib/non-free repos and would be approved by FSF.

> Look at Debian itself. Ever since they made the (Frankly terrible.)
> decision to leave so-called "non-free" firmware out of their
> installation media, installing Debian, especially over a wireless
> network, has become a royal pain in the ass, for no reason other than
> a "philosophy" the Debian developers have. I have since stopped using
> official installation media because anything the Debian provide
> officially is useless to me now.

The only problem I had was, as you said, for wireless installations.
For those ones, it sure is terrible, you have to first install the base 
system, and then download firmwares from a cable network (being the same 
computer or another one) to finish by dpkg it. Of course, you need to 
identify it, too. All of that in command-line indeed (except if you can 
ssh from another computer... still on cabled network).
But that's the only really painful issue I had with the non-free 
separation.

> the "point and
> click" concept is tapping or swiping, instead of moving a cursor
> around and pushing a button like a mouse.

The problem is not the point and click paradigm, which is the same as 
what you do with a touch screen, or with a pencil on a paper.
There are sometimes tools with focus following the mouse's moves, that 
can not (and should not) be reproduced, but that's all I can see. 
Usually, a mouse action is only read if a button is pressed in the same 
time, exactly as for pencils. Or touch-screens.
Multiple buttons are usually simulated in a way or another, and same 
for mouse's wheels (multi finger combinations, specific moves, multiple 
clicks in a time...).

> because a desktop [...] will just make you miserable.

This is the problem.
Phones are not desktops. Desktop computer are not desktops either, in 
fact (and when you have a small screen, or multiple screens you really 
understand why, stacking window managers are not so good). The desktop 
paradigm, which rely on heavy mouse uses, is only here to ease computing 
access to people which were only used to move papers and books around 
and to use pencils to mark. It was a try to adapt virtual world to real 
one.

IMO, that was an error: different interface (keyboard/screen/mouse is 
different than stacks of paper/books and pencils) imply different ways 
to do things. Smartphones also have a different interface (touchscreen 
only), so they must use different interfaces ( as few keyboard inputs as 
possible, icons big enough to "click" them even with big fingers, etc ).