Re: GtkGLExt (was Re: Gtk 3.0)

[David NeÄas <yeti physics muni cz>]

On Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 04:22:36PM +0000, Carlos Pereira wrote:
> We must atract more scientifc/engineering applications for Linux and  
> GTK, because this is exactly the kind of stuff that enterprises and  
> universities are demanding.
>
> If we have fantastic operating systems and desktop environments in the  
> free software world, but most of the scientific/engineering aplications  
> only run in Windows/Mac OS X, people will be forced to use them, even if  
> they would rather prefer to use Linux/BSD... I have many friends in this  
> situation...

I'm afraid you explain it from your viewpoint.  But looking at your
reasoning from the `desktop' viewpoint there are troubles.

1) Objective.  There will never ever be a scientific `killer app'.
Every little branch of science, or even an individual scientific
problem, has specific needs.  Hence the applications are inherently
scattered and each individual app is used only by a small group of
people.  Even the `universal' commerical tools such as Matlab are far
from being universally used [among scientists].  This makes hard to see
sci/eng apps matter *at all*.

2) Subjective.  Do your graphs have round corners and include the user's
IM status?  Can your data acquistion software synchronize the data with
an iPod?  Are your reports summarized to 140 characters and sent to
Twitter?  No?  Does your app help people with some difficult to
understand and much more difficult to solve problems instead of
facilitating idle chit-chat while consuming power for visual effects?
Ah.  You are such a loser.  Go away.

Regards,

Yeti