More > JRiver Media Center 21 for Linux

Simplest version for PC that plays well with JRiver MC ?

<< < (6/8) > >>

mwillems:

--- Quote from: kstuart on June 05, 2016, 03:06:21 pm ---I think we have a different meaning of "better" in this case.

For example, let's say that you had an automobile engine that had 10% more horsepower and 10% better mileage.  In an abstract way, that is better.

If I convinced a friend to replace the engine in his car with that one, his personal experience would likely be indistinguishable from before.   Only a yearly calculation of gas cost would show a difference.

Now imagine I had to convince the friend to buy a new car to get the 10% improvements.  His experience would be overall worse, because it would take him hours to learn the high beam switch, the radio controls, etc. etc.   Since we have already established that he would not notice the 10% differences, then his personal experience overall would be worse.

Lastly, if all auto manufacturers used the new engine, there would a society-wide improvement in gas usage, which would likely be statistically positive.

--- End quote ---

A better example is a car that breaks down 10% less often on average and has brakes that are 10% more powerful; your friend may not ever notice the advantage (statistics being what they are), but no one enjoys a car that breaks down and needs immediate repair, and everyone likes to be able to avoid accidents.  Stability, better privacy, and better data integrity are things that you don't notice by design; you only notice their absence  ;D.  Many of the differences are about managing certain kinds of risk, which can be hard to quantify


--- Quote ---I arbitrarily chose the example, but it turns out to be a good one, because then the equivalent of "Tesla electric car" is "Android".   Linux and Windows share a lot of their disadvantages, the biggest one being a requirement for average users to do a lot of setup and a lot of maintenance.   They also share a lot of 1970s computing concepts.

--- End quote ---

Something else that may not be immediately obvious; Linux does not have a unified user interface; there are dozens of different user interfaces available.  There are Linux desktops that have entirely abandoned the desktop metaphor and other "1970's computing concepts" (no task bars, no minimize or maximize buttons, no desktop icons, etc.).  There are linux desktops that look and act pretty similarly to android (but with more robust multi-tasking).  There are actually linux desktop environments that are similar to OSX too for that matter.  Consider that so far you're evaluating an operating system based on a conscious decision to find the version that's most similar to windows, and then concluding that the two were functionally identical.  Because Linux is about choice, it can be made to be similar to Windows, but it need not be.  If you're looking for something that looks and acts a bit more like android, try the Gnome desktop; it won't run particularly well on very old hardware, but is very, very different than Windows.

But I certainly won't argue your point that linux requires the user to do more much setup and maintenance than android; it certainly does.  It also gets security fixes in a timely manner and is a general purpose operating system (both unlike android).  But as you note, that's beside the point, you can't run JRiver on android, and that's the goal here, right?


--- Quote from: kstuart on June 05, 2016, 03:24:08 pm ---As far as the concept "distros that have modifications can cause problems with MC21" - that is true with anything other than the Jessie distro used by JRiver devs.  It is impossible to predict what change will cause a problem, otherwise action would be taken in advance. :)

So, it seems to me that unsupported distros are all equivalent in that respect.

--- End quote ---

You're forgetting the community.  Lots of folks here run distros that aren't Jessie.  I run plain Arch Linux.  MC works great for me.  If you ran plain Arch, for example, I could provide some assistance/tips and tricks (and have for users running Arch here on several occasions).  Awesome Donkey maintains the excellent Ubuntu/Mint guides and helps folks out with those, etc.

By running a distro that's unsupported and that very few other people run, you're drastically reducing your chances of being able to get meaningful assistance.  So all unsupported distros are not equal in the sense that if you hit a quirk with, say, Ubuntu, there are dozens of people here who might have some idea how to help; not so with the smaller distros.


--- Quote ---===

The smaller group vs larger group issue can also be examined in iTunes vs WMC vs MC21 vs small and medium freeware media players development groups.

Each size has development group has its particular advantages:

* Small groups headed by one person can be the most responsive to user requests, but only up to a point.  Prior to MC, I used a player with the name of an insect :), the dev was quite outgoing and open to requests, but ultimately he only had enough time for major requests that were requested by large numbers of users (as is appropriate).

* Medium groups (the typical open source project) are actually the most likely to go aground and die.  Unlike the small group, medium group devs tend to be largely anonymous and so don't tend to get the personal feedback that most volunteers require as their real reason for participation.  So they are constantly leaving.

In a medium group, if you are just a user, your feedback and needs is just statistical.  You will only get improved MKV support if a significant number of other people happen to ask for it as well.  Generally, high profile stuff like 4K and 3D get more attention.

* Large groups (Microsoft, Apple, Samsung) are impossible to contact (even a large group, including some businesses, could not get MS to even notice the request to add USB2.0 Audio support).  What you get is generally what increases profitability.  Over time, these companies get less and less customer responsive (Google is constantly phasing out popular products and features that really don't cost them a significant amount to support, as one can read in their product Forums that have tens of thousands of pleas to not phase out some small aspect of Gmail.)

So, no particular size is automatically better.

--- End quote ---

I think you might've missed part of my observation: people behave very differently when something is their actual job than when it is a hobby.  One noted developer has called OSS development the "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers" development model.  As I noted, small groups can be great when it's their job and/or they're focused on a manageable task.  A large task (whole OS) combined with a small volunteer force trying to do it in their spare time, is not even remotely comparable to a professional group of similar size performing a comparatively small task (media player).

In any case I'm only offering an observation as someone whose spent a few years following open source projects (which come in all sizes by the way); my observation is that small volunteer teams working large software scopes tend to either fail to add value or fail to do a good job, especially over time.   It's frustrating to have to relearn things at a time not of your choosing because a project you relied on has vanished or gone into desuetude.  

You can come to your own conclusions through use over time as I have, and you may have a different experience.  Nothing I've offered above is intended as gospel; it's just observations to help manage risk.  You likely have a different risk tolerance than I do and there's nothing wrong with that.

terrym@tassie:
Responding to your original post, I converted a couple of old laptops (one 32 bit the other 64 bit) to Linux from Windows last year to use as MC clients. I originally installed Debian Jessie for maximum compatibility with JRiver MC but I found after testing a lot of other Linux releases that I preferred Linux Mint 17.3 XFCE.
I still retain Debian on both machines in case I hit an issue with MC that requires testing but as a long time Windows user I find Linux Mint XFCE the most "understandable" and easy to use and maintain. It also seems to perform very well on old "underpowered" hardware.
Purely my own subjective opinion FWIW.

Terry

kstuart:
@Terry I think that Linux Mint Xfce is very similar to Linux Lite, the main difference being that Lite made a conscious decision to remove any differences from Windows that were "optional", for example, they renamed some things to match the Windows equivalent.

@mwillems I actually agree with all the points in your last post, in fact, at the same point I was thinking that - just for the purpose of running MC21, the two best choices would be to run Jessie, or to run whatever was the most commonly used by MC21 users - as opposed to how big the distro dev team is.

Perhaps someone could start a poll in this Forum (which of course limits one to "forum visiters") about which distro they are using for MC21 ?

mwillems:

--- Quote from: kstuart on June 05, 2016, 06:07:51 pm ---Perhaps someone could start a poll in this Forum (which of course limits one to "forum visiters") about which distro they are using for MC21 ?

--- End quote ---

You can get a rough idea by looking at the number of views on the various install guides at the top of the forum.  The Ubuntu/Mint guide is ahead by a mile (if you bracket out the build threads, which shouldn't count).  You can also see the same result over time by looking back at the MC 20 for Linux forum which had guides for a few more distros (Ubuntu/Mint also in first place).

That also dovetails with what you would expect based on general adoption of the various distros in the Linux community: it's hard to get a reliable figure, but the top three distros in terms of number of users/popularity are typically considered to be Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian in that order (followed by OpenSUSE and Fedora in 4th and 5th place). 

kstuart:
quote: "I think you might've missed part of my observation: people behave very differently when something is their actual job than when it is a hobby.  One noted developer has called OSS development the "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers" development model. As I noted, small groups can be great when it's their job and/or they're focused on a manageable task.  A large task (whole OS) combined with a small volunteer force trying to do it in their spare time, is not even remotely comparable to a professional group of similar size performing a comparatively small task (media player)."

I think you've just argued against Linux itself, in favor of Windows or Mac. :)  Debian and Mint are both volunteer projects. Linux itself was originally a volunteer project, but it has become so important to a number of companies that currently 75% of the code is written by paid developers.  Of course, Ubuntu is a project of one of those companies (Canonical).  So, overall Linux is a mix of volunteers and paid developers.  And...

quote: "Stability, better privacy, and better data integrity are things that you don't notice by design; you only notice their absence.  Many of the differences are about managing certain kinds of risk, which can be hard to quantify."

I found the following from Wikipedia interesting on that:

Kernel code quality

In an interview with German newspaper Zeit Online in November 2011, Linus Torvalds stated that Linux has become "too complex" and he was concerned that developers would not be able to find their way through the software anymore. He complained that even subsystems have become very complex and he told the publication that he is "afraid of the day" when there will be an error that "cannot be evaluated anymore."[12]

Andrew Morton, one of Linux kernel lead developers, explains that many bugs identified in Linux are never fixed:[13]

    Q: Is it your opinion that the quality of the kernel is in decline? Most developers seem to be pretty sanguine about the overall quality problem. Assuming there's a difference of opinion here, where do you think it comes from? How can we resolve it?

    A: I used to think [code quality] was in decline, and I think that I might think that it still is. I see so many regressions which we never fix.

Con Kolivas, a former Linux kernel developer, compared some OpenSolaris kernel code to Linux code and was surprised at the difference in code quality:[14]

    The summary of my impression [after reading the OpenSolaris code] was that I was... surprised....the [OpenSolaris] code, as I saw it, was neat. Real neat. Extremely neat. In fact, I found it painful to read after a while. It was so neatly laid out that I found myself admiring it. It seems to have been built like an aircraft. It has everything that opens and shuts, has code for just about everything I've ever seen considered on a scheduler, and it's all neatly laid out in clean code and even comments. It also appears to have been coded with an awful lot of effort to ensure it's robust and measurable, with checking and tracing elements at every corner. I started to feel a little embarrassed by what we have as our own [Linux] kernel. The more I looked at the [OpenSolaris] code, the more it felt like it pretty much did everything the Linux kernel has been trying to do for ages. Not only that, but it's built like an aircraft, whereas ours looks like a garage job with duct tape by comparison....[OpenSolaris] looks like an excellent design for a completely different purpose. It's built like a commercial design for commercial purposes that have very different requirements than what most of us use Linux for, but it does appear to have been done so very well. It looks like a ** Star Destroyer, and the Linux kernel (scheduler) suddenly looks like the Millennium Falcon. Real fast, but held together with duct tape, and ready to explode at any minute.

Theo de Raadt, founder of OpenBSD, compares OpenBSD development process to Linux:

    "Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run.” As for Linus Torvalds, who created Linux and oversees development, De Raadt says, “I don’t know what [Linus] focus is at all anymore, but it isn’t quality.”[15]

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page