Yes this is a long rant but I think you should all read this:
jonb2 Wrote:What we are talking about is the hardware configuration that will be recommended and that this site, the developers, and forum users will try to provided -free- support for. Now what many of you are saying is that you only want to provide support for a specific mac. Think about that for a minute. Why would want to avoid supporting the vast majority of your user base? More then half the people that will use this will using it on an AMD or Intel cpu with an ATI, Nvidia, or Intel onboards graphic's and realtek, or sound blaster audio that they may well already have, but you only want to support a pair of Mac's. That just doesn't make sense.
@
jonb2, I too hear what YOU are saying but it seems to ME that YOU are only thinking about this from YOUR point-of-view and thus are really missing OUR point when WE are thinking about this from the average
end-user (which includs mom, dad, girlfriend/wife and other
non-technocrats); I think that once XBMC for Linux is mature enough then we will not be releasing nor supporting it as a stand-alone application which is be run on any Linux distribution you like, (as a free hobby project we simply do not have the support structure nor time to develop for and support all hardware and Linux distros there us, which is why we will need to limit what we will officially support). We will only be releasing XBMC for Linux as a bundled package together with the supported operating-system as a Live CD type distribution that you will simply be able to load onto a USB-key or CompactFlash module and boot directly on the officially supported hardware platforms without having to worrying about hardware compatibility issues or manual configurations. This way we will then be able to have control over what device-drivers, modules, etc. versions are installed by default and that is what we will develop for and support.
bmfrosty Wrote:I see what you're saying, but I think you need to think about what a daunting task support can be. Of course users are going to be using the software on many different platforms, and I'm sure many developers will be experimenting with multiple different hardware configurations, and by default any bugs found there will probably end up being fixed. The fact remains that there is a need for there to be a core platform for support purposes.
Exactly. Remember that since XBMc is open source, both developers and 'nerdy' end-users will of course still be able to extract or compile that XBMC for Linux application themselves and (try to) run on any Linux distributions they want, or add any device-drivers and modules they like to the Live CD distro and use on any hardware they like (and probably without any major), but they should then understand that Team-XBMC (and this official XBMC Community Forum) will then not help them if they run into problems. However if they discover what they think can be a bug they can get a friend to try to see if they can replicate the issue on one of the hardware platforms that is officially supported by Team-XBMC and get a debug-log from there to submit. This is also why game-consoles (and embedded devices like Apple TV) are as perfect as it gets for reference platforms, the have long life cycles (+5 years), and they are relatively cheap to buy and set-up for the end-users (compared to buying and building a regular computer from several different hardware pieces), since every end-user runs the same hardware which greatly simplifies development, troubleshooting and debugging. Mace is right, simplicity and stability is the holy-grail for 'normal' end-users, (not everyone is a 1337 geek you know, and those who are is a minority, not a majority).
All this goes together with Team-XBMC's internal moto
User-friendliness is next to godlyness
One of Team-XBMC major ongoing goal have always been to make XBMC and its
user interface even more
intuitive and
user-friendly for its
end-users, based on the
KISS (
Keep
It
Simple
Stupid) philosophy. We think that
usability is very important for media players like XBMC. Many user interface decisions are being made by developers who often have little experience in user interface design, in order to improve this, we try to listen to XBMC's end-users fro how XBMC is actually being used and how we can improve the user experience. We also aim to do regular overhauls, improving existing features/functions, and scrapping outdated code and features/functions (as "to much stuff" can also be a bad thing).
XBMC as a whole must...
* Be easy to install, set up, and maintain, (so that the end-users do not get fed up with it and quit).
* Have an user interface simple and intuitive enough so that less geek-savvy people are not intimidated by it.
* Make common usage easy, easy the '
Human–Computer Interaction (HCI)', from the viewpoint of an ordinary user.
* Be able to play audio and video files that have been compressed using divx, xvid, etc. directly out-of-the-box
* Be able to and organize audio and video files in an easy and user-friendly way.
* Use standards and be consistant, (the music section can for example not use complly different controls from the video section)
* Preform actions in the GUI with as few 'clicks' as possible
* Require little to none non-GUI configuration (and all such non-GUI config should be via
AdvancedSettings.xml)
* There is still a little work to be done here, for example RSS-feeds settings need to moved to the GUI
* Look nice.
Again, the decisions are all still many months away before anything like this can be set in stone.
jonb2 Wrote:On another note virtualization was mentioned several post back and think this is an excellent tool for this sort of thing.
Yes that is a possible future option, however no virtualization solution does yet provide 3D hardware acceleration (OpenGL) which is a minimum requirement we have, though I sure that within a year or two there will be a solution for that as well. Both
OpenLina and the
Linux VM kernel looks have potential as future sandbox enviroments but none are quite there yet (at least not when it comes to 3D and GPU access).
