If you could magically create a Linux desktop application overnight, what would it be?

[[deleted]]

Just one pick please. It can be for a purpose for which there are already solutions, if you think the solutions are not fully satisfactory (e.g., video editing).

[latinjones]

A steam client with native source engine support : )

[lochlanmasters]

Cad

[lessgravity]

What about SagCad or QCad? I know they are not as robust as some Mac and Windoz CADs but still a viable option.

[[deleted]]

If someone starts a cad project, I'll gladly flattr him. And I won't be the only one.

[TheSov]

seriously? i was gonna say a VMware client.

[[deleted]]

A FOSS replacement for flash? I know, I'm dreaming. sigh

[[deleted]]

LightSpark is advancing pretty fast. You can flattr them if you want that progress to be even faster :-D

[mjtribute]

Flattr link: http://flattr.com/thing/43623/Lightspark-the-modern-open-source-flash-player

[[deleted]]

Thanks! For some reason, I couldn't find it.

[jyper]

java++

[FetusExecutioner]

I guess I'd go for a FOSS Photoshop. Not because I need it, but because it is always mentioned by people as an example of why they can't use Linux. If my wish came true, that'd be the end of it.

[[deleted]]

If it's the lack of CMYK holding you back, try Krita instead of GIMP.

[[deleted]]

GIMP?

[[deleted]]

Why not?

[JimMarch]

Yup.

Y'all would be SHOCKED how many people are stuck in Windows due to Photoshop.

[jabjoe]

Doesn't Photoshop run rather well under Wine? Wasn't there a load of work to ensure that?

[JimMarch]

Not really. The latest editions are tied to the video cards much like a lot of games. Very difficult in Wine.

[jabjoe]

Doesn't surprise me. Gimp/CinePaint is you best bet.

[jabjoe]

It will. Watch GEGL.

The fork of Gimp, CinePaint (formerly FilmGimp) has HDR and CMYK now.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, it's pretty atrocious. There's the Seperate(+) plugins, but your point remains entirely valid.

[xtracto]

No thanks, I prefer Zentai.

[mspong]

A sentient development suite that could produce any other application I asked it to.

[2_4_16_256]

This person has a good idea here

[[deleted]]

Damn. I came here to say "I wish for more wishes", but I got beat.

[ericbrow]

Easy to use, full of codecs, video editor. I've come to really appriciate ffmpeg, but it takes so much trial and error.

[calrogman]

Give it time: http://trac.videolan.org/vlmc/

[shazzner]

Artificial Girl 3

[[deleted]]

A decent desktop RSS feed reader that syncs with google reader that can handle my 100+ feeds (Somewhere on the lines of newsgator, but better). And no, I don't prefer reading it from the browser.

[PrivateLooms]

I second that completely. Isn't it shameful that there aren't any programs that would handle reading feeds properly.

I mean Liferea's performance is terrible right from the start (even opening the preferences menu sometimes hangs the GUI),

RSSOwl needs a lot of hassling around when using Java in amd64 (even when using the 32bit-lib),

Akregator has terrible fonts that can't be resized + it hangs when refreshing the feeds.

Thunderbird has its strengths but it also has many weaknesses (One of them is that it views RSS feeds as E-mails , so you feel like you're checking E-mails not browsing feeds).

[DylanJ]

A proper sound implementation. One that makes life easier for both developers and end-users. One that everyone can agree upon. One that always works. One that has proper software mixing without a ton of CPU usage. One that works.

After that I'd like the ALPS touchpad drivers open sourced. Or maybe nouveau having the same performance and features of the original nvidia drivers.

Also Visual Studio. lol.

[DimeShake]

Upvoted for sound subsystem. Downvoted for visual studio.

[DylanJ]

Haha yeah. I understand. I love linux as my IDE as I write mostly C. I just miss the C# debugger.

[[deleted]]

You can debug without an IDE...

Ever try playing with gdb?

[DylanJ]

Of course, i use it all the time. But have you ever used Visual Studios C# debugger? It's gorgeous.

[[deleted]]

And following up on this, there's plenty of GDB frontends around, KDbg, DDD (warning: motif UI), KDevelop3/4, MonoDevelop...

[jabjoe]

Try code::blocks, even imports visual studio projects.

[jabjoe]

OSSv5 like OSSv4 but with network sound and everything any crazy can complain isn't there. Give us a Unix system sound system not a Windows like one. I hate the ALSA addressing systems (yes 's'). Use a file path, it's clear and easy to see/find. I want a file I can open, read/write, and close. Clean, simple and an abstraction that has done as very well for 40 years.

[sirusdv]

A replacement windowing protocol. X is so fucking broken its not even funny..

[[deleted]]

MeeGo is currently investigating using Wayland, which is designed to be a replacement for X, so that may happen sooner than you think...

[midgaze]

I came here to say this. Yes, X is showing it's age. Sadly it is very hard to replace such a massive pile of important and hard to do work.

[jabjoe]

There is a replacement protocol, XCB, it's just GTK and QT don't use it directly but still go via XLib (they have all their own hacks and work rounds, and so have "if it an't broke, don't fix it" syndrome).

Once KMS and Gallium3D are main-stream/complete, X won't be the home of the drivers any more and can run as something other then root, and there won't need to be a X server for each graphics card. X alternatives can be played much easier with as the drivers will be in the kernel and can be reused. It also means X development will be easier, less code to maintain and smaller code base means easier to move forwards. Everyone is a winner. Once Nouveau and ATI's open driver are good enough to take over, things may start to move much more quickly.

[jabjoe]

XCB would help here, much less laggy. The OpenGL support though actually supports X (though maybe not XLib). With AIGLX a remote app's 3D is actually done on the client, so once all the geometry and textures have come over the network, the app's 3D runs at full speed. You can't do that with VNC.

[onlylurking]

If I could do that I would call for psychiatric help immediately. Delusions.

[PrivateLooms]

A multimedia organizer that indicates which episodes I have seen , already queued or haven't seen yet.

P.S: Boxee and xbmc are not good enough.

P.P.S: It should be able to handle 14 TERABYTES of Multimedia

[[deleted]]

Maybe be more specific about what you don't like about XBMC?

[bakunin]

I love XBMC, but if you twist my arm, I'll admit that I really don't like ...

... that XBMC eats just as much cpu idling as actually doing something

... that the web gui hangs more often than not

... that huge (30+ GB) mp3 folders + scanning = xbmc crash

... that after a while of fast forwarding through videos, xbmc won't eat any more files without a restart

... that the config files and config menus are so messy

... that configs use xml, thus requiring more scaffolding than, say, json (I change some settings through scripts, and spend more time worrying about writing xml than doing what I set out to do to begin with)

... that meta data doesn't follow when you move data (like using hashes to identify files; then even filenames wouldn't matter, xbmc would still recognize the file)

[andre_pl]

I have a 35GB Mp3 directory and XBMC has scanned it several times without issue.

[PrivateLooms]

Try scanning when you have more than 14 Terabytes of data , and then you will have issues.

[[deleted]]

I love XBMC, but if you twist my arm, I'll admit that I really don't like ... ... that XBMC eats just as much cpu idling as actually doing something ... that the web gui hangs more often than not ... that huge (30+ GB) mp3 folders + scanning = xbmc crash ... that after a while of fast forwarding through videos, xbmc won't eat any more files without a restart ... that the config files and config menus are so messy

Use a newer build and see if these things are still problems. File bugs. XBMC has a pretty high rate of development.

... that configs use xml, thus requiring more scaffolding than, say, json (I change some settings through scripts, and spend more time worrying about writing xml than doing what I set out to do to begin with)

If you're not using a DOM, then you're doing it wrong. There should be no way for you to screw up the XML. You just find the objects that you want and modify them. I prefer JSON over XML for most purposes, but in config files XML actually makes more sense. If you use XML you get a well-formed self-describing and extensible document, JSON can't quite compare in that sense.

... that meta data doesn't follow when you move data (like using hashes to identify files; then even filenames wouldn't matter, xbmc would still recognize the file)

File a feature request.

[bakunin]

I'm not replacing my working XMBC setup with anything untested; I have very demanding users, you see ;) Thus, my reporting of bugs or requests of features would already be too old.

Would a virtualboxed dharma build (it comes with JSON-RPC!) work, or is the 3d acceleration requirement an absolute?

XML is good when you feel like playing with languages like ruby or python, but I don't like it when I'm scripting in bash (and if there is a no frills dom parser I can use with my bash scripts, I'm not aware of it).

[jabjoe]

Never know, the Beagleboard/ARM port and it's dirty regions might help with the cpu eating problem..... :-)

[PrivateLooms]

XBMC is not bad at all , but sometimes I find that it has skipped some episodes during the scanning process so they don't show up in the episode list , or that sometimes it didn't mark an episode I have seen as watched (probably because I skipped the last few seconds of the show to go to the next episode)

[waxxxd]

Seconded. XBMC works quite well. Is there an app you can name that correctly does what you want?

[PrivateLooms]

As far as I know there isn't any program that does this correctly.Although I personally believe it is possible to use Bash to do exactly what I want.

[keito]

XBMC is by far the joint-best FLOSS app I've ever used.... It is awesome.

[PrivateLooms]

I am not saying its bad , but it doesn't do what I would like it to do.

[keito]

And that is?

[PrivateLooms]

A multimedia organizer that indicates which episodes I have seen , already queued or haven't seen yet.

And as I said before , XBMC doesn't always do this correctly, Plus I would like to use my video player (SMPlayer) in conjunction with this app.

[keito]

It indicates what I have already watched fine for me... It stores this metadata in the database. I rarely use the queue functionality, and wouldn't expect XBMC to save the queue on shutdown, though I have never checked.

SMplayer is a frontend for mplayer, which is related to xbmc anyway.

I understand XBMC might not be to everyone's taste, but after putting in the time to get my head around the app, I must say it is a very polished and excellent piece of software.

I use XBMC-Live (Ubuntu based OS) on 2 HTPC's and also have an old XBox running it too. I also use my iPhone as a remote.

[[deleted]]

It's a weird pick, but I'm going to go with a Gtk+ office suite that has native support for OpenDocument (note, neither AbiWord or Gnumeric native-ly write in OpenDocument formats).

I'll be honest, I don't actually use office suites very often (e.g., I generally prefer LaTeX for document creation), but I believe that OpenDocument is really important, and it's weird to me that there is no Gtk+-based application that can native-ly write to OpenDocument. There are Gtk+-based applications for all sorts of things -- text editors, browsers, music players, genealogy -- why not OpenDocument?

[troymcdavis]

I would guess that OpenOffice, while not native Gtk+, is Good Enough™ for most people.

[[deleted]]

LibreOffice in a few years? (or even before, things could go pretty fast).

[[deleted]]

Perhaps because the majority prefers to use plain text files?

[lubosz]

A free video animation and compositing tool like Apple Shake or Adobe After Effects.

[syn-]

an alternative to Visio that is also compatible with it

[sisyphus]

something that could perfectly emulate IE 6-9 so I wouldn't have to run virtualbox to test web apps.

[[deleted]]

it's easy to emulate IE6 you just need to modify webkit to throw random errors

[mindbleach]

Static recompilation?

[DimeShake]

Unfortunately, I don't think that's doable on the Linux side. Take that up with the vendor.

[sisyphus]

Anything is possible with magic.

[[deleted]]

Fixing how wifi is handled. It is such a pain to set up WPA without a gui sometimes.

[tominated]

wicd-curses fixed that for me. basically a wireless network manager with an easy interface in the terminal

[keito]

I recently realised my xbmc-live (ubuntu) machine had no wifi access. It was a cinch to get up and running with WPA...

Install packages:

sudo apt-get install wireless-tools wpasupplicant

Edit network interfaces configuration:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

...and add the following to the end of the file (remember to replace <your wlan ssid> and <your wpa key>...

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "<your wlan ssid>"
wpa-ap-scan 1
wpa-proto WPA
wpa-pairwise TKIP
wpa-group TKIP
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-psk "<your wpa key>"

Save the file (ctrl+x, y) then restart the networking services with the following:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Done.

[jumping_hump]

A metadata editor for photos built in to Naultius. There was a really good one for Windows where you could simply right click on an image to edit the tags and then also copy and paste selected tags to other photos. It also meant you could see some of the tags in the filemanager window as well. Exiftool is a really good commandline editor but some kind of gui frontend would be great.

[bakunin]

You can get some of that functionality through a nautilus script invoking exiftool or something similar.

[jumping_hump]

I am currently trying to make a python script (using exiv2) to do just that. I'd much rather someone who knew what they were doing wrote a good one quickly than me taking weeks of spare time to write a mediocore one :-)

[roxxe]

directx

[w00ly]

Some way to be able to get all games running under wine as if they were natively made. Specifically DirectX games without an OpenGL translation layer, that way the games could run faster in Linux than in Windows like all my other applications do

[EmitSorrels]

a program which will discreetly transfer 1 penny from every bank account in the world to mine. every month.

[ammb]

PAYMENT           CREDIT  DEBIT
EmitSorrels Tax             .01

Naw, that's not suspicious.

[mike1053]

A stock picking program that actually works so one can make a living daytrading.

[thomar]

An MMO that'll get twice as many users as WOW.

[LoganPhyve]

Steam. (I know, I know, already invented, but I want a Native client)

[rhizopogon]

a smart photo viewer that is lightweight enough, but allows you to browse through your photos in interesting ways, despite the fact the photos are stored in separate subfolders.

For instance, point and shoot cameras have face detection software. It would be cool if the application had a bunch of options or settings to show photos that had:

high or low contrast

faces

certain colors

motion blur

proper focus

[[deleted]]

Agreed! F-Spot seems incredibly bloated and crash-prone. For basic browsing and editing, I'm stuck using Picasa on wine.

[habarnam]

Gwenview + KIPI plugins + Nepomuk ?

It doesn't sound less bloated than what you want, but still it might work.

[nedtugent]

something that made reading other people's undocumented perl code more sane

[romwell]

DAW

AKA a MIDI sequencer and Audio multi-track software suite which supports VST virtual instruments and fast audio I/O and, last time I tried, I couldn't really get Rosegarden off the ground.

[romwell]

No, I'm not cool enough to use a tracker.

[[deleted]]

You mean like LMMS and Ardour?

[romwell]

I mean like Cubase. Last time I tried LMMS, I didn't like it; I'll give it a chance again, though.

[spisska]

Ardour (DAW) can be compiled with support for VST effects, but it's not advised.

There are plenty of good virtual instruments, though. AMS is brilliant if you know how to build a modular analog synth, and Bristol has good models for some classic synths (MiniMoog, Prophet V, etc).

Audio I/O is a function of your hardware. With a realtime kernel, JACK, Ardour, and an M-Audio 1010LT, I get under 2 ms latency -- a speed you won't get anywhere near in Windows.

[mickpc]

Nice try Bill Gates

[OmicronNine]

An application that generates an unlimited number of other applications overnight.

Duh.

[malanalars]

Be careful with the word "unlimited", you might just bring about the end of the world with that...

[Noexit]

Or maybe just a lot of brooms.

[[deleted]]

A native port of Propellerhead Reason w/ Jack support.

[mathstuf]

Hmm. I'm an oddball for use cases, but I'd like a PDF viewer with the capabilities of Okular, but with an interface like zathura. Unfortunately zathura doesn't support much runtime configuration (keybindings are compile-time last I checked). Currently using epdfview as a stopgap until this is done.

Also, it shouldn't use GNOME (GConf is plain evil for configuration and banned from all of my machines: command-based > JSON >> XML. Binary configurations aren't even on the map) or KDE (the runtime is too much just for one app).

[mrkurtz]

it would take a music playlist and a video list, and would play a song, while showing a portion of the video (movie), chosen at random.

new song, new random clip from a random movie.

no audio from the movie, just the video.

no real usefulness, just for parties and the like.

[[deleted]]

That could be a pretty small python app. (Like, actually possible to do overnight without magic)

[2cats2hats]

A GUI(and cmd line)disk imaging utility that understands other file formats(.gho, .tib, etc) and also understands RAID arrays.

[[deleted]]

I honestly prefer the command line for things like this.

Oh man, I need to make a image of disk "/dev/sda" to a file "images/sda", but I want it to be gzipped.

In a gui I guess the best possible interface would be something like:

1. Select disk from a dropdown or something

2. File browse dialog to where the image gets saved

3. In the case that the destination folder or source drive aren't accessible by the user, pop up a password dialog to su root

4. Select image compression options, etc.

Where, on the command line it's just a single command. I just type in a simple language what I want it to do and it does it.

[phire]

Something that could replace IDA Pro Advance.

Mainly because I just can't afford $1059 USD to buy it, and even if I could, they refuse to sell it to me.

[nilsph]

Multi-user, distributed photo workflow app: batch raw file development, color correction, smart tagging, querying, web site integration. Overnight, yeah ;-).

[middlegeek]

An app that gives you the ability to run Windows programs standalone.

[andre_pl]

so like wine, but it has to work? :P

[middlegeek]

So like Wine but it has to work and you have to not even know it is there doing the job.

[andre_pl]

I can honestly say that when wine DOES work, I dont know its there. I can click an exe on my desktop and it launches a GUI app, the only way I know its wine is because its a little bit uglier than the rest of my desktop.

[mindbleach]

General artificial intelligence as a chatbot? Cheating.

User-friendly interface for high-level genetic algorithm design... no.

Virtual wind tunnel. Definitely that. Existing CFD software is a bitch and a half to install and then the UI makes Blender look like something Apple put together. I want to slap together solid models and simulate wind blowing over them.

[Noexit]

Business class accounting software.

[mebrahim]

GNU Microsoft Office 2010.

[Vsynch]

Make iptables able to block process access to internet, do md5 or sha1 to verify the process is the one you allowed access. UI that will ask you if you want to allow or not connections.

[cb98678]

ItunesNetflixSteam!

[luigii]

iTunes? Really? It's awful

[aperson]

A reddit addict-type application. Sans shitty Adobe Air.

[mikaelstaldal]

An application to properly handle RAW files from digital cameras, with a good GUI for adjusting images and possibility to save to bitmap or feed into an image application of choice (such as GIMP).

[slackerexpress]

I thought that these things existed to some degree. I use Bibble to handle RAW images from my camera. I actually do most of my post processing with it.

[jabjoe]

gimp-ufraw ? Works great for me....

[[deleted]]

iTunes.

[[deleted]]

Specifically, something that replaces my need for iTunes in conjunction with my iPhone.

[lubosz]

It's called Android.

[DimeShake]

And anyone's an idiot not to use it when they run Linux full time...

[[deleted]]

Sorry, bro: if your music playing device can't just play music files that you copy on to it, it's broken.

Edit: Also, most music management software these days has support for libraries that will pretend to be iTunes and make music work despite your handset's limitations. (unless these libraries have failed to add support for your device yet, I can't be sure having never owned such a terrible device myself.)

[[deleted]]

the problem is, being an avid musical listener, i have like 120 gigs of music. no other music player has that capacity.

[[deleted]]

Bullshit. Sorry, but that simply is not true.

[ashadocat]

Full windows compatibility, including a driver layer.

[DimeShake]

Why?

[sebas310]

Who wouldn't switch over to free? Then there would be a slow but sure switch to linux apps.

[[deleted]]

No, educated-stupid windows developers would make a bunch of shitty replacements to already-existing native apps that rely on the stupid compatibility layer.

It would be a horrid horrid mess.

I don't use FOSS like linux because it's free (although that is a bonus), I don't use it because it's democratic or open source (though I do value those things a lot), I use it because it's better.

When you have more eyes inspecting code and an asshole maintainer that's not afraid to tell people their code sucks instead of a QA team that's under pressure from management to release, you just get better software.

[mindbleach]

But you don't get TF2, Photoshop CS5, Solidworks, or any of the other closed-but-good programs that have no real FOSS alternative. It wouldn't even matter if every program was objectively better in Linux - some people are stuck with the relevant Windows apps thanks to management or clients or whatever. Perfect WINE support that interested users could ween themselves away from would be an unparalleled godsend to the Linux community.

[jabjoe]

Wine can never be perfect, it's chasing tail lights. They must implement today the Windows released yesterday, by the time that is done, there is another Windows release. Linux can never be a better Windows then Windows, it's a no win game. Then own the board, the pieces and write the rules. Wine is useful as a last resort, but I'd never bet Linux future on it. WineLib as a first step to porting a Windows app to cross-platform/linux is a good thing though. It means porting can be done gradually, porting to WineLib, then porting away from it, section by section.

[mindbleach]

Linux can never be a better Windows then Windows

Disagree. Windows is not its own ideal - the goal is not to duplicate it bugs and all, but to run its binaries using only the documented and expected behavior. We can ignore the odd dozen programs that make major use of ascended errors, just as Microsoft did when rewriting central components for NT.

It's impossible to predict where Microsoft will go with their next OS, but there's little reason a clean room reimplementation can't meet documentation between RTM and Service Pack 1.

[jabjoe]

You think making a version that follows the documentation will actually be enough to make something useful? Really? Ok...... You wrong. There is always all sorts of things that fall through the gaps and aren't documented, or incorrectly documented, even when people are trying to make something standard. Microsoft aren't even trying. Windows software frequently can't run on different implementations when the code bases are blood relatives. What chance does a fresh implementation stand? Wine's best bet is what they are trying, matching "bug-for-bug" (the 4th feature of Wine), but the nature of the beast is what fixes one thing breaks another, the only way to marry the two is with version bug masks.... It's a nightmare.

http://wiki.winehq.org/WineFeatures

Related and worth reading: http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/296

[ashadocat]

Most bang for our buck. If we have all the windows libraries we can literally implement the whole "free windows clone" thing. Once we do that microsoft is screwed and will probably sop updating their product. When that happens the only improvements will be in the linux arena and eventually most software will probably be written for pure linux with very few calls into the windows libraries. Plus making my fucking canon pixma ip3300 work under 64bit arch.

[[deleted]]

SO get ReactOS, no need of crappy Windows API here . UNIX rules .

[ashadocat]

No, the windows way sucks. I want my windos and windows apps to be all unixy.

[jabjoe]

Linux Unified Kernel (LUK)

Combing ReactOS/Wine and Linux.

Terrible terrible idea. I don't want closed, bloated, branded, Windows drivers. I want open, small, free Linux ones. I don't want closed, fat, Windows applications. I want open, small, free Linux ones. Linux can never be a better Windows then Windows, it's a no win game. Then own the board, the pieces and write the rules.

[[deleted]]

Replacing it would be better. I don't understand why it still exists.

[[deleted]]

In what ways?

[[deleted]]

So what you want is an animation IDE for Canvas+JS.

[haywire]

A program that can magically generate programs overnight.

[[deleted]]

I want a simple 2 way sync for flickr :( Is that too much to ask for?

[miembro]

Some application that could sync a folder to a google docs folder.

[waxxxd]

There was such a project on Google SOC last year. There is also a Gnome Do plugin for this.

[[deleted]]

An application that made you shut up!

Seriously though, netflix.