Windows is Dying, Time to Develop for Linux
 

It's no secret and completley obvious that Windows is dieing and Linux is on the rise. Compare Vista to Ubuntu and Google's Andriod. Look at the multi million dollar adverstisment that Mircosoft put out that didn't help a bit.

Nullsoft has repeated that is developers are exhausted and can not develop for 2 OS's. Fine. But why develop for a OS that is dieing?

The linux community is very prejiduce against Winamp. For really stupid reasons, being that Winamp blows away all the current media players in Linux. The resentment is more because Nullsofts neglect to the Linux community. The longer Nullsoft waits, the less chance it has in establishing Winamp in the Linux community as it has done in the Windows community.

It's time Nullsoft stop developing Winamp for Windows and develop it for Linux.

they know and its not like they didn't try.. lookup the winamp3 project.

i'm guessing money for the business is based on marketshare, since windows has the most market share(over 90% of machines) it's the only OS worth developing for, other operating systems don't bring in money.

winamp would have to be re-written from scratch for a linux version to be usable, this would break plugin and skin compatibility... and winamp wouldn't exactly be winamp without skins and plugins.

this has been answered heaps of times, and with only 1 main developer, its not physically possible to rewrite winamp from scratch and including all the current functions of the modern winamp.

please feel free to nag aol to give nullsoft more money, maybe wasabi can be brought back to life.

or maybe you can help develop wasabi into an open source winamp3 which would be mad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasabi_(software)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_s...ystems#OneStat

I understand Windows is still the most used OS. But Windows has reached it's hieght of success and is now on it's downward spiral. Most people use Windows XP, which Microsoft will soon stop support for. Not enough people are buying Vista, and with no one buying new Windows versions MS won't be generating revenue. And with support for XP stopped, and people unwilling to move on to a new version of Windows, alternatives such as Ubuntu are becoming more popular. It's only a matter of time before Windows becomes so diluted it will no longer be the mainstream OS. MS is already abondaning Visa and working on a new Windows, this proves thier desperation and supports my arguement. Hence, it is better to abandon ship now then go down with Windows. If you wait to long, eventually there will be a media player as good as Winamp in the Linux community and Winamp may not have such success.

On a side note, I don't put much faith in statistics.

Winamp will never be ported to Linux. Ever. Period. Move on with your life.

Windows dying? Right...

@dman777 - LoL. Just because all your friends use Linux doesn't meen that Windows is dying.

just cannot take this thread seriously considering the little typo in the topic. but seriously (fnarff) there are far better players out there than winamp and especially in the case of the next versions of some of the more popular linux players that are coming. plus winamp on linux wouldn't be the same as winamp on windows so what's the point (since searching before posting threads about stuff that has been talked about before is rather tedious...)

-daz

90% market share isn't going to drop like that. Linux is not user friendly and the majority of computer users aren't the computer literate.

Windows is nowhere close to dying. .XX% drops in market share mean very little.

yes, active dev on windows 7 is like a dying blood-curdling scream.

As vista is to windows ME, hopefully 7 will be to XP.

How is songbird on linux?

I'm on Windows 7 Pre Beta right now and it's already better than Vista.

I guess most of you vista haters havn't used it more than a few days! - Your fault!
Vista is an huge improvement to XP. Just take a look at Windows Explorer - it is much more user friendly than the one in XP. OK the startmenu is a bit a pita, but i use Launchy instead and Windows7 will have the same one. In addition Windows7 is no new Windows Version! It is Windows6.1 based on the Vista kernel w/ some additions.

Moreover just because Vista isn't sold as good it doesn't mean Windows will get a decline in UserRate. And if you compare Vista to XP: I knew a lot of peeps that did not install XP till it was 2 years old, using the same arguments as the Vista-haters have now.

As for good players under linux: I prefer exaile if i am not running Winamp in VirtualBox - http://exaile.org/

martin.deimos, you may just be the man i need to talk to.

i tried running winamp with virtualbox. i had a few problems. 1 was i am using usb audio and virtualbox did not handle usb audio very good. there were clicks in the audio similar to buffer problems. do you know a work around for this?
and do you get the same sound quality as you do when running winamp in windows?

also, are you using samba network? i tried virtualbox's own networking virtual drives to the host os but it was to slow to use.

well i use my laptops audio device for playback and it works fine. Virtual Box' USB support is not the best but ensure to have the latest version of it installed. I needed to use Virtual Box for syncing mp3s to my Zen Touch since i f.cked up the Media Player MTP drivers in the host system - here the USB connector worked fine.
As for the network interface I can only say that it is fast enough to start winamp from my real Windows HD and play the files from Windows HD. I've connected the Virtual drives as network drive in windows.

Btw ensure to use the sharing method Virtual Box offers and not the SAMBA method.

The last time I used the sharing method Virtual Box offers it was so slow the mp3 would not play. Is the samba worse?

i havn't tried but the internal sharing works like a charm for me

linux is on the rise because there are more new computer nerds and hackers using it. Linux is still not for the average computer user not by a long shot. now if apple let OSX on PC's then there may be a stray from windows

ya, see....linux IS on the rise. I wouldn't say it's because of hackers and nerds...thier all using Ubuntu and a monkey could do that. But still, Linux is on the rise. It's only a matter of time before it becomes the main stream OS.

Whether Linux is rising or not, Windows is surely not dying. The % of Windows users tells for itself.

Although the OP's assertion about the death of Windows is completely ridiculous, I must say that your post interests me the most.

I currently dual-boot between Windows and Linux, and I have had a very difficult time finding a music player that can compare to Winamp.

I've tried the more popular players like Amarok, XMMS/Beep/Audacious, Exaile, Rhythmbox, Songbird, Banshee, and (most recently) Listen. However, I haven't been able to find anything on par with Winamp, let alone "far better". I've been looking on and off for a while now, so hopefully you can point me in the right direction.

I've made a few posts on Linux forums, and so far, no one's been able to offer a Linux alternative that really satisfies me. The best I've been able to find is a nightly "unstable" version of Listen, but even this has no where near the features of Winamp.

if their was a linux version of winamp it would have no plugins or advanced features, because all the plugins are made for windows only. as in... they are tied in with the windows api aswell, its not like java or firefox extensions, it just won't work.

songbird is made my ex nullsoft employees i'm sure in the end it'll have similar features to winamp that won't be shit.

Re: Windows is Dieing, Time to Develop for Linux
 

Right now, I'm more worried about the death of your vocabulary than anything else.

That explains why when I used it felt like Winamp's ml and Firefox in one package.

Please no slurs against spelling/grammar. We have many users whose first language is not English. Let's face it English has illogical spelling, and the world's largest dictionary, but despite that one can communicate very well even in broken English.

The arguments against Linux are compelling because most personal machines are Windows based. The majority of large research machines are Linux based, but they are not used primarily as personal computers. If Linux suddenly took off and grabbed a huge share of the market, then many programs would be ported.

The big advantage of Winamp is that I can use its features as a base to make a player that does almost exactly what I want. I have not seen any players that can do this, and I have not seen any players that can satisfy our needs other than Winamp. We are using it as a simple easy to use player for computer novices to program a night of dancing. There are other groups who are likewise using it with my skin.

Actually, if one were to take a page from nature we should have many operating systems all of which provide interoperability, but with different guts. This would provide us with much more immunity from viruses, just as genetic diversity protects species from extinction. But that has not happened! So we live with a unitary operating system, on a small base of processors.

And I have not had good experiences with Macs, or Apple's philosophy, but that is my prejudice. I don't like iTunes!!!

I always thought it was because the environment wasn't up to snuff to developing apps for. Atleast that's what I hear. Jonathan Blow wanted to port Braid to Linux and asked for help with Linux Sound APIs. All he got was flak for his company being a Windows based developer.

I also read that Macs were being looked at for development.

I hate limited OSes.
You can't run most of apps & games on Linux.
Even with emulators, you can't run any app or games like when you run them on Windows.
Same problem on OSX.
So, give up.
I like host apps.
Winamp is the best host-audio player, I like it.
I will wait for Win 7.
Win 7 supports low-end systems.
Also, Adobe will develop Flash Player 10 for Win Mobile.
Guys, if Nullsoft develop Winamp for Win Mobile, how much you can pay for it?

Sorry for my bad English.

i use linux as desktop job development environment from 15 years. There is nothing that works in windows that don't work here until now.

But why bring in linux a project that's born in the closed source point of view, that never wanted to open the source code, that have a commercial approach also. Is a non sense, is out of place simply.

And windows is not death, there are still many users that like his stupid icons/ cpu-consume stupid stuff, virus and antivirus.

Also there is no need in linux of very heavy programs like winamp. All the stuff loaded from winamp at boot has already been discussed here many times.
I am working to use modern skins in linux, i already interpret the maki staff and starting to displaying layers and button through gtk. And there are other linux media app that are working on this.

http://194.177.99.211/~angelo/modern.png

Winamp doesn't load anything at boot if you don't install the "Winamp Agent" garbage, and it is the most modular program I've ever used so it's hardly bloaty..

Winamp Agent is just a loader / quick access to select _some_ options for loading in Winamp when it's not already loaded. and even before that when it maintained file associations, it was pretty damn light on what it was doing since it used OS notifications to reset the association i.e. very minimal system usage at all. needed to say that to counter-act the false comment in the post above.

-daz