Leadwerks: GDB Is Annoying; Editor Using GTK

[XorEaxEax]

How does it make GDB a 'crap'? It's a crap, because some stupid company wants to take the code for free and hide modifications from others?

Again the whole 'crap' thing comes only from Michael who in turn doesn't know jack-shit about programming or debuggers at all, and the reason he called it crap is due to nothing but his bias/agenda.

However there is nothing indicating that Valve is using LLDB because they want to offer it as a proprietary friendly debugger or that a GPL licenced debugger would cause any problems for developers, that's just deanjo trying to make it into a licence issue.

The actual Valve developer in question has already stated why they opted for LLDB over GDB, which was that they though it would be easier to build a GUI around it, which in turn ties in to what I speculated about earlier, that they (Valve) want to make it as easy as possible for what is mostly Windows based developers to get up and running while developing for Linux, and a debugger which offers a similar GUI and functions very much the same way that they are used to will obviously make it easier.

Now Michael in his eagerness to attack FSF/GNU based software tries to equal this with GDB being 'crap', which again just betrays his agenda. GDB needs to function as a system level debugger, and since neither Linux or *nix for that matter comes with a built in gui, GDB needs to fully function in text mode and this is it's default mode. It's equivalent in Windows, WinDbg does have a simple gui (given that Windows has a core gui) but it was a crude gui back when I was developing on Windows.

There are of course numerous front-ends aswell as IDE's which integrate GDB (including Visual Studio through plugin), so it's not as if you are stuck with pure text mode unless you are developing at low system level. In short, GDB is not 'crap' by any stretch of the imagination, it's also not the 'Visual Studio Debugger' because it has requirements far beyond that, like being able to run and be fully functional in a very sparse environment where you simply can't expect any sort of graphical interface.

Meanwhile the game developers who are used to Visual Studio Debugger will want Visual Studio Debugger, they would likely be just as annoyed with Windows GDB equivalent WinDbg, and this is what Michael tries to turn into 'GDB is crap', again all part of his pro Clang/LLVM, anti-FSF agenda.

So Valve will offer game developers a GUI based debugger which more resembles that what current game developers are used to (again most likely Visual Studio Debugger), and perhaps even an entire IDE in the future, but there's no indication that they will do this in a proprietary manner, and I for one would be very disappointed if they did as I don't see any reason for it.

[mrugiero]

However there is nothing indicating that Valve is using LLDB because they want to offer it as a proprietary friendly debugger or that a GPL licenced debugger would cause any problems for developers, that's just deanjo trying to make it into a licence issue.

Wanting to release a proprietary derivative is a reasonable speculation, though.
I find your post (the whole, not only the quoted part) very informing, also, so thank you.

[mmstick]

Also, his problems with drivers are mostly due to the fact Catalyst messes things up, you can't blame Linux for that. That's why I stopped using it. Kernel update and poof, Catalyst doesn't work. I uninstall it from the CLI and still not working. I don't remember how I solved it, and I don't want to, I'll stick to Radeon.

I really don't understand what happened with his dual boot. The one time I had problems to dual boot, it was SecureBoot. Also, I feel seriously annoyed by his use of the word "driver" instead of "drive".


On the other hand, while a lot of his criticisms are wrong, he is respectful in the way he expresses them. Some, of course, are also right.

I've manually installed Catalyst hundreds of times in the past and never had any problems. For Ubuntu and Debian all you have to do is create a deb package with the installer and install the deb package. If you were using a xorg.conf with the open source drivers then remove that. It'll work perfectly so long as Catalyst supports your kernel, and Catalyst 13.8+ has supported up to at least kernel 3.12 fine.

What's really troublesome is manually installing a NVIDIA driver. You have to kill your xserver just to run the installer.

[mrugiero]

I've manually installed Catalyst hundreds of times in the past and never had any problems. For Ubuntu and Debian all you have to do is create a deb package with the installer and install the deb package. If you were using a xorg.conf with the open source drivers then remove that. It'll work perfectly so long as Catalyst supports your kernel, and Catalyst 13.8+ has supported up to at least kernel 3.12 fine.

What's really troublesome is manually installing a NVIDIA driver. You have to kill your xserver just to run the installer.

I am aware of the process, thanks, I did it a lot of times. I am aware of all the tricks, too. Problem is, eventually I might run for some reason to a newer kernel, and then uninstalling Catalyst correctly is which usually fails for some reason, and leads to a broken GUI. I know how to fix things (well, not know as in "it is in my memory", but as "I manage to"), but Radeon works fine for my needs, and *never* got me into problems. Of course, for mainstream gaming it could be insufficient. The point is, blaming Linux as a platform for a shitty blob is unfair to the platform.

I don't know a lot about NVIDIA's driver, as I only installed it once or twice in my brother's computer. As you said, I had to do it from the CLI, but that's not really a trouble, and it usually comes to support newer kernels in time.

[mrugiero]

EDIT: Anyway, I'm basing in a really old experience mostly (I had some problems installing fglrx from the repos in my brother's computer, some time ago, since he does prefer the blobs for any card he gets), as I switched definitely for my computers to the open source drivers since around 2010.

[leech]

EDIT: Anyway, I'm basing in a really old experience mostly (I had some problems installing fglrx from the repos in my brother's computer, some time ago, since he does prefer the blobs for any card he gets), as I switched definitely for my computers to the open source drivers since around 2010.

It just sounded to me like his issue was with the weird way Ubuntu does things. It's a bit 'off'. Generally the fglrx packages are a bit better under Debian, because the maintainers do a better job at cleaning things up (usually).

In theory, all he really had to do was purge all the fglrx packages then install the nvidia-glx ones.

Doesn't Ubuntu have some sort of hardware driver installer still? I know they did at one point, but I stopped using them years ago due to random stability issues.

[mmstick]

It just sounded to me like his issue was with the weird way Ubuntu does things. It's a bit 'off'. Generally the fglrx packages are a bit better under Debian, because the maintainers do a better job at cleaning things up (usually).

In theory, all he really had to do was purge all the fglrx packages then install the nvidia-glx ones.

Doesn't Ubuntu have some sort of hardware driver installer still? I know they did at one point, but I stopped using them years ago due to random stability issues.

Installing fglrx in Ubuntu is no different than in Debian. It's the same package that works the same way and therefore gives the same experience.

[leech]

Installing fglrx in Ubuntu is no different than in Debian. It's the same package that works the same way and therefore gives the same experience.

Assuming you use the package, if I recall correctly, they had an installer for proprietary drivers that could try to fetch the latest. It was my experience that it would muck things up a bit more than just using apt-get.

This of course could have changed in the last few years.

[ArneBab]

I got a reply from Leadwerks which supports my notion that Phoronix is completely misrepresenting them:

@ArneBab That really wasn't meant to be controversial. I was hoping to provide constructive feedback from the view of an Xcode / VS user.

@arnebab The first 24 hours are the best for usability feedback. I figure if they notice a pattern some of those things will be improved.

https://twitter.com/Leadwerks/status/399704102151540736

I updated my post accordingly: http://draketo.de/light/english/free...misrepresented

[XorEaxEax]

I got a reply from Leadwerks which supports my notion that Phoronix is completely misrepresenting them:

Sadly this is unlikely to be the last time Michael 'misrepresents' someone in order to further his agenda, thanks for the update which allowed the developer to further counter Michael's mischaracterisation of what he actually said.