I have wanted to do this kind of thig for some time. I even suggested it as a potential feature for the Linux Outlaw show a while ago. I’m convinced it’s worth doing, so I’m going to blog it for now and hope the idea catches on.
It’s very simple. It’s pointing out and saying thankyou for brilliant features of Linux and Linux Applications. I’m going to deliberately try to avoid the stuff in the news, and focus on the stuff that gets overlooked for various reasons. But I think this sort of thing is incredibly important. Simply because if we become ungrateful for the efforts of volunteer coders, we run the terrible risk of them sodding off and doing something more rewarding with their time instead. So here’s the first “Feature Kudos”.
To be fair, Microsoft made solitaire games on the desktop popular in the first place. Perhaps they knew how much time people were going to spend watching progress dialogues and had a moment of humanity. However, the idea has only been moved on in two small ways since Win 3.1, they’ve added a bit of eyecandy and added Hearts and Spider. However, Hearts and spider are still seperate apps, so I guess a fair amountof code is duplicated for no good reason.
Up until recently, I thought AisleRiot was equally lame, just a bog standard solitaire game. But the other night, I noticed that AisleRot is actually quite special. Maybe it was just me being dense, but did you know that the standard AisleRiot, as installed in the standard Ubuntu desktop (amongst others), actually has 85 (yes eighty five!!) different solitaire games in one application?! Doesn’t that mark it out as just better out of the box than our old nemesis Windows? Think of all the effort that went into coding all those games, testing them and writing all the help and instructions! Brilliant.
So, to everybody over the years who’s contributed to the AisleRiot Solitaire over the years … Kudos Guys, we appreciate it!
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Nice post. I discovered this massive amount of games myself about a month ago and was as impressed as you are. They even wrote guides how to play these games on the help pages!
Now that is a real jewel of open source card games
Thanks Julian. It’s really nice to write this kind of piece. The cool thing is, there’s loads of things I could do similar articles about, so this is going to become a seris.
Good choice; it’s apps like this that really win over a lot of non-techie users, and it’s nice to see them getting some congratulations.
I’ll have a better time convincing my parents to use Linux when I can show them “It has tons of different games that you enjoy, built right in for free!” instead of things like “The EXT file system does not suffer from volume fragmentation like NTFS does, so you no longer have to defragment your file system periodically.”