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The New Linux Myth Dispeller
TillmanJ writes: "Just a quick note to let everyone know that the New Linux Myth Dispeller is online at http://www.eruditum.org/lin ux/myths/myth-dispeller.html
It is not, however, ready for prime-time, but is usable.
If anyone has anything to add/correct/bitch about, send me some email.
In patricular, I would like to work with some non-english-speaking folks to translate it into whatever langs we can" Useful for clearing up the misconceptions of PHBs and other folks.
I think this is trying too hard. The answers sound good in principle, but they don't tell the whole story. In fact, I think the answer to many of the questions should be "Well, that's actually kinda true," followed by an explantion of why it is so and how to better deal with that issue in the future.
"suits" or "powers that be", or even Grand Poobahs... PHB does not work.
"After getting a Linux CD, you'll probably be up and running within an hour. In the olden days, this has been true, and Linux can be made hard to install."
Not to be a grammar nazi here (we have someone at slashdot filling that position already), but "this" is unclear, and may confuse some people about the facts, as it implies that being up and running within an hour was only true in the olden days.
"Linux is well over twice as fast as NT"
Generalizations like this should have no place in a document of this type, especially considering you don't back this statement up with any data. Statements like these should be what your document is fighting against. Specifically, twice as fast at what? While it's probably true that Linux 2.4 is significantly better than NT at several tasks, there are definitely situations where NT beats Linux 2.2.
Haven't finished reading the rest of it yet.
It's interesting to note that all the Linux Myths listed on the page are negative in nature. This is essentially the reverse of Microsoft's "Linux Myths" website. How about a website which tells people the full story?
Mac OS X uses fully preemptive multitasking. It's core is Unix BSD.
MacOS and Windows 9x simply don't support this.
Mac OS Open Transport is one of the most advanced networking stack, and support almost everything you can do on Linux. It's based upon Mentat Portable Streams (used on Novell NetWare, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, IBM AIX, Compaq Tru64 UNIX...)
Most apps do not crash linux too bad, but at least on the Linux boxes I used, X windows had a tendency to crash and take the whole system with it...
Linux Advocacy is nice. Impartiality would be nicer. At least it would help differentiate Linux from Apple/Microsoft, whose advocacy is often far for beeing objective...
Note for the author : how long did it take you to set up a PPP connection with the Debian ppp-config utility ? not more than 3 minutes ? or about 5 minutes ? At least be coherent.
anti-linux = FUD ?
pro-linux = dispelling myths ?
FUD is when you spread misrepresentations to cast doubt on a competing product. In general I don't think this is widely done by the Linux community.
That's a joke, right? Slashdot is the home of anti-Microsoft FUD. Not that MS is a perfect company, or Windows is a perfect product, but if you listened to many Slashdotters, you'd think that it was impossible to get ANY work done because of the constant crashes, never mind that 50-100 million people use it every day.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
No.
This is the second comment I've responded to about this. The question isn't wether or not some distro is ready to have joe shmoe install it...Hell my dad is on his third windows box and he's never installed it! The question is wether or not linux is ready for the desktop. period.
I'm talking about getting a box pre-installed! my dad wouldn't know how to get any of those things working! I bought him a new video card and a flight sim for christmas, then I had to go and install everything because didn't know how to do it.
But windows is ready for the desktop, right? Why did I have to do that? Because, being "ready for the desktop" and being "ready for j. average user to add random hardware" are two different things.
My comment boiled down to this:
Everything is difficult when your new. But if you don't have preconceived notions of what things should be, then you can get over the difficulty very quickly.
end of story.
-Peter
Since about 1997, Linux has become extremely, extremely mass mainstream, and has had write-ups in all major mass-cultural media outlets, including magazines they sell on news stands in grocecry stores, major metropolatin newspapers, and prime time news programming on television. Every second of press it gets is overwhelmingly netagtive. Every single major computer corporation, including IBM, Intel, Sun, HP, and Compaq have embraced Linux and sell primarily Linux products. Every PHM stepped on the bandwagon years and years ago, and practically every Windows and Unix installation has been ripped out and replaced by Linux. Linux IPO's have been extremely successful, and the market caps on Linux companies, as awell as Linux entrepeneurs, rivals that of any major multinational corporation. Practically every comuter user is using Linux including grandmothers, blue collar workers, and third world residents. Linux is THE buzz word of the last few years, and by far the trendiest and most fashionable new thing for the masses to latch on to.
Yet, people think it's still oppressed, and feel the need to defend it further. What are you defending against? Linux has no detractors, except perhaps competition such as Microsoft, but only just, and that represents a tiny portion of the marketplace.
The articles reads like it was written in 1995. Windows only cooperatively multitasks? WTF? This was trendy to discuss in 1994, but since the release of Windows 95 (not to mention NT, and 2000!) the issue has long since been resolved. The author needs to pull his head of the sand, fly back to earth, and check out everything that happened in the last five years, which he has missed.
You're basing your claim that "Linux is ready for the desktop!" on the experience of one person? I'm sorry, but you're jumping to conclusions. If you wanted it to be a bit more effective, why not let your friend install Red Hat on there himself? Why not see if the average person can get past a Linux installation?
The fact isn't if people are willing to learn or not. Yes, people can learn how to use Linux if they sit down and learn it. Now how about getting devices like your sound card, your scanner, your printer, your modem, or your digital camera to work efficiently under Linux? Now we hit the snag. Some people may find Linux is easy to use, but what about device support? Yes, there is support for such devices under Linux, but it's still not as good as the device support you get under Windows. Not everything will work under Windows, but I'm willing to bet that there's a lot more that won't work under Linux.
Sure, Linux is supposedly easy to use for the average user to toy with. But it's still behind Windows when it comes to desktop readiness. Before you spout your FUD at me, is an OS that can be easily used (after learning it) yet doesn't have device support for everyday components ready for the desktop? I don't think so.
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
To be fair, the site is fairly objective. However, I have to bop them on a few points.
1) Linux may not be a nightmare to install, but it is still a nightmare to configure. The main problem is not so much that configuration is very text oriented, but it is not consistant. Some stuff is configured through user-space programs (hdparm and ifconfig.) Other stuff is configured thourgh text files. Some stuff is configured through scripts (the old rc.modules style) others are configured via stuff like modules.conf. Often, there is little feedback if you do something wrong. I still don't know what I'm doing wrong configuring ALSA.
2) Linux multi-tasking.
The site implies that Windows uses cooperative multi-tasking. That is simply not true. Windows95 and WindowsNT all use preemptive multi-tasking and in fact multi-task SMOOTHER than Linux. It is not so much a performance thing as a "feel" thing. The default quantum in NT is around 20 milliseconds or so on workstation, 50-100 on server. The default quantum on Linux is 50 milliseconds (newly lowered in kernel 2.4). So on Linux, each app gets a longer time slice. While this may be more efficiant, it degrades interactive performance (ie the "feel" of the system.)
3) Linux IS too huge. In order to get the same experiance as one does with Windows, you have to use KDE or GNOME. Otherwise your competing a product with more features against one with less features. Also, if you don't use GNOME or KDE, some of the other "FUD" becomes true. To get a Linux system comparable to a Windows NT system, you have to have GNOME+KDE(both so you have full compatibility) +Mozilla+X+kernel. Not to mention the multiple versions of glibc and all the additional (often redundant) libraries all the apps use. In terms of memory usage, Linux blows NT4 out of the water (a bad thing) and is quite close to Windows 2000's bloat.
4) Linux IS playing catch up. Most new kernel features (journaling FS, new automounter, LVM, etc) have all been implemented on previous operating systems. Not to mention the fact how much KDE and GNOME are playing catch up.
5) Other OS kernels do NOT load everything at the same time.
I don't know how they got this? Most of Windows is built out of DLLs which can be dynamically unloaded. Most UNIXs had modular kernels long before Linux. Microkernels like BeOS can turn off entire subsystems if they are not needed.
6) Linux DOESN'T take full advantage of hardware.
Linux doesn't support DirectX, and thus automatically lacks support for a lot of hardware features that are in DirectX complient hardware. The main reason was because transparant usage of hardware was a major design consideration for DirectX. It is based on the concept to support many different hardware features, have all applications use them, and then emultate those not supported by hardware. When the hardware supports new features, all apps and the OS automatically take advantage of them. Also, X doesn't have as compelete a support for many graphics operations that are possible in DirectX.
7) Linux threads aren't all they are cracked up to be. I have seen tests show that NTs threads not only take less time to create, but switch significantly quicker. Also, the sites makes excuses for Linux's lack of threaded applications.
FACT: Multi-threaded apps are better. They may have slightly more overhead and are more complex to write, but it really pays of for those with SMP machines. It also pays of in todays systems because of the increasing number of CPUs in the system. Not only due to SMP, but the specialized chips systems use. Graphics cards can do operations independant of the CPU, so for most graphics apps, it makes a lot of sense to have an independant display thread. Thus, the main-thread can do things while the graphics card is busy working. Same thing for 3D audio. Instead of blocking the CPU waiting for the sound card to finish working, spawn another thread and have them process together. The trend is moving towards PCs with more and more independant chips, and there is no excuse for writing single threaded applications.
FACT: Theading on NT doesn't use cooperative multi-tasking. Where did they get that? Threads are preemptivly threaded just like applications.
FACT: Linux doesn't use threads nearly as often as it should. By having the kernel and libraries heavily threaded, and with fine-grained locking, performance really improves.
However, BeOS hopelessly outclasses both in the threads department. The same tests that show that NT threads switch quicker also showed that BeOS threads switch 10x quicker (that is due to the different model BeOS uses for threads. I can't find the articl at the moment, but I'll post it when I do.) Also, the kernel, servers, kits and apps are heavily multi-threaded. The API encourages apps to be multi-threaded. If you've used BeOS on SMP machines, you know how important multi-threading is.
8) Linux really isn't that fast, depending on what you do. For server tasks it is undoubtedly a speed demon, but for desktop tasks, my NT4 machine (not to mention my BeOS machines) FEELS faster. Screens have less visible redraw, apps switch quickly from one to the other. Not to mention the fact that anything media oriented does much better on Windows than on Linux. (This is partially due to the APIs. X is really not great for fast display, OSS isn't really great for complex sound, the X input system can't compare to DirectInput, there really aren't that many MIDI APIs to speak of (at least those comparable to DirectMusic) and (as of now) 3D is STILL slower than on Windows.
9) The Linux desktop IS clunky. It's very attractive, but the Linux guys need to steal some ideas from the Mac instead of Windows.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"There will be cases where Linux is not the answer. Be the first to recognize this and offer another solution." - Linux Advocacy HOWTO
No matter what side it comes from, FUD is still FUD.
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
This "myth dispeller" isn't going to do anyone any good if it remains as misleading as it is.
For example, you can't just say "Multitasking under Windows 95 is partially preemptive." True, 16 bit apps run in a shared memory space and the GDI isn't fully reentrant, but a statement like that is just flamebait.
Also, the statement "Hardware is often ignored by other operating systems. On the other hand, Linux takes advantage of all the hardware it can." is ridiculous.
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* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
"What you get from using Linux, or other free operating systems is freedom. Freedom from corporate decisions. Decisions that are made from a view that people are consumers and should be tricked and lured into giving up their money for as little as possible. Freedom to fix the code yourself. Freedom to share the code and binaries with your friends. Freedom to get it for free. A platform you know won't change in the future on the whims of corporate greed and hype."
And your comment brings up a serious question here. The freedom you get with Linux is great, there's no denying that. But can you sell Linux to the average user on the fact that it's free (as in speech)?
I don't honestly think that the average user would even care if Linux came with source code or not. Think about it here for a second. What good is the source code to someone who doesn't have a programming background? Sure, the code is neat to poke through, and may give you an inkling of an idea about how the system runs, but what good is it to the average user? We have to remember that not every Linux user is a programmer.
You may be able to sell Linux to the masses based on the fact that's it's free as in beer, but if you try selling it based on the fact that it's free as in speech, people will get confused and say, "So what?"
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
I recently witnessed this "sacred truth" become a myth after a friend of mine performed this experiment.
He gave an old laptop to a buddy of his who was in need of a computer. His friends previous experience with computers was limited to double clicking on a prodigy icon on his dads computer several years ago. "The computer is free", my buddy said, "on the condition that you keep the redhat 6.2 that I've installed on there."
At first he wasn't sure if he made a mistake imposing that condition on his gift as his phone was ringing off the hook ( "hey, how do I...?" ). But then, after a while, the phone stopped ringing. When the two of them eventually met up again, my friend left slack jawed as his buddy was talking about joining one of lugs he'd seen online after getting the internal modem working.
So you see, the point of this convoluted little story is that linux *is* ready for the desktop. Everything is new to everyone at some point so there's no reason that you wouldn't be able to stick a brand new linux box in front of some one who's never used a computer and tell them, "hey, this is what an os is supposed to look like. okay?". But see, that's what microsoft has managed to do with their billions of dollars for people all over the world. They've said, "this is an OS. This is what an OS does. If an OS doesn't do this, then it's *difficult*. If an OS doesn't do this, then it's not ready for the desktop."
But that's just crap. Everyone I've seen can and does learn how this OS works. You've got to get over your preconceived notions of what an OS is and go and find out for yourself. People are willing to learn. I've seen it.
-Peter