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What Linux Must Do To Survive...
mgoodrum writes "Emily Dresner-Thornber has posted an editorial/rant about Linux's viability as an end-user OS over at Netslaves. An interesting mix of criticism and her history as a Linux user." I think she's on the right track, but most of the places she says "Linux" I would substitute "one distribution". GNU/Linux need not be a monolithic entity to be adopted, there just has to be one user-proof distro available.
Yes, people in poorer countries get seriously hurt by MS, but by their software prices more than RAM prices. For me, each of the several flavors of Linux I've tried has horribly misbehaved on my "supported" system, each in a different way, and these were modern distros, installed by people who knew how to do it. Yet whenever I install a Windows, even the allegedly bitchy 2k, it works perfectly from the start. I'm also not a stranger to the command line, I've been around computers literally since I was born, and using them longer than I can remember, right back to DOS 3.x. However, I do prefer a GUI and mouse to CLI and keyboard for running my computer, it just feels better to me, and I have the money for a computer that can run them acceptaby. If you prefer to use Linux, do please, by all means, MS must lose its stranglehold; I'd use Be if it had more software, and bought a copy anyway to support them.
Again, I apologize for the agressive tones of my previous posts, if you don't have a problem with me preferring MS software, despite its higher system requirements, I have no problem with you preferring Linux. Your earlier posts had given me the impression you were a zealot bashing Windows, this was wrong. Peace.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
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Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
First, you never address your subject in your post. I'll go out on a limb and guess that by making a computer system "easy to use", you equate that with "dumbing it down". This is patently untrue -- a TV is easy to use, but what it does is incredibly complicated. It's taking a stream of data from a cable, mashing it into an electron beam, exciting phosphors on the back of a vaccumed glass tube, and suddenly you can see Pamela Anderson Lee take off her bikini top.
The TV works (as a consumer device) because it makes a bunch of decisions for the user. It decides that 720x480 resolution is fine. It decides that the user will travel linearly in a forward or reverse direction. It decides that the volume level you had set it at when you turned it off last is likely the same level you want when you turn it on again.
Now, a TV has a lot of other nifty options (PIP, self-timers, etc) but very few people use them. Why not? Well, sometimes because it's just not useful -- PIP is a good example of a great idea, but one that nobody really wants. And sometimes, nobody uses them because it's a huge pain to get working.
To address your other points, what Emily is complaining about is the fact that EVERY distribution (except possibly for Mandrake -- I haven't used it in a long time) is basically the same, in that EVERY distro tries to include EVERYTHING. ksh, bash, csh -- who cares? Pick one, stay with it. If some nerd wants to use your distro, make him compile his favorite shell himself. GNOME, KDE? Who cares? The differences between GNOME and KDE are miniscule. The differences lie in how each one moves bits around in ways that are only interesting to other nerds.
Honestly, I don't care if you use CORBA, massive flat-file databases, or do everything in base-12. As long as I can type, compute, look at porn and play xboing, I'm happy. The details don't matter.
Now, the fight between GNOME and KDE is good, in that it should determine which is the "better" way of doing things. But, instead, we end up with two different toolkits -- and our nerd-power is immediately halved. We've got hugely talented programmers duplicating effort. Is that the wonder of Free Software/Open Source? 16 different wheels, each one painted a different color?
That's the problem -- the open ideas market isn't judging -- it's allowing both to prosper, and thus divide our forces. Am I complaining? No -- I don't use either. My needs are met with Netscape, emacs and xterm. GNOME, KDE -- I don't care! But if I wanted to set up a machine for my mother to use, which would I pick? I dunno. I think I'll just keep Windows 95 on it, since she's used to that.
Reality -- if Linus truly wants "world domination", the way to do that is for somebody to make up a distribution that doesn't suck. I had high hopes for RedHat, but they've fallen down. (Honestly, the best installer I've uses is the one for OpenBSD. As long as your hardware isn't weird, and you know how to follow directions, a reasonably intelligent person can install OpenBSD) The way things stand, Linux is still a nerd's toy.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
If you derive pleasure from Linux because you have access to the source, be happy. But don't ridicule other people who see their computer as a means to an end, not an end in itself.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
If you ask a question in the right forum you will be treated with dignity by most linux users. If you hop onto under-ef-net #linux and expect to be treated nicely then you don't understand irc much. Try posting to comp.sys.linux.* (not advocacy!) and you will usually have a nice response in a few hours.
I may even be the one responding.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
You forgot the number one thing: get scanners
and winmodems working automagically. Both
currently lack drivers to say nothing of
autodetect features.
Wow, this is a textbook example of how to write FUD!
First, make some claim to credibility by making a vague description of something you've done with the product quite some time ago, making it sound as if you've been on top of the subject for aeons. Now you're an "expert."
Next, establish your "talking points." These aren't what you're going to say directly, just the general things you want the reader to be thinking as s/he makes his/her way through the piece. For example, get the reader to wonder about the viability of the product: will it survive, is it just a fad, what will happen to my computing environment if it goes away? Divert attention away from such basic things as the GNU GPL by making it seem that only rocket scientists can type "make install" for all that perpetually free source code.
Talking points shouldn't include cutting-edge information in FUD pieces; they should work on historical points, reputations, and perceptions only. For example, early Linux distros may have been tricky to install, so talk about that.
Change. Most people hate change. They hate bugs, and betas are full of bugs. Talk about being in "endless beta," yeah, that's the ticket.
Documentation. Let's continue on the path we started down with Installation, and ignore such things as the past few SuSE offerings that come with voluminous documentation. And ignore HOWTOs and such while we're at it.
Then, after going after perceived historical flaws, a good FUD piece slips in a fatal misdesign of the competition and makes it into a feature. For example, the "Unified User Experience." Just try to get multiple desktops on Windows right out of the box, or to configure it to work the way you want it to work. Only an MIS Nazi could love having exactly one choice. Dear Emily, may all your dresses be short, red, tight, and low-cut; this, too, will provide a Unified User Experience. (Probably horrific, but hey, what do I know?)
Conclude your FUD by saying that all the perceived flaws cannot be fixed; there are and can never be standards (oooh, go see FreeStandards.org and contribute). Nothing like piling a lie on top of it all.
And finally, loop back to the difficulties you had ages ago, and make it sound as if the same problems will always be there for you to come back to.
What a horrible trap of logic for those without the brains to see through it!
Now, anyone want to do the same thing to a certain monopolist crashware company? :-)
start coding
I never assumed that people dont feel comfortable with the environment. I just think that there is no need to go as far as to completely scratch plans just to make a nice desktop environment. The current system combined with a better installer, better software, simplified docs, and some setting changes would get around the problem easily.
This review doesn't appear to have a personal stake and Linux wasn't a gift. In the review many things are incorrect. But the best someone should be when reviewing something awful is tactful, nothing more.
How do you think she should have reviewed it?
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
I think she has a point. I think RedHat in particular is making extremely rapid progress towards where Linux neeeds to be.
A couple suggestions on how to get into the consumer market:
What needs to happen is that somebody (probably RedHat) needs to include an "simple desktop" option on install. Put Netscape, an email client, and StarOffice in a little box in the bottom of the screen, where you can't miss them. Give the user a one-time list of consumer software that comes with the distro to put in that box too -an MP3 player, whatever.
Next, pull one of Microsoft's great tricks - make migration easy. Imitate all the Windows keyboard shortcuts. Alt-F4 should close the current window, not take me to the fourth desktop. And so on.
From there, the only difference they'll see between Windows and Linux is that when something crashes in Linux the OS never goes down with it...
1) This article was supposedly written by someone that gets paid to write. Her writing style is harder to read than some of those HOWTOs she was complaining about. I guess that's more proof that engineers and programmers can't write coherently 0-).
2) Instead of a Journalists FAQ for writing about Linux, we should write a "What Linux Must Do To Survive" HOWTO. If we did that at least there would be a reason all these articles recycle the exact same points.
3) The end of the "What Linux Must Do To Survive" HOWTO should point out that eight and a half billion of these articles have been printed since Linux was first released. Yet despite all the prognostications in these articles to the contrary, Linux keeps gaining ground.
4) Finally, the "What Linux Must Do To Survive" HOWTO should contain a list of other topics that harried journalists can write about when they and their bosses are looking for filler and a deadline is approaching.
Everybody knows what's wrong and how to fix it, but nobody wants to do anything about it. You say that it is up to OEM resellers to configure Linux to their customer's specs (using twm, vi, TeX, lynx, KDE2), but she wants it to be up to the creator of the distribution. It will make it easier on everyone if the people writing the code assume responsibility over their own creations instead of trying to create a zillion "options" and telling Joe Sixpack to make up his own mind. If Linux wants to succeed, it should appear simple at all layers -- the code itself, the documentation, and the logistical distribution (from manufacturer to reseller to retailer to customer).
Who's been saying that Linux going to die? That's a strawman argument. What some people are saying is that it's not going to end up meeting with any success. On the desktop, it's obviously nowhere right now. On the server, it depends how impressed you are by a free Unix-like system cannibalizing a fading Unix marketshare. Frankly, if I were stuck overpaying for some Unix solution, Linux would look pretty attractive to me too, but FreeBSD would play that role just as easily if Linux wasn't the free Unix getting the attention. around.
Cheers,
Linux may be fast-growing. But I'd wonder how many of the people out there who are using it are people like me.
I have a machine which dual-boots Redhat 6.2 (a very vanilla install) and Windows 98 (ditto). Most of the time, I use it in Windows mode. Why? Because at the moment, I can't find a workable driver for my PC's internal modem (which is supposed to actually work with Linux, according to the box - maybe they should have said which distribution they were talking about). Most of my interest in computers revolves around the web, and if I can't connect to the web, I'm not likely to use a different OS. At the moment, I can't afford a new external modem - I have other priorities for my cash.
Then there's the software issue. A lot of what I do with my computer revolves around a few games - most of which are only available on Windows. Even with the ones which are available in a form which suits Linux (angband, zangband), I often can't get them to install correctly.
Then there's the whole "documentation" issue. Most of the more useful documentation I've found has been in books that I've had to pay between seventy and eighty dollars for. Okay, I'm getting the OS "for free" - but I'm paying an equivalent amount to what I'd be paying for Gatesware, and *still* not being able to solve the problems which sent me to the documentation in the first place.
Now, I'm well aware that most of this is due to my own lack of familiarity with the OS. But at the moment, I don't have the necessary block of time available to me to be able to sit down and seriously learn this system. So it sits in its partition, barely ever used, and gradually becoming more and more out of date. Hopefully one day I'll be able to get things organised, and actually learn about it. But at present, I don't have the time, the energy, or the skills to devote to getting my machine working as a Linux box.
Thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of people out there who have similar issues with Linux, and who basically have it installed, but unused.
Meg Thornton
--
Perkin's Postulate: Online tech support is designed to provide everything short of actual help.
It is. X takes a lot of RAM, and while KDE and GNOME are growing slimmer by the second, they do too. Office 97 and Windows 95 will run on a P133 w/ 32 Mb of RAM. Not great, but okay. KDE (itself) will take 4 minutes between logon and desktop.
That's just not true. Four of my Linux boxes use KDE: each has 32 Mb RAM, and the processors are 133-200 MHz Pentiums. All of them load the desktop quickly. If your machines are taking 4 minutes to start X, something is very wrong with them.
Really? Linux runs great for me with only 32MB RAM... but then I don't use bloatware like desktop environments, office suites, or (forgive me for saying so, but I don't think it will get much smaller) Mozilla.
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
About McDonalds I'm inclined to agree with you, though not for definitions of sucess that involve monentary gain. Which is fine, monentary gain is not the most important thing in the world, by any stretch.
However, I (and I'm sure others) would like to see a stable, reliable, reasonably secure (none of this email virus crap) OS that we could slap on our non-geek friend's computers. I am an activist and a computer geek, my world is about making human society and technology work. My mother is a nurse, her world is about helping people get better, or die with dignity, a more important job, if you ask me. If she wants something that she can write email to my little sister on and write the occasional letter on, then fine. I'm not going to deny her that just to keep the 'purity' of one distro of linux.
In terms of market share -- we live in a capitalist society, whether or not we would like to, and the greater the market share of linux, the less the market share of MS (and a few others, but MS really is the big nasty) and therefore the less money, and the less power (as money actually is power in a capitalist society) MS has.
Anyway, I'm not too worried about it. At some point *someone* will get it together, put out a luser proof distro and make quite a bit of money off it. And yay for them, I have much bigger fish to fry.
I have a machine with the same specs and I agree, Windows and Office run better on it than Gnome and StarOffice.
But not better than vi and fvwm2 :) And, for me, that's where the fun stuff is. Real men publish in gorgeous, perfectly typeset pdf generated by LaTeX from documents marked up with vi or emacs :)
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
You've missed my point. I don't want a GUI-based installer. I have yet to have someone give me one good reason why I should use a GUI to install an OS. Some of those Solaris installs I referred to in the original post were done as recently as a few months ago.
This is not a Fugazi
Not my experience. I've installed Windows a few times. Cake. Insert CD, hit a few buttons, wait. Boot, hit "Windows update", wait. Reboot. Done.
I've recently installed Mandrake 7.0 and 7.2. While installation was fairly easy in both cases, getting my system up to snuff wasn't. On 7.0 I got KDE 1.x (duh) and no sound (this is a SB128). Doh. On to 7.2. Got KDE2.0 which is what I want to run. But wait, oh no, the WM didn't start. And most other Apps crash upon start with something about a QT problem. I'm lost. This is a _default_ installation of a supposedly easy to use distro. I'm certain a lot of work could (and will) fix it. But heck, I don't know if I feel like it. Because of point made below...
I don't know what she's on, but the default Mandrake install, which boots into KDE, looks remarkably similar to other *cough*Windows*cough* GUIs.
Yes, looks similar. But looks are all superficial, and in this case, decieving. I find the KDE "start menu" intimidating. It's got a lot of programs, in strange places. It's got what seem like duplicate functionality. The configuration options are numerous and seem to be overlapping. There are mouse configuration options, but they are very limited compared to what I get in Windows(tm) and I've yet to find where to tweak the X mouse sampling rate (which seem to be lower than in Windows). I guess I gotta find that in the appropriate .rc. Sigh. It looks similar, but it's _not_ very similar. It's confusing and messy, puts options in too many different places. Windows(tm) certainly isn't perfect in this respect, but a whole lot better.
Believe it or not. I'm computer savvy. I know how to program. I could use my C64, I could use my Amiga (for other things than games), I can navigate the *nix CLI and have done so for many years. I've configured and tweaked WM's under Solaris using .rc files just to my liking. I've done numerous other stuff. I'm not imidated by source code.
The Linux desktop has me. If I could just get a decent working environment up to start with, I could use it and go from there. With Mandrake, it seems I cannot. I want to mess with my system. but I want it when I want it, not because my system wants it. I want to install Xfree4, it should have come with Mandrake 7.2. The X configure tool says X4.0 supports my Nvidia card for faster 2D but then offer me nothing but using 3.3.6 (or whatever) with or without 3D support. What am I to believe from that?
I'm ranting. But I must admit I've been slightly disappointed by what I've seen from the Linux desktop so far:-/ If only I had a second box and I'd use it as a server. There I know it's good.
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Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
There are *tons* of word processor programs for Linux, including Word Perfect.
.doc format. None of them can handle this function (I use Staroffice clunkily anyway, but Word does work better). Here's why:
Yes there are. As a journalist, I need to write articles that conform to page limits (400 per page) and submit then is
* StarOffice won't let me do a word count on a selecton
* OpenOffice isn't stable, and didn't do sectional word counts anyway
* Abiword isn't finished
* Applix doesn't even HAVE a word count.
* KWord can't output stably to Office 97
* WordPerfect Office 2000 works great on Windows and is a pleasure to use. However, the WINE absed Linux version is inconsistently unbreably slow in its GUI and crashes rather often. I (meaning Cybersource) purchased a copy and we got burnt because we can't use it - it's that bad. A QT of GTK version would be wonderful and well worth the cash. A WINE version is not, at least at this current stage (perhaps a service pack might change my mind).
Why do people continually say X takes a lot of RAM. It doesn't. The only reason you'd see top report that X has 30-40 MB of RAM in the size column is because that's all the memory it has maped, including video RAM (possibly several times depending on video card), shared memory, etc. If you've got a 64MB video card, you can expect the size of the X server to be at least 64MB. All the parts of Gnome or KDE that make up the desktop probably account for more used RAM than anything else.
There's complexity in installing Windows apps, but the above comments are completely out of touch. NT and 2K Administrators touch the registry quite often. Regular users don't. Very few apps require driver upgrades.
One word: Games. Nothing requires tweaking, driver upgrades and system upgrades like games do. And what a coincidence that this just happens to be one of the major things people do with their computers.
ESR has the same beliefs as this guy, and the B&B emphasises making stable, useable released as frequently as possible (and treating those who give feedback with respect as well, by the way).
What free software authors seem to have a real problem with is deciding on when their program is good enough to call a 1.0 release. Some people just don't know when it's time to just compile out the features that don't yet work, and deliver a useful program out of the parts that do work.
But anyway, I see no problem with her feedback and these are all valid criticisms in my opinion.
Her criticisms are valid, but I'm far more worried about the more technical ones. The Linux Standard Base specification is moving at an alarmingly slow pace, and not even because the people developing the standards don't agree, it's that the important questions that will affect everyone's lives haven't even been discussed yet. Package format, for example, was a mushy decision to use RPM v3, with intent to replace it later. If I were a developer looking at the LSB for guidance, this is pretty worthless. Do I target the sub-1.0 spec and risk incompatibility later, or hold off on packaging and use the old standy-by binary .tar.gz files that later need fixing up to suit the resident distribution, or what? Personally I prefer Debian's three state packaging (installed, removed [retain existing configuration], and purged [no configuration]) to RPM's two state (installed, not installed), and the fact that .debs can be decomposed with compeltely standard tools. I would hope that companies like RedHat and Mandrake would want to position the LSB as a critical element and try to devote some resources in getting it finished. Microsoft and the computer media have been saying for the longest time that Linux will fragment, and the finalization LSB would prove that it won't happen. And then, just maybe, they can take on more ambitious (and dangerous) projects like standardizing the GUI and object sharing frameworks.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Yes, it is easy to mock those views. They are pretty much exatly against that which linux stands for. Choice. However, consider this:
1. Provides one window manager.
I see no reason a standards body can't decide on a standard default for the window manager. We aren't saying don't make the rest available. Just pick one for the default, regardless of distro, aside from specializied distro's that need to be different. Most non-tech users will stick with the default which would provide a commonality accross various people's installs.
2. Provide one shell.
See above answer. Hopefully the user wont' need the shell, but if they do, it can't hurt to have a standard default.
3. Provide a unified Linux "look and feel"
This one really WOULD be nice. Lack of consistancy in user interfaces drives me nuts in linux.
4. Remove options.
Fine. Make two different sets of config screen. Advanced and simple. Make simple the default. Make it so you can change the default to Advanaced if you so chose. There, done. Newbies and non-techies don't have to worry about it, but with a magical check box we can forever unlock the "Advanced" options. That doesn't sound unreasonable.
5. Stability stuffs...
Yeah, duh. Of course we want stability. But, duh, the command line needs to be a last resort if all else fails. Seems like she was stating the obvious there...
Justin Dubs
This is just asking for a point by point analysis, so here we go:
1,2. A standard default windows manager/shell or standard interface features to remove the learning curve would help, but since when is forcibly removing all choice supposed to be a good thing? "No one cares what is whose favorite when it comes to the marketplace"? Gee I thought Linux was supposed to win by becoming everyone's favorite, not by being more generic than the competition.
3. First of all, "a company or consortium of companies"? WTF? Apparently someone fails to realize Linux is all about "for the users by the users" and removing control from companies, who are often out of touch with users and usually produce lousy looks and feels. Also, why would we want a standardized look when everyone can have their preferred look and feel?
4. Remove options? Crippleware is supposed to be better than allowing the user to actually use the OS? Oh, and apparently somebody has never used a Mac. Right now I'm typing this on a Mac with a theme installed (nonstandard look and feel) and so many modifications and customizations it's barely recognizable compared to the default. The Mac OS provides a variety of options, and that's still not enough for everyone.
5. "and God help us, it should never crash and dump a user into a shell" As opposed to some operating systems which dump users into the far superior Blue Screen of Death...
If I didn't know better I'd swear the article was one giant troll.
(btw, my user id is higher than yours!)
The strawman is that Unix is a fading market share. Unix is stronger now than it has ever been.
Fortunately, FreeBSD is getting more attention. Linux is in the spotlight, but FreeBSD is in the server rooms.
What server would *you* suggest? You certainly don't seem enamored of Unix (and by extension, Linux).
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Bullshit. There is something close to 5,000 drivers that come with a default installation. When I installed Windows 2000 on my main box, absolutely everything was recognized. Correctly. And the sound works. And the printer works. Etc.
I don't know what she's on, but the default Mandrake install, which boots into KDE, looks remarkably similar to other *cough*Windows*cough* GUIs.
Wrong again. You argue that the woman doesn't understand the entire point of "Free Software", then you should you no absolutely nothing about Pay Software. KDE is in no way like Windows. The closest thing it has is the K menu, which is a Start Menu rip off. You can't position things on the K menu by clicking and dragging them like you can in Windows. A majority of the control panels aren't functioning fully yet with most cards (hello Sound) And you have to go to a command prompt to get more critical things done.
Contrast that with Windows, which gets everything right on the first try AND is easier to boot. I tried that bullshit with "teaching kids Unix at an earlier age so they would understand it" for a high school project. You know what? They couldn't understand a damn thing. But when they saw a Mac GUI they understood it immediately.
And I would suggest not calling a female journalist "babe", unless you want a wrath of feminists breathing down your neck.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
It didn't seem to have any new information. We all know that installation needs to be simplified and documentation needs to be improved.
I have a proposal. What if professional writers wrote a few pages of documentation everytime they felt like writing an article that mentions the need for documentation. They are pros, so it should take them no time at all.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
For LINUX to survive I would say they need to be one standard for startup scripts, no more messy sv4 or bsd, your own.
Thanks,
Andrew Pinski
Come on, defaults SUCK.
Any new computer I sit down at, the first things I try and establish (if I'm going to be working on it for any length of time) are what the maximum resolution and color depth supported are. I then switch to those.
No, I don't often end up looking at horribly small text - well, nothing I consider horribly small. 1280x1024 is fine on 15" and 1600x1200 is good for a 17".
I simply don't understand how people manage to survive with so little screen real estate.
High resolutions, and multiple virtual desktops are the only way, surely?!
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Male. 5-speed manual.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Maybe it's because I've always had to deal with another OS on the system. I did Onsite support for a while, and of all the OSes I've had to install, OS/2 was by far the worse, followed closely by Windows. AIX was easy to install but a pain in the ass to configure. Linux has always just gone on a system for me (Of course, most of the time, Linux was the only thing going on the system, too.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I just finished grading about 300 written CS101 tests (I got a job as the grader) and I noticed a couple of things (the test was on Macinstosh stuff):
1. Only about 10% of the people put answers down as keyboard shortcuts, the rest used the menus.
2. Only 2 people put things about extra security in. 25% didn't even know how to permenantly delete a file.
IMNSHO this means that menus are useful to most new users. They don't take up much screen realestate and tend to be used. The security features of Linux could also be a hinderence...
Just throwing some observations out there.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
It's not the fault of linux if hardware manufacturers are not providing drivers.
You are dead wrong here. It is the fault of the Linux community if hardware vendors don't provide drivers.
If Microsoft had no hardware support due to lack of drivers for XP, who's fault is that? It's M$'s for not cajoling, coercing, contracting, or conscripting the vendors to write drivers.
My god, what planet do you come from? I can't believe that they mod-ed you a score of 4 for this crap.
I'm completely astonished: "Windows, which gets everything right on the first try" -- nice blanket statement. I only wish that my experience in installing windows was like that. Then maybe I would think better of it.
You're completely wrong about They couldn't understand a damn thing. I'm constantly amazed and reassured by the number of people -- young or otherwise -- who adapt to Unix, and frequently on their own. It isn't rocket science, and they figure that out pretty quickly.
Oh, and hey, I'm a babe too. You can call me babe if I can call you WRONG.
Emily's point, as I took it, was not that she personally finds Linux difficult to use (although she apparently did). Her point is that it will not replace Windows as a desktop O/S, precisely *because* of what some would call its strengths: its customisability (is that a word?), flexibility, and complexity. Our office examined Linux on the desktop a year or so ago - before my time here - and found that it Just Wouldn't Work. Our secretaries etc can't, and don't want to learn how to, customise their desktops beyond what theme they want. Most don't even go that far, they just use what I give them. That's what most people do - the client side of the client-server, the users, whatever you want to call them. (In a previous post, somebody used the word luser. That's funny on alt.sysadmin.recovery; that's not funny when you want to be taken seriously in a desktop os discussion.)
Emily's rant was about the same thing - she doesn't want to be presented with oodles of choices when she's installing and running a desktop operating system. Why does she have to "break out her favourite development environment and start hacking"? Her whole point was that users don't want or need to do that. They just want something they can use. They want to be able to read the documents other people give them, they want to know that when they doubleclick that icon, the app will load up.
This is why, Emily says, Linux will not beat Windows out on the desktop - and she's right. That's not to say Linux doesn't have a place on some desktops, because it does. However, it doesn't have a place on as many desktops as Windows does - for the reasons she gives.
Check out this for configuration: http://ximian.org/desktop/setuptools.php3
Check out this for updates: http://ximian.org/apps/redcarpet.php3
Both are beta projects, but I would say they are both very promising. Combine these with Eazel's Nautilus and the upcoming OpenOffice, Mozilla, Galeon, KDE2 and Gnome1.4 and Linux will be in great shape. The future is bright!
No, most distros are either Deb or RPM based. APT is a packaging system independent tool capable of finding dopwnloading and resolving dependencies on Deb or RPM based distributions. Unlike Mandrake Update and Red Hat Network, it is not limited to vendor supplies updates.
I use rpmfind quite frequently. It doesn't have all the RPMS available for my distribution, and often if they do they're built for a newer version, and require long chains of dependencies I have to resolve myself.
Apparently not everyone can get their facts straight either. This author is talking about downloading patches via gopher for chrissake. I would say she can't even be a journalist.
It's a useless, cluless rant and nothing more. It does not deserve to be called journalism or even criticism.
War is necrophilia.
Actually, I'd argue that even among the various *NIXes, Linux leaves a bit to be desired. My own experience: About a month ago I needed to set a personal webserver up for a friend. He needed to set up three sites with three domains on the same machine. Since he was short on money, we pieced together a P2-333 server, and I proceeded to load up RedHat for him. Total time to get the OS installed, configured, and talking to the network: 90 minutes. Then he decided that he actually wanted the machine to double as his development environment, so I had to get his sound, printer, and higher video modes working. Time? Another 40 minutes of patching, tweaking, manual file editing, and crawling through man pages. Then I reinstalled and configured Apache to run his sites. Web server and patch installs took another 60 minutes, start to stop. Finally, I installed Forte and his other dev tools on the machine, which required several more patches and manual file edits to get working...adding another 40 minutes of tweaking to the project. Total time? Ignoring the huge amount of time I spent searching for various documentation, it took nearly four hours to get the system running.
Of course, the system bombed the next day when he tried to update Java 1.2 to the 1.3 J2SE, so I got to repeat the whole thing again. And then it bombed again a week later when he tried to shut it down, and the whole damned filesystem corrupted (as far as I'm concerned, ext2 is just plain evil).
So, being a good friend, what did I do next? I grabbed my Solaris 8 Media Pack($70, unlimited license), drove back over to his home, and went to work. Solaris was installed, configured, and fully functional with his hardware and network in less than 30 minutes...and I NEVER ONCE had to edit a g*ddamned configuration file in vi to do it. iPlanet FasTrak Edition was installed and running all three of his sites 20 minutes after that, and his development tools were installed without a hitch or a patch. He figured out CDE in no time and is now happy as a clam.
The problem was not one of familiarity, I regularly use my Mandrake 6 box for development and built my own distro for my DNS server. I've used Linux since 1995 and am just about as familiar with it as one can get. But I'll be one of the fisrt to tell you that Linux has flaws. It's not that Linux isn't easy enough to use, it's that it often seems like some of the developers went out of their way to make it difficult. I like Linux, and I doubt that I'll be repartitioning my Mandrake box anytime soon, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't a serious chiphead. Although we've come a long way, the major distros still need to do some more work on the ease of use issues.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
And Linux installers is only good value-for-your-time if you actually _need_ all those extra services you get. Most you mentioned I simply don't need. I _don't_ need three word processors either, or twenty WMs, or DHCP servers, or sendmail, or pretty much anything of all the crud I get with Linux.
Linux can't be stopped, but based on _my_ experience _I_ have to say people are sticking their heads in the sand if they pretend that installing, maintaining and using Linux is as easy as Windows. You _do_ have a much greater level of control in the end, but that is only important to a fraction of users, and you pay a price for that control that most users don't want to pay.
Me, I just wish KDE2 would actually have worked for me from the default install of Mandrake 7.2. With Linux it's probably possible to fix whereas I would have been left in the cold with Windows. But fixing takes time and time...
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Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I administrate my box, and I only touched the registry once to play with some Domain Master values.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
The only time I've ever installed Solaris to a Sun box that even had a video card, the machine was slated to be a workstation -- and even then, it was done via the black-text-on-white Sun video console.
Maybe so, but it was a hell of a long time ago. Solaris has had a colour GUI based install tool since 2.6 (1997).
Why do people continually say X takes a lot of RAM. It doesn't.
You're right of course. I mean a modern Window/Icons/Menus/pounter type GUI desktop environment based on X, now just X by itself, providing equivalent `friendliness' to a Macintosh or Windows machine.
You have to remember that the kids on the slashdot short bus get all tingly when they can tell all three of their friends in the computer lab that Linux has doubled its marketshare.
Which is ok, I suppose, since going from 1% to 2% is technically 'doubling'....
~dlb
Hi.
Linux can be whatever a distribution packages it to be. It can be twm, vi, TeX, lynx. It can be KDE2.1 with anti-aliasing built in, Windoze-alike user interface, KWord/Wordperfect/Abiword, KAIM, and Konquerer or Mozilla or Netscape. Sure. It can also run on palms, cellphones, and PS2s. Who the George Bush cares? I have a cluster of production machines runing Linux (heay email). Cool. Nice.
So Joe Sixpack unpacks the cool box and... what? selects a distribution? Then gets a choice between twm, E, fvwm, etc.? Then gets to pick the scan rate for the monitor? Then gets a prompt for additional users? Then is asked about allowing rsh? Then is troubled about where they happen to live so that a crypto package can pretend to be compliant with random laws?
Compare those questions with "What's your name?" "Do you have kids?" "do you want to hear more about Microsoft products and services?" "Would you like to set up a Hotmail account now?"
I'm probably rambling too long now, but you're missing the entire point. Configuration options is not what people want. People want function. Give them choice and they flail. Give them dancing pigs and they're happy, even if you're charging by the minute.
It will not take a genius to see that distribution sales are NOT made to the end user, but ARE made to the OEM seller. Hardware sales will occur on the basis of the distribution packaging.
Thanks, won't have to push that point.
Dell and Compaq and IBM and whoever will be packaging linux to grandma in a few years. They will do it because that is the way it will sell. They will do it to make money on hardware sales. They will do it because they will be able to sell their hardware CHEAPER than hardware with Windoze BECAUSE the operating system intellectual property is FREE, and the cost of the operating system is a service charge to load and customize it. And whereas Windoze forces them to pay Microsoft to load Microsoft's software on their machines, the linux distros will load and customize the software for the OEMs. As part of a service contract. Are you a budding MBA looking for a dot com job or something? There's an important bit you missed somewhere along the line, called the consumer. Use all the capitals you want, but they still happen to be the ones buying things. And they will buy Windows, M$ tax or not, until there is a viable alternative.
The market will demand it, and it will come. It will come BECAUSE hardware companies can use it to make money. I liked my econ classes, too. There's a lesson here: go look at www.hotmail.com, and then www.bigfoot.com. Compare and contrast utility, price, and value. Please predict which will ultimately outperform the other. No bonus points for noting vendor tie-ins, etc.
Because that is the American way. Ok, now you're the troll.
-j
I forget what 8 was for.
I'm no MS shill (I'm typing this from my OpenBSD laptop) running lynx) but I will say that MS office runs pretty well on my 128MB, Win2k, 300MHz AMD box at work. Even 96MB is OK for Word, Outlook, and a couple of MSIE windows (home PC).
It's a standard slashdot line that Office is bloatware and a pig. I happen to find Word pretty snappy (surprisingly so). I found StarOffice and WordPerfect almost unusable on similar hardware.
Of course, server apps are another matter-- give me Apache/PHP4/Python/PostgreSQL on the above hardware over IIS+MS-SQL+ASP (cringe) any day!
---
In a hundred-mile march,
The system tries to find the files in $CDROM LETTER$:\....what you need to do is type in :\win98\
After that, what you should do is copy the files onto your HDD once your system is install. Type:C:
cd \
mkdir win98
xcopy $CDROM LETTER$:\win98\*.* /s C:\win98
Then when the system asks for the Windows 98 CD, just put in C:\win98. That's it. That's all you do. And when you get tired of Windows, you install GNU/Linux or preferably, Free Solaris x86Office 97 and Windows 95 will run on a P133 w/ 32 Mb of RAM. Not great, but okay.
UUMM, I'm not sure what your point here was, of course 6 year old software is going to run okay on a 6 year old system. I suspect if you tried to load Win2K on the system it would be so slow as to be unusable and only if you could install it at all. On the other hand RedHat 7, running a 2.4.X kernel and AfterStep as the Window Manager, would probably run rather well. This would assume I installed a video card supported by XFree86 4.01, but this not would help Win2K at all. Yes KDE or Gnome would be slow, but that is why I would pick AfterStep instead, a choice I simply do not have with Win2K.
Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
Joe sixpack can't install windows either. Joe sixpack needs to get a mac anything else will lead to infinate frustration for joe sixpac.
War is necrophilia.
I should have specified that I was suggesting that Win9x does lots of stuff behind your back, whether you want it to or not. I really don't, but yet there it is...
I wasn't talking about any particular software, so I don't see where you get your third point. My point was simply that there's always an area where even the most godlike user needs a dialog to walk him or her through, and that beats the pants off of having to hack csh script on a package you don't know. All this stuff about nails and screwdrivers is confusing me, but I think you can rest assured that we agree that there's always a learning curve. I suggest we make the curve start low and end high instead of starting mid-high and ending in assembler.
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
I agree with your first and second points.
I get lost on your third, but I'm going to assert that a standard Linux distro will never be something anyone can just pick up and use. Perhaps a special shell that coddles the user like a 3com net appliance. What does linux do behind your back, or do you mean other OSes?
Useability: you're just using the wrong software. And often times, makers of software have all they're own standards and formats and dialogs that aren't standard across the board. But the point is it makes it easiest for them (the developers), and those who use that stuff most. You cannot expect to use every unix utility as easy as the last without spending time to get to know each of them, just as it is difficult to learn how to remove nails with a hammer when all you've ever used is a screwdriver.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I don't know, take away linus's box and hand him a stack of punch-cards and I bet he'd come up with a new supported platform.
You Like Science?
You Like Science?
You Like bottomquark.
Exactly!
People down the hall are amazed how I flip through minimizing and switching between windows in '95 or '98, because they're all addicted to the mouse. And I owe it all to bash...
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I hope that some of the key apps developers in the linux scene take articles such as this to heart. After all, if you really want to "stick it to the man" (aka, MS), you really need to look at who their market is: Dumb-Ass Business End-Users who couldn't fix anything on their linux box if they tried.
I think i'm done now.
Apparently not everyone can get their facts straight either. This author is talking about downloading patches via gopher for chrissake.
She's not being literal. She means there no single place to download patches from (unless you cunt APT based distros, but most aren't) and there's no uniform format to get them in (though this is changing). URLs break often - I can't even find the homepage of vacation or the current maintainer (help appreciated).
I think you'll find that it's called Mandrake and it does all this already.
You need to think about what you're installing
I takes me several days to set up an NT server or workstation. Once you've got the basic OS running, you then need:
And a similar list for a workstation with Office 2K instead of Exchange and a slew of development tools.
Install Mandrake and it's ALL there from the word go, working and ready. Linuxconf works great to set everything up and even works under X (could do with a more sane interface but it's OK). If Mandrake had apt, it would be absolutely fantastic. And if most Linux installers only installed a base system+fancy desktop it would seem incredibly 'easy' to install, but we've all got used to the idea of a complete workstation/server being installed and set up in the space of an hour.
And the best thing is that I can copy half the contents of /etc and have a similar server up and running in half the time again. Try doing that with NT/2K.
When I was growing up I was told that when somebody gives you a gift you say "thank you very much". I guess in her family when somebody got a gift they promptly and publicly began critising this gift and telling the person what a piece of shit it was compared to the item she bought yesterday.
War is necrophilia.
Install half-a-dozen 'service packs', 'hotfixes' etc. etc. and then go and find fixes for all the other packages broken by the fist fixes, update Internet Explorer (because everything from Notepad up to Exchange Server seems to depend on it) blah blah blah.
Take a look closely around the "m505" marker. Sort of looks odd, doesn't it?
My $0.02 says this is the JPEG compression which occurs around all more detailed surfaces in the images. I think its real.
Definitely. Once you get Linux onto Joe Sixpac's computer, then you will succeed in getting little Joe Jr. and Jocelyn interested, and they will most likely delve into the more technical side of Linux. Then you can start adding/reenabling features, and have no problem with acceptance. Children always exceed their parents technology threshold, its just a matter of Mom and Dad getting the technology into the house in the first place. From that point, it makes perfect sense. Make it simple and they will come.
Bow before my sig, for it is good.
If you'd actually bothered to read the article, pb, you might have noticed that she wasn't "down on" Linux at all. No one who's used it that long could really hate it, after all... Still, she's right about a few things.
One: For the average end-user, Linux is way too difficult. Hell, it was really tough for me to get going, and I'm about as far above most people as most of you are above me, in terms of computer know-how. And never mind the dumb users, who can't figure out how to use the "Reply" button, or, when asked questions like "Does it run on Windows or Mac?" say, "I don't know, I don't get into that technical stuff." (Don't laugh. It happened to me. I couldn't make up something that weird.) No one should have to know how many cylinders are in their drive before they can install an(other) OS, but I did. While, I admit, learning more than I cared to know about my hardware was certainly edifying, it was also a fsck of a lot of work.
Two: AFAI'm concerned, the documentation and HOWTOs are all written in Moon Language or some designated alternate. They're certainly not written in terribly comprehensible English (although the ones by Rob Malda are at least funny in places). Most of them suffer from the "COIK" problem (for "Comprehensible Only If Known") -- that is, if you can understand the doc or HOWTO, you don't need to read it. Many of them tell you everything you need to know about the given item -- except the one vital piece of information you need (such as how to open a file or something). I know about technical documentation for end-users! I at least attempt to do it for a living! And some of those docs or HOWTOs should be textbook examples of what not to do.
Plus, of course, judging by the tone of this article, at least some of her griping is hyperbole anyway, so don't get your UNIX bloomers in a knot.
?!
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
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Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Unix dropped from 17% server marketshare to 14% over the past year — that's even larger than Novell NetWare's drop from 19% to 17%. Unix is fading. How could you possibly say that Unix is stronger now than it's ever been when it used to dominate the market? Sun's the only Unix company doing well — IBM sales are flat, HP sales are down, and SGI and SCO are sunk. NT/2000 now has a server marketshare equal to that of Unix and Linux combined.
The server I would suggest is the one appropriate to the job. I host some web sites on a Sun ES450 and AOLServer, run a bank's email system on an x86 Debian box and qmail (well, until the filesystem hosed itself after about a year and I ended up moving it to a different Solaris machine), run a few newsletters for people from a Win2K box with MySQL/PHP/IIS, and host an e-commerce site and a weblogging service on Win2K/ASP/IIS machines. That's not a comprehensive list (and I do other things with some other Debian boxes that I have, the bank job just happened to be the most important thing that I've had running on one of the Linux boxes), just letting you know that I have no problems with computing diversity.
Cheers,
my newbie friend...
I'm truly glad somebody has taken the time to express these very same sentiments that I have had during the past week as I try to install linux for the first time.i'm glad you're here, welcome to a new world that is *nothing* like your former windows one. don't expect things to be windows-like or as "easy as windows" cuz it's not. look beyond that. what distro are you using? none of them are terribly difficult to install, if you really really need hand holding, try mandrake
I know that in time I will become proficient at linux, but that's because I have the technical inclination to do so. Forget those people who just want to "get something done" (like my mom).i hope you will, and maybe someday you'll look back on your post (and emily whatsherface's rant) and think, "man, was she blowin smoke out her ass", i'm glad this os gives me choices and freedom
It's about clicking a box to turn on the sound without having to install additional softwareeven windoze must have additional sound drivers installed, and it's usually not as easy as modprobe sb. try tracking down drivers for win2000.
McDonalds is not a success for it's "endless selection," but it's consistency of product. You can go to any McDonalds in the world and get the same exact thing. That is one of the primary driving factors to it's success.people will buy anything for their kids. don't count out happy meals and slick advertising. the debian jr project seems to be kinda slow, but the idea remains. i'd like to see kids grow up using linux. people have "grown up" with windows, and are stuck in that windows mentality, that this is the way the computer looks, these are the options i have. my kid (due in a few days), will grow up with linux (and other unices). i'm sure he'll see windows, but i want him to see the rest of the os world too. it's been said many times: "all oses suck. just in different ways." find the one that sucks the least for you.
it's late, and i'm goin to bed. sorry if this doesn't make much sense. good luck with your new box :)
--
Unfortunately neither you, I, or linus has enough money or power to try and coerce anybody to do anything. Like it or not Linux is a community project. Even we had the power I doubt any of us would sink to the unethical practices of MS to accomplish their goals. Corporations have no morals but humans frequently do that's just the way it is. The best you can do is to use supported hardware and fire off a letter to the manufacturer. You can't threaten them like Bill Gates does.
War is necrophilia.
Let me get this straight. No application can replace any DLL in windows 2000? is that what you are saying? Or are you saying that there are a handful of DLLs that can't be replaced but the rest are OK?
Actually you would be wrong on both accounts because Microsoft applications can replace any DLL in the system. Usually the biggest culprit in breaking existing apps is Microsoft itself. Every iteration of office, IE, or service pack will inevitably break somebodies application sometimes other MS applications. Just recently somebody I know installed VB6 SP4 on his machine and his code stopped working. He had the spend a freaking week at the MS web site and on the telephone with tech support till they found the hotfix which was buried someplace in the KB.
Apparently VB6 SP4 had some problem with IE5 and his code hung up every time it attempted to make a HTTPS connection. See q174836 and q238934.
I will reiterate. Sooner or later you will install something on your machine will will break something. If you are lucky it will break instantly and predictably if you are unlucky you machine will start flaking out and you will tear your hair out trying to figure out exactly what the problem is. MS will be of no help unless you pay even then they will spend two weeks blaming god an satan first. Only after you have escalated your ticket up three or more levels will you speak to a person who is actually listening to you and then you may be able solve your problem. Hopefully the solutions will not involve a complete reinstall or a $300.00 upgrade.
War is necrophilia.
My debian installed without a hitch and with gnome (which I gather is more difficult to set up). I have no complaints about my debian system it's been rock solid since I installed it in june. Not one glitch not even a quiver. I could not be happier with it.
War is necrophilia.
Isn't that what I said?
Lusers don't care about productivity and programmers do. Programmers writing an operating system for themselves will place emphasis on productivity (ease of use) not ease of learning.
War is necrophilia.
In order to have dual boot on my complicated notebook configuration, I tried using GNU Parted to resize the old drive and then installed a sliver installation in the space thus freed for Slackware 7.1. Then I tar and gzipped the whole Windows98 installation and copied it over to my sister's desktop pc running cygwin sshd. (How can unix net tools be consistently more stable and faster than Windows versions even when they run on top of Windows? Nevertheless, it moves.)
So then I installed the new laptop drive and skeptically tar -zxvf'd the 1.4GB .tar.gz file to my Windows partition. Wine took some tweaking (lots of tweaking!) and then ran okay. Later I decided to switch over (no Quicktime4 for Linux says Apple! Ever.) to boot Windows for once.
I started by booting my old boot floppy (made at Win98 installation two years ago) and using the sys command to install a boot sector on my C:\\ partition. Then I rebooted to see how badly things would crash on a new and different size drive with all sorts of things in new places on the drive and all that. Everything worked fine. The first time. It was quite amazing.
I know that's standard for *nix but it's pretty good when a closed source hack can deal with that. I found soon that I need to set up the swapfile again for Windows, but that's been the only problem.
Of course, since my job is mostly web development and I don't like FPS games, I have little need for Windows and I've only run it for a couple of hours since initial install.
-B. Earl
My own correspondence is in PDF. If someone complains that they can't read that I point them to the acrobat reader. This way I'm slowly (very very slowly) changing the mindset that you have to send editable MS-Office documents around in your correspondence.
So if I were to have a simple CL utility that would transform doc format files to ps files, I can quite happilly communicate with my co-workers without reinforcing the position that you have to send msdoc's around.
And rebooting isn't evil, it's not a problem, not on my desktop machine. It take a couple of minutes. And?
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Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I use linux for quite some time, but mostly in text modus shell form on my servers, but last time I looked, Suse 7.1 was completely configured from the KDE control center. There was a folder full of admin plugins like install software, change network settings, and probably all the stuff, yast has.
This quote pretty much sums up what I think:
Everything journalists write is true, except when they write about something you know.
-- Dag-Erling Smorgrav,
June 1999, FreeBSD-Stable Mailing List
Yup! And therefore, the sole cause for Microsoft holding a monopoly today is NOT Microsoft, but the same ubergeeks and uberhackers who refuse to make, let alone allow Linux to be a user friendly OS...
The only reason Linux has the professional level of respect that it does, is that it's a viable alternative to other flavors of *nix, which many professional IT and engineers are already familiar with, and unlike the professional grade OS's like Unix (which can cost thousands to set up), costs nothing... And $0 is a very pretty number to the beancounters...
Therein lies the irony, Linux is used by those *evil* corporations that the Linux zealots tend to rail on about... They also make a profit by using an OS that they can get for free, writing off their on site geeks as a tax deduction... They're laughing all the way to the bank, and yet Linuxers have displayed this as a badge of honor...
Oh, but I suppose handing the brass ring to evil corporations is okay, as long as it defines your skills as '1337'... Next they'll say how their computers are made of organically grown components designed by Buckminster Fuller, powered by a Wilheim Reich designed orgone harvester, transmitted via Tesla broadcast power, using an open source wireless net stabdard designed by Jerry Garcia...
Give us a break...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
And another problem I have with this article is the complete lack of logic. For example:
And I'm not even going to get into the rant about how all Linux programmers hate standards. And the "moon language" thing ... yeah ... she should know, sounds like she's living on the moon. She does have some good points but most of it unreasoned rubbish.
I'm sorry that this is offtopic,
But how do you call this news? A picture, sent in anonymously, claiming to be the successor to the Palm V? I didn't even have to open up an image editor to start thinking that this thing was a fake. Take a look closely around the "m505" marker. Sort of looks odd, doesn't it? Like the edges of another image were blended into the image of the palm. Look at the left bottom edge of the screen, and the right bottom edge. The right edge is further away from the silkscreen than the left edge; *way* more than can be explained by perspective.
Anyways, this photo may or may not be doctored, it may or may not be real. But you can't call this news; an unsubstantiated image on the web, with nothing to back it up, sent in ANONYMOUSLY is not, I repeat, not news.
Okay, I've opened up the image in the Gimp. Yeah, it's probably a fake. I could be wrong, though. Anyways, the "m505" is definetly plastered on top of it, and it looks like the text was originally straight, then had a transform applied to it in order to make it looks slanted. There were also some more technical things that indicate falseness. Now, this could be an image generated by the 3com engineers; so it could be very real. BUT COME ON!
Before you start bitching at Malda about what news is, go and watch a real news program on television. One that reports on wars, and politics. Then look up the definition in a dictionary. Then, for Christ's sake, apply some common sense. Chances are, this picture is a fraud. Arse. Have a nice day.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Bullshit. A collegue of mine tried to upgrade (?) to Win2k just this week on his not-so-new toshiba laptop. All went well until it hit the network. Big bang, crashes all over the place. It took him and computer support at the company two days to get the damn thing working. Needed a special Win2K CD-rom for Toshiba's, needed tweaks in the registry, toshiba only drivers, needed to override something called a BiosServer and about thirty reboots.
Guess what, I have the same brand/version laptop, installed RedHat in 30 minutes with everything working: network, sound, printers, samba, apm, etc.
So your mileage may vary, but windows installations are not always painless. Go to any support/installation department and ask around.
>Linux port of Microsoft Office You obviously never used StarOffice. It doesn't work anymore like MS-Office than any other GUI based competing Office Suite does.
BTW, Wordperfect for Linux is NOT a native port.
Wordperfect for Solaris and Unixware is. Doesn't matter MS paid Corel to get out of the Linux biz anyway.
I agree with her on the desktop. I like having billions of looks and feels to choose from, but the average user hates it.
However, most distros now default to one look. This has to continue. I once told Gael Duval that to beat Microsoft Linux should copy the MS desktop widget for widget so users feel nice and comfortable with it.
" I think you're under the impression that the only way to make something useable is to make it stupid-friendly. That's not actually how it's done."
/s" it only takes a second to type and you are done now you go on to your next task.
No what I am saying is that ease of use and ease of learning are different things. Ease of use means getting your task done accurately and quickly as possible. Ease of learning means that you can sit anybody down in front of the system and teach them in a short time. Let's take windows example.
Let's say you had some faxing program that never deleted it's files and spewed the fax files all over your drive and you periodically needed to clean these files up.
An ease of use situation is to type "del *.fax
An ease of learning situation involves clicking on start, dragging you mouse over to find and then over to files and folders, clicking, waiting for the dialog box to come up, clicking in the text box, typing *.fax, clicking on the start button, waiting for the search to complete, clicking on edit, clicking on select all, clicking on file, clicking on delete, clicking on the ok button when the "are you sure" dialog box comes up.
This is just one simple example I could come up with a more comples one like finding all files which have not been touched in last 6 months and moving them into an archive directory.
I hope you see what I mean here. Maybe it's possible to make a tool that is easy to learn and easy to use and powerful but I have not seen one yet. The ones that came closest were lotus magellan and info select before version 4.
War is necrophilia.
I ran into exact same problem as you so I switched to debian. Debian did not install sendmail by default but instead installed exim. I really wanted postfix so I did an apt-get install postfix. It took a coule of minutes (dsl) and I was done. I fired up webmin and configured postfix and haven't touched it since. Debian is truly awsome.
War is necrophilia.
I have a similar story, I have a similar system to one you described, the only differnce was I was tried to install Win2K. It would boot to the CD and copy all the files fine, but once it started up it would give me a hardware failure error. The first time I ran some diagnistic programs, everything seemed fine, so I tried again and got the same error. I knew nothing was wrong with the system, so I installed RedHat 7.0 on it. The install went fine and I have upgraded to XFree86 4.02 and kernel 2.4.2. I have added a DvD drive (Yes I can watch DvD movies with it under Linux), a TV tuner card, a CDRW, a network card and a USB WebCam. All of which works perfectly. Whatever the problem was with Win2K is now Bill Gates problem, not mine. I took Win2K back to the store for refund and never looked back.
Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
Uh. So, I take it that in your book, an "average corporate user" runs a web server on their... desktop machine?
The reality of the matter is that while Linux may be making inroads in corporations, it's making inroads in the server rooms. Not user desktops. Hence Netcraft's survey makes sense, while the dots you're trying to connect using it... aren't actually connected.
She was talking about the desktop, remember. Servers are not desktops, and with god as my witness, they never shall be... (shudder)
Moof!
I run Word 2000 in a K6 233 with 64 MB of RAM. It works.
--
I have no sig at all.
I completely agree, and posted something to the same effect. However, you kept your cool a lot better than I did, even in the face of such "moon language" comments.
:)
Also, I'd like to say "thank you" a few times, because my Linux box is running a Software RAID configuration, and, well, I couldn't have done it without the HOWTO.
I Speak Moon Language; bah weep grah na weep ni ni bong?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
EMACS is easily extensible using its very own version of lisp
EMACS lets you work with regexps. Will Word do that?
EMACS is GPL. You dont have to pay anything. It is stable and runs on a 486 with 16 MB of RAM.
Because there's a big disconnect between zealous ranting that Linux will take over the world and the fact that Linux = UNIX. Any OS that has a learning curve like Linux/UNIX is doomed to be a niche player. Most people just want a box that runs applications...and doesn't make them have to think very hard. Like a toaster, you know. Make Linux the bext, slickest version of UNIX around and what's the best you'll get? Replacing commercial UNIX distros. Wanna put Linux in the homes and office desktops of the world? Then, pay attention to people like Emily. Make up your mid and get over it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Sure a fresh copy of w2k probably installed in an "approved" box that does not mean anything. How will your system run a year from now when some program or another overwrote some DLL that something else needs?
Applications cannot replace dlls in win2k. Each application that tries fails, and windows just pretends it worked for the application, which has it's own copies of all libs installed.
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Quite simply, (linux || unix)'s main virtues are power and flexibility. Taking advantage of either of these virtues requires that you as the user take the responsibility to understand what you are doing. In other words, as someone whose name I can't recall said: "Unix is hard to learn but easy to use, windows is easy to learn and hard to use." Another way to put it is that Unix is extremely user-friendly, but to a different set of users than windows or MacOS.
If you want simplicity of use (by that I mean pointy-clicky-screw-the-details) and you don't want all the microsoftian crud, take a look into BeOS (it retains much of the power and flexibility of linux but in a more "refined" user environment, IMHO). You can get pretty much the full OS for free (free.be.com IIRC). There are ways to install the free BeOS without a host operating system but Be, Inc. deserves your monetary support, because, again IMHO, their product is actually worth the price they're asking (something like $80 bundled with a tome and productivity suite, I think).
It is a common fallacy for a new user of linux/unix to compare it to some previous OS they used and say "linux needs X, Y, and Z to take over the world / survive". Linux/unix is perfectly well suited for the set of uses it is currently doing. These uses are generally not on the desktop or oriented at desktop users. If you want linux to fulfill some new role: easy, write code. Want linux in your wristwatch or on your mainframe or playing every new game that comes down the pike? Easy, just start or join a project to add features to the linux experience, and write code.
Semi-ranting aside, welcome to a new world. I hope you have fun (yes, the first 3-6 months are fustrating, but a whole world of potential is there if you stick with it).
--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I am not sure what version of Red Hat she is using, but the last time I installed it, version 7.0, I didn't have to know how many cyclinders, etc. for the swap file. It was actually just as easy to install as windows. It was definitely harder to upgrade to the 2.4.? kernel, but I got through that also with just a little patience. Maybe she should check the current versions before she goes ranting on. Although StarOffice is very bloated. She could try the free version of WordPerfect for linux.
What good is a used up world, and how could it be worth having? --Sting
Then you need to do exactly this. Use Word. Working around is more trouble than it's worth, it spoils your ROI (you need to spend too much effort for the money you receive).
As you do this for a living, shell out the few bucks for VMware and just use it. If you hate Word, well, who said that work is fun all the time?
And, if you're good enough, charge them a surplus if they force you to Word. Actually, that's what I am doing - contracts with an explicit price tag attached to "documentation in MS Office format". My customers shall know how expensive usage of these programs is. But then, I'm not a journalist and am not forced to work in a business with razor-thin margins... :-) :-)
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Absolutely right.
Perhaps it doesn't fulfill all of Emily's requirements for a desktop OS. It doesn't fulfill mine either (at work at least.) This is due in large part, as we all know, to Microsofts obvious monopoly of the desktop market. They have it sewn up. Period.
So many advocates of Linux (of which I am definitely one) want so badly for Linux to squash the Microsoft monopoly. I used to want this as well. Now, I could care less. I use Linux along with a lot of other people and thank goodness there are so many brilliant people out there developing for it on a daily basis. As long as people continue to use it and people continue to develop for it, Linux will be there.
What is Linux? Why was it created?
Certainly I don't have to educate most of you in regard to questions like these. Maybe just a little reminder however. Linus began working on the Linux kernel as a way to have a UNIX-like OS on his PC (also, of course because he loves to hack and wanted to learn more about OS's/kernels) Windows, quite simply, did not fulfill his needs. UNIX was and is a server OS. It was never really intended for "casual" desktop use by average, everyday users. It was created with multiple threads, multiple users, stability, and power in mind. Not how pretty the GUI looks (although I like a nice one myself) or how "intuitive" the interface is for new users. UNIX was designed around hardcore work. Crunching lots and lots of numbers, over and over without crashing. Many people and companies are trying to "bend" Linux to do a lot of things. From embedded and palmtop devices up to large (very large in some cases) servers and huge clusters. This scalability is fantastic and a nice by-product of incredible forethought that went into the design of Linux. However, it was not initially intended for all of these purposes.
Linux is (and will most certainly continue) making huge inroads into a very tough market. It is marshaling a lot of the efforts and monies of some very big players like IBM and HP (who are putting more emphasis on Linux than their own, already well-established, very dependable server OS's.) It is in a sense unifying the once forked UNIX community. This is the most important part! Microsoft has been trying to break into the very staunch server OS market for some time now, but they just don't have what it takes. This is what scares them the most. This is why we get all of the differing and varied comments out of Redmond. Microsoft doesn't know what to do about Linux. They don't know how to fight it. The FUD that they have used so many times before to destroy other OS's (OS/2) and companies (Netscape) isn't working against Linux.
This is what gives Linux it's strength.
I'm not worried in the least.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
What I don't understand is why she wants a word processor to write her articles. I write mine using Emacs. Why can't she? Emacs has a wonderful spellchecker (ispell) and is fully compatible with the worlds best layout language TeX. Why do you need anything else?
I dunno where she got that 220Mhz laptop with 128M RAM... And it runs Word 2000!!
Try this: Network doesn't work, fiddle with the IP-adress. Reboot. Still doesn't work. Fiddle with the workgroup. Reboot. Still doesn't work. Fiddle with the driver. Reboot. Fiddle with the protocols. Reboot. fiddle. reboot. fiddle. reboot ...
Those couple of minutes each reboot has eaten up your day. Welcome to the productive world of Microsoft.
What really annoys me are people who spout off about lack of apt-get, when they fail to notice urpmi! It does everything apt-get does, albeit a bit clumsier.
Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
http://smokedot.org/
Go to McDonalds anywhere in the world - eat mad cow infected "beef" - get sick - die...
Excuse me - it is "free"
It doesn't crash
realkiwi
She's just a "rogue" writer.
And if she thinks "rogue" PROGRAMERS are many and vocal. . .
Well, you know. What do cowboy hats and hemoroids have in common?
Sooner or later every asshole gets one, and sooner or later every "rogue" (whatever the hell THAT means) journalist seems to have to write a "What Linux needs to Survive" article, totally clueless that all linux needs to survive is. . .
Someone programing for it.
KFG
These guys all feel they are owed something for an OS they payed nothing for... He makes some good points, but at the end of the day if you don't like something, get off your article writin butt and write some code.
And lastly, I disagree with the thesis-statement of the article. Linux will be used by lots of people in the near and distant future, you can't kill a free OS.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
For my research articles the publisher often likes to have the LaTeX source to be able to format things properly. Guess what, Office 2000 does not output that.
turf war
I too have noticed that attitude. Applixware is a good suite.
What must Linux do to survive? The answer is continue to grow and support more hardware. The problem is not with the average corporate Linux user (and such a thing does exist, as it is used for web servers more commonly than any other OS according to Netcraft's survey a few months back). These users know that you may have to spend money in today's market for quality apps.
Rather the problem is with a small vocal minority who think that on Linux all software must be free (as in beer). The author of this column falls into this trap.
As time goes on, I think that this problem will disappear. With the advent of Ximian GNOME and KDE 2, Linux now has the capability of being everything that Microsoft Windows can be (including such features as COM+, which corresponds to the Bonobo technology in GNOME).
These are exciting times for the Linux community. I personally have sold three Linux servers to various clients and continue to do my best to promote what I feel to be an excellent product where it will function well.
Never underestimate the power of a penguin....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"
Bullshit. There is something close to 5,000 drivers that come with a default installation. When I installed Windows 2000 on my main box, absolutely everything was recognized. Correctly. And the sound works. And the printer works. Etc.
"
I'm suspect about this, the windows installer is not as good as Microsoft says. On my work machine - P3 500, 2x GeForce, 2x19inch monitor, 2xSCSI disks, Zip drive, tape drive, cdrom, floppy, 512MB, 100Mbit network,
win2k installed perfectly [in three hours!], Redhat 7.1beta also installed perfectly but it took about 10 minutes to get the multiple monitors working using a helpful clear HOWTO - however the inital install was 15 minutes over the network rather than CD.
On my home machine it's a different question, Celeron 500, 320Mb ram, TNT2 and ATI Rage 128, Soundblaster Live and Soundblaster 16, 100Mbit network, TV card, cdrom , cdwriter, 2xide hd, floppy, scanner, digital camera - admittedly a non-standard machine, however RedHat 6.2 / 7.0 installs with hardware not working and requires fiddling to make it go. Win 98 does not install, no matter what I do, Win 2k insists on me removing all the hardware and putting it in in order [2nd video card -> 2nd sound card -> cdwriter -> TV card -> USB devices] or it randomly bluescreens and dies - sometimes taking the disk with it. I still have the problem that win2K randomly alters the default soundcard, and, if the machine is hibernated the TV card loses all sound output. Oh, the scanner still doesn't work because the digitally signed driver claims it's a not supported OS. Works under linux though.
All in all, I suspect that for a first time installer it's toss up between why doesn't X work, and, why do I have to remove various bits of hardware and install them in a specific order.
However, if I'm installing someone elses machine - or being telephoned from a long way away to install someone elses machine I prefer them to install linux - remote administration is wonderful.
Maybe this is the tech support business model - people who will pay extra for ease of use get remote admin by the company - it's much better than giving point and click instructions over the phone.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Please read my other posts in this thread.
This woman claims to not be a newbie, but she couldn't possibly have used a distribution of Linux produced in the past three to six years for any length of time and come up with this story without large amounts of crack.
Seriously.
I tried very hard to suspend my disbelief and respond calmly and rationally. I lost it somewhere around the "Gopher Server in Madagascar". (I think I already covered the "Moon Language" comment)
Ask yourself these questions for the newbie:
Now, please tell me who the rational person is here. Hmm?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
-
-
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
I recently installed Redhat 7 on my girlfriend's machine (Redhat 6.1 wouldn't recognise her video card, modem, etc. and was full of bugs), and I the screen resolution was an absolute pain in the ass to change. I can vouch for the fact that trying to use Xconfigurator (or editing XF86Config*) is difficult at best when xdm keeps trying to start and failing. It flashes the screen about 3 times every 5 seconds and then prints an error message in the middle of whatever you're typing. Not just that, but the video card had all sorts of problems trying to use 24 or 32 bit colour. I spent about 2 hours stuffing around with it until I got it working.
The modem, sound card and one of the network cards still isn't going. Yes, I know they're dodgy integrated-with-the-motherboard components but when I tried to tell her that, her attitude was, "well, if it doesn't work, then I'm not going to buy a new computer/new components to make it work". Not unreasonable. Anyway, there are a limited number of Linux "drivers" included on the motherboard CD, but their installation is nonstandard, breaks if you're using the wrong kernel version etc. and can cause incompatibility problems. Open sourcing drivers is a nice idea, but you've got to be able to supply proprietary drivers in a standard, clean way as well.
In any case, she's decided that just getting Emacs and LaTeX for Windows is good enough.
My point is: It's the hardware configuration that annoys me most about the current state of Linux development. I can't really say that I'm all that impressed with the configuration tools in Redhat at least. The tools are annoying, buggy, don't do what I want and are hard to find a lot of the time, due to a lack of centralised documentation. IMHO, Xconfigurator is a case in point. Further, the tools break as soon as you try to edit a config file manually to get the functionality you want.
There are a lot of things about Linux that I appreciate and enjoy very much. It has a wide variety of programs for all tastes, and is generally cooler in many respects than Windoze. However, I also would like a certain standard of ease of use in a few critical areas.
Before I get a whole lot of flames in reply, I'd just like to say that (a) I am a programmer (and hate VB and the like), and (b) I have spent a reasonable amount of time reading docs (far far more than the average user would bother with).
Her rant almost makes sense. The problem is that the modern distros take care of most of this.
When you get a distro like Progeny Linux out of the box, it looks a certain way. It looks like sawfish with certain theme and GNOME configured a certain way. So what's the big deal? I refuse to believe that just becuase someone is a secretary, that means they must be brain dead and easily overwhelmed (they'll start to cry indeed).
As to her use of Microsoft word... Did anyone else notice the ?s instead of ". That's Micrsoft's embrace on ANSI standard text.
And lastly, if you're not Jewish, don't use the term "Oy Vey". Just don't.
Thank you and goodnight.
- Serge Wroclawski
The pictures of the rumored Palm V successor, Palm M505, will have 16-bit color, and the same sleek form factor as the Palm V.
You can view the picture of the m505 here, or view the PalmInfoCenter article here.
---
From the article:
This is an easy problem to fix. It requires folks sit down and make some real, hard choices. Let's try the following, just as a vague thought experiment, nothing serious:
1. Provide one windows manager. One. Not two. Not four. One. It doesn't really matter if it is GNOME or KDE or some new jumble of letters. Ensure that it is the same one for all flavors of the operating system, period. Time for someone to win.
2. Provide one shell. One. Not two. Not four. One. It doesn't really matter if it is Korn or Bash or something some kid whipped up in a dream. No one cares what is whose favorite when it comes to the marketplace - keep your shell politics out of the decision. Pick the one that seems to work the best and stick with it. That way, there is a direction in which to proceed to making it easier.
3. Provide a unified Linux "look and feel." A company or consortium of companies needs to sit down and figure out what would be the absolute best standardized look across every one of their workstations.
4. Remove options. Preferably, remove all options short of "able to move around icons and change desktop images." The Linux desktop should have about as many options as the Macintosh, and no one except the common Linux hobbyist should realize it can be super-configured with a random application of VI.
5. Create a windows manager that couldn't crash if it was hit by a Navy submarine piloted by rich civilians. The desktop should never crash, and God help us, it should never crash and dump a user into a shell.
So, she pretty much wants us to turn Linux into Windows, eh?
What's that you say? Number 5? Oh, I didn't see that part; it appears her vision for Linux differs completely from that of Windows.
47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)
Tim
Hey, your're right, we are on the right track; there's just one problem -- We've been on the right track for YEARS now. All the things that are going to make Linux a Luser operating system have been RSN for a LONG time. Why this you ask ?
1. Windoze has an advantage we cannot have. Everyone already knows how to use it. Windoze == computer for millions of people.
2. All (OK, OK, Most) of the GUI effort in KDE/GNOME etc. has been in providing cool geek features like widget themes, rather than real application integration.
3. The apps that could really make a difference (KOffice, Abiword, so on) are all going to save us Real Soon Now. Soon hasn't got here for a Long Time.
4. Collaboration apps (read Exchange + Outlook) aren't here either.
5. No reasonable Directory Services are available either. SysAdmins of large institutions won't live without this. While OpenLdap has potential here, it doesn't have the tools to be a viable alternative (yet).
This list could go on for a long time, but I have to get back to work. The Point here is that Real Soon Now isn't going to get here; that making cool stuff is always more fun than making useful stuff, and Free Software developers DO IT because its cool. Trust me, I've done BORING stuff at work for years, but it was something someone was willing to PAY for. These issues have to be resolved for Linux to be a "real" Luser OS. If you don't care, that's OK too.
-- Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
What Linux must do: First off, most people who use windows, were spoonfed on how to use GUIs and such, they aren't ready for compiling, running, command lines, etc, the stuff in linux. The ignorance is astounding. What must be done: Raise awareness of UNIX. Make Linux more user-friendly while still retaining the interest of the computer literate. Linux needs to come up with a way to be fully compatible with hardware and have software which blows M$'s away. Trump the benefits of Linux. Downgrade Windows. I'm thinking, by 2005, Linux will have a version that ANY dumb ass can use. BUt thats my line of thinking, installing redhat 7 was easy, using it is something else, like my cable modem, still won't work after numerous solutions. See what I mean?
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
I had the exact same thing happen to me years ago in DOS; I assumed that 'fdisk' was like 'format', which is what I was looking for to format a disk...
Yes, reading documentation is essential. I guess understanding it is, too. And that first time it happens to you, it's always a learning experience.
By the way, my Linux distribution has nothing like a format command, except maybe the various mkfs.* commands, like mke2fs.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
She obviously doesn't get it.
Linux company stock is underwhelming. Yet linux grows.
Robert Young, Redhat CEO, once stated that he was not in the operating system to make more money than Bill Gates. He knows that is absurd.
Robert Young thinks he will win when the market for operating systems is 1% of its current value. Linux is such a good product for free that Microsoft will lose 99% of their corporate value.
And that is what is scaring the crap out of Bill Gates and Jim Allchin. It doesn't matter how well you market, and how well you use your monopoly.
Once people grasp that something free can do the job they need done, commercial sales for that market are next to worthless.
I wouldn't sweat it though - Microsoft, even at 1% of today's value, is still worth an insane amount of money.
For five years, I've read the same articles over and over again. "Linux needs to be simpler to install, and there needs to be more documentation, or it won't survive."
Yet it's still the fastest-growing OS in the world. I don't get it. Have the installs gotten simpler? Well, okay, maybe. Has the documentation gotten better or easier?
Okay, maybe.
But Linux is still going to die! Trust me.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
If you add flexibility, you lose in simplicity, and the other way round. This is true for both the user and the OS. A few examples:
My boss is still having trouble managing his bookmarks. He couldn't care less about the setup of the system. He can't change the desktop wallpaper without help. He can't even tell the difference between Solaris and Windows. If the user does not understand the concept of OS, he really should use Windows. When he crashes the system, you can always blame Microsoft.
As an example of the more advanced computer skills, I started programming on my Commodore 64 when I was twelve. After I first tried Linux, Windows has been my 'games-only' OS.
I agree that linux is terrific for it's endless configurability, but that is it's death knell.
That's the point!
Linux will never make an economical success comparable to M$. The success of a hacker is not measured as $$. It's the quality of the programs he has written that matters. The Linux community is actually interested in writing a stable and flexible OS. They are not trying to become another Microsoft. Spending programming hours on adding extra features will never be an economical success, especially if you distribute it for free. Selling an OS that sucks for an outrageous price will be as long as someone is willing to pay.
Now, think about success. Bill Gates is the richest man in US. Read slashdot a few weeks and you start wondering if he has friends at all. On the other hand, does anyone really hate Linus Torvalds? Both have started a succesful OS, but they measure the success in differetn ways.
(I know about Xconfigurator now, but they were laughing at me in the slashdot irc forum)
There are always wannabe-hackers who know one or two microscopic details more than a newbie. They are just boosting their ego by laughing at the newbies. You meet those guys everywhere, slashdot is no expection. They are not worth your attention. In a few months, you know more about Linux than they ever will.
Easy. Nothing.
Hold on, Captain Mods-Me-Down, I have a good point here.
Linux will survive no matter what. First, ask yourself: "What is Linux, anyway?" There are many ways you could answer that, but this time, I'll answer it this way: It's an operating system that's written by a dedicated cadre of highly skilled, super-intelligent, uber-geeks. They create it for themselves, because they need it for themselves.
Now ask yourself: How can you stop them? I don't think you actually can. Outmarket them? They don't care, the kernel-hackers keep on creating. Make strategic alliances, meta-conglomerate mega deals that lock linux out? The kernel-hackers keep on creating, still ceasing to care. In fact, short of taking away their computers, the uberhackers will continue to hack no matter what the rest of the world does.
The funny part is that in spite of their lack of caring about market success, Linux has become a huge market success. Now that I think about it, that might even be the REASON it's become successful. Ironic, isn't it.
In any case, I think that Linux-based companies have to be worried about survival, Linux will survive simply because there is a group of people who will never stop working on it.
If you want to see people get all wet on the typing chair about this fraud du jour, you need to tune in on PalmStation. They've got a User Survey, and even several articles. I'm sure it's a total coincedence that this flood of 'information' happened at the same time as the Natalie Portman/Hot grits crowd dropped by in force, right?
Show me a corporation that gives it secretaries a new PC, a windows install CD, the CD's for Word etc...
They don't, IT do it all for them and give them a preconfigured out of the box solution. The same happens with Linux. I have taken a group of students (life sci with no 'geek cred'), sat them in front of a preconfigured box and let them get on with it. Star Office, no problem. Other apps, no problem.
Preconfigured, ready to roll with the apps one needs.. That is what appears on your desktop, not a bunch of CD's and so on.
Apart from that, the author does appear to be a couple of years behind the times. RH 7.0 was a breeze to install. Insert CD (no other boot disk needed), follow the instructions and bingo, a workstation ready to roll. Of course you need to know some technical details like your user name and the network settings, but when did MS ever set those up (cue gMindRead 0.1)..
--- Four bases should be enough for any genetic code
WTF is this article? Is Emily writing this in 1994 and posting it now??
:)
:)
Ok, I tried to stick to a reasoned response, here, but she got increasingly weird.
---pb attempts to understand the Journalist---
Almost every time I see a journalist writing about Linux, it's because they think it's too hard to use. That's also because they think it consists entirely of software that would frighten almost any journalist, like Emacs and Vi. Now, to her credit, she also talks about StarOffice, which in my mind is basically a Linux port of Microsoft Office, and certainly enough to frighten any hacker. But her problem is the same.
If she doesn't want her word processor dumping core, then she shouldn't use Word 2000. There are *tons* of word processor programs for Linux, including Word Perfect. It isn't Linux's fault that she can't seem to find them all. For that matter, Windows '98 doesn't come with a decent word processor either.
Speaking of annoyances, it's painfully obvious that she *did* write this in Word, or something from Microsoft-land. That's because when she writes this sentence, "That's" looks like "That?s" on this Solaris box. Microsoft is evil, Emily; don't give in. They will make you look like a fool to your audience.
Many Linux distributions do install rather quickly, and with a simple interface. They do indeed have big buttons that say "Workstation" and "Server", but thank god they have one that says "Custom" as well. And most users shouldn't have to install it anyhow; after all, Windows comes pre-installed, and if Linux distros didn't have to worry about *that* taking up space on the computer, there wouldn't be a problem (Windows doesn't; it just silently overwrites your MBR for you; how nice!).
---pb cracks and starts to want some of her drugs---
Download patches from an obscure server in Madagascar using GOPHER?
The HOW-TO files are written in some strange moon language?
Should my mother attempt to change her shell to CSH when she probably doesn't know how to get to one from the default Desktop environment?
My god, woman; who taught you how to troll?
Ok, EMILY. Listen. Find a copy of COREL's Linux Distro. Or MANDRAKE 7.1. Or REDHAT 7.0. NOT Redhat 3.0.3; not Slackware on disks. Then, get an empty hard-drive just for linux, and push the big red "Workstation" button. Then be amazed, and PLEASE shut the fuck up in the future. Did someone actually *pay* you to write this, because I wouldn't!
Here's some friendly advice. Try sending this same article to a linux newsgroup and see what advice they give you. In fact, please DO THAT FIRST before you even THINK about "publishing" anything else. PLEASE.
Also, yes, Linux has a set of technical standards. It does not dictate GUI policies, though, and that's a good thing. Individual environments like GNOME do, and you can find those, pre-installed, as your desktop, from big mainstream Linux distros like those you claim to have tried. Now please try them.
However out of all this, I think we did find what Linux desperately does need: a JOURNALIST-NEWBIE FAQ. We'll make that a big button on startup, and burn them a special CD. Maybe then they'll click the WORKSTATION button and get the special JOURNALIST packages that magically detects which ONE software program they wanted. Even the standard RedHat GNOME stuff would probably do, and definitely XMMS instead of mpg123 for them.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
And there you have it. Usually it isn't the CPU speed that makes your PC fast, but the disk speed, and how much you use it. With that much RAM, I don't think you'll be swapping very much.
Now try the same with "only" 64MB, but increase the CPU speed a bit (say 1.3GHz) and see how it crawls.
--
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Exactly. But it is difficult to find someone bitching that integrals need to become easier, so the mainstream could use them...
Interesting stastics. Where did you get them? According to cnet, IBM's unix sales grew by 30% in one quarter last year. How's that staying flat?
The other statistics are suspect, too. As are all statistics, I might add.
I do agree that the best operating system for job x may not be the best for x'. But I have yet to find a situation (not dictated by application availability) where MS-Windows is a better fit.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
/. posts something that takes a common sense approach to linux as opposed to the zealot way. Good job, slashdot. You get a cookie for this.
-
1) Auto-detection of all hardware during installation
2) A linuxconf port to KDE (as part of the KDE control center, which currently configures only desktop itself) How is a newbie supposed to figure out that he has to do
/bin/su; linuxfconf ?
Just my $.02
Wroot
--
...or am I missing something?
It's silly to try and win the end-users' desktops. They'll use Win32 for the same reason we still use QWERTY keyboards. Linux (and other OS'es) will advance in stuff like appliances, where one doesn't have to adhere to the "i'm used to my start-button" crap.
Grab your favorite OS/GUI toolkit and make a killer appliance running linux/beos/etc, which will have an intuitive interface and will actually do useful stuff. Sure, we're a few years away from a real appliances market, but we'll get there, I think.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
Seth Finkelstein of the Censorware Project comments on Michael's hypocrisy and abuses of power:
/ 44551/24522&cid=81#81
http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=comments&sid=2001/3/5
For my research articles the publisher often likes to have the LaTeX source to be able to format things properly. Guess what, Office 2000 does not output that.
Agreed -Office 2000 could be way better, especially for structured documents, PDF, etc. However unfortunately MS Office has the majority of desktops right now, and we have (for a little while anyway) to be compatible with them more than they have to be compatible with us.
When we win the desktop, this will change. But we won't win the desktop if new Linux users can't read and send documents to their (still Windows based) counterparts.
go and watch a real news program on television. One that reports on wars, and politics. Then look up the definition in a dictionary
I just did that:
tel-e-vi-sion news (noun):
A system and method to distribute propaganda to mis-educate an uninformed public. Will increase apathy and lethargy. Device to display lies, damn lies and marketing campaigns. Usually employed by Multi-National Corporations to shape reality to match product offerings - replace individual experience with collective conscience. Also employed by Corrupt Western Governments in order to maintain their entrenchment, and satisfy the desires of their Corporate Task Masters(TM). *Health Note*: To be avoided at all costs; will cause a serious detachment from reality and cause the viewer to participate in group-think rendering them incapable of using their cognitive function.
Phew! Thank god you recommended we go get the *real* story from television newscasts.
In case you hadn't seen it, you can now download Solaris 8 10/00 edition for free off the Sun website.
Result: Microsoft Word is one of the most bloated packages in existence, and can require significant training and support for low-level users to be able to use it effectively. (If you've never had to support secretaries, you may not realize this.) But it has just about every niche feature that any paying customer on the planet has ever requested.
To get back on topic, all you journalists and writers need to do is find a friendly Linux geek and convince her that adding this feature would be an enormous contribution to world happiness. You'll have your wordcount feature, StarOffice will be that much more bloated, and Microsoft will be that much less necessary. Everybody wins! (Everyone we care about, anyway.)
> What is this hyperthetical "mom" intending to do with the computer?
Exactly. My mum bootstraped digico's by entering octal on the front panel.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
One of the marketing guys here at work (we resell for IBM) got some of the promo materials for the campaign, and I have to say the bumper stickers at least rock. I don't have a scanner, so I'll describe them: There are three different bumper stickers. They're completely black and white, with the funny e in the "IBM e Server" logo red. The background is black, and there are three white circles with the peace sign, a heart and Tux's head on them, respectively. On one of the stickers, Tux is huge, no logo. One the other two, the white circles are all the same size, and they say either LINUX LIVES or LINUX POWER in huge letters.
Still, they're very plain and non-detailed. There's no flower power feeling. In fact, the impression I get is more making fun of the sterotype of Linux hippies, especially on the one with Tux dwarfing the peace and love signs, kind of a manic celebration of the fact that yes, Linux was founded on the principles of sharing and goodwill, but it makes a damn good solid OS right now for your business.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
This is an attitude I see alot. In alot of people. They are in it up to here, and they do not have the time, or do not want to deal with the technical details.
Ultimately, when the BS hits the fan, they do not want to deal with it. As in "y'know, after a while, I get tired of it." I get tired of doing my own car repairs, for example. So I can understand this, but there is a problem with the attitude as well.
If you deal with stuff all of the time, it pays to know how it works on more that a casual bandaid basis.
Looking through the article, I got to say that she has nailed a number of points. For Example:
Stand back away from the myriad of geeky letter slinging and imagine, just for a moment, the secretary at your place of business. She sits at the front desk, and wears a prim, black suit. She wears a mile of makeup. On her monitor are three beanie babies and a cute grouping of Snoopy stickers. She has a picture of her kids next to her keyboard, and a mug with "1 Mom!" on it in bright red. She is sure she knows how to write up memos in Word, how to use the E-Mail client of the month, write up a spreadsheet, and maybe put together a presentation. If her computer crashes, she has to get up and bug you to come fix it, because she is terrified to reboot.
Tell this woman that her desktop is infinitely configurable. Tell her that she just has to edit this one configuration file, and it will look however she wants it to look. Tell her she can even download templates off the web. Look, it's easy! A mere two or three hours and it will look exactly the way you want it to look! Furthermore, you can change it whenever you want!
She'll probably start crying.
This is a truth that many geeks do not want to deal with, because broad acceptance of Linux means dealing with folks just like that. Broad success means dealing with these folks, the folks that get satirized as tech support lusers.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Wroot
RedHat have done an excellent job with Rh7.0 (except for the kernel upgrades.. those are hell). I've seen people who've never used Linux before install Rh7 like a breeze. And, they get right up to using it immediately - like they were mavens.
Granted, there's a lot of polishing to be done, but have you ever used, say, Windows95 without any enhancement? MS had a LOT of clean-up to do to make the interface perfect. Well, I think we have a faster running start.
So, editors who have nothing better to write about than to criticize Linux: you can just go ahead and writing about what you don't understand. We know what needs done and we're quickly getting there.
And of course, with the plethora of Linux distros, everyone is happy! My Debian distro gives me something of a challenge (not as easy to use as Rh), but mom can easily use Rh or Corel (which isn't dead yet :). You get the idea. I think pretty much everyone who isn't a Windows zealot is happy. We're on the right track.
...that there are better things out there. Much of her article assumes that Linux must be sold to the consumer in order to be popular. True. However, if Linux is to move in the path that she suggests, we go back to ground zero with an "evil empire".
1. Standards: She complains that there are no standards in Linux. However, there are of course MS standards which aren't necessarily good either. Linux only has to work with current standards and make its own playing field. There is no reason why a standard has to be permanent when it is inferior to another product. IBM already said in its ads that it wants to use the Linux standards. They'll change soon enough.
2. Much of the complaints revolve around the installations- off floppies etc. Michael is right though; Linux need not be arcane, only one distribution has to be superior.
3. Documentation: The average joe (AOL perhaps) user probably wouldn't frequent newsgroups and the such nearly as often as regular engineers. There exist support groups that can speak English if you want them to, and the current system just lets users have a little more than plain Microsoft tech support style help.
4. Beta- it's as if this word has some severe connotation. The artcle once again treats Linux as an object under development and then inferior- but that doesn't mean that Microsoft products are fixed and ready to go from Day 1 and "beta" versions aren't superior to Microsoft products as is. The Linux kernel can change for all it wants but the if one distribution remains the same that's all that's needed.
5. Money: Mentioned is the fact that Linux must be sold as a product in order to be successful. On the contrary, we all know what "free" has done for Linux.
6. Linux is just a fad- once again a common argument answered prolifically on linux.org. Just because something is made by a disorganized group doesn't mean its inferior. It's only the end result that matters.
7. Linux should remove options, Linux should have only one standard interface- Heck its microsoft monopolies all over again. The distribution argument comes in here again, and god forbid that users should need less options. You don't have to always look for everything at once.
8. Linux should have an interface that doesn't crash. This looks an interesting argument, but its the choice between the console and the BSOD. If a user feels like they can't do anything more, they reboot. Simple as that.
There are various other points, but to sum it up these are just the standard anti-Linux arguments. To bend to them would force Linux into a situation where it is nothing more than a Windows look-alike and act-alike. Doing so would surely force Linux out of business. As the article admits that Linux is seeing success right now (and assumes that it will hit the brick wall running later), there is no reason why things should be changed. Linux is to be a tool to revolutionize the industry and offer something new, not a cheaper, more stable alternative to Windows. Linux will not die off because it can always change when change is necessitated...and that is not right now.
to be at the top of the hill (or king of the hill)? At this point the whole world wants nothing more than to watch you fall to a dramatic death at the feet of the next big thing. (Look at Micro$oft) Linux will thrive with every line of code that Joe Six Pack types in for fun and releases for free. Linux does not need to be in the corporate board rooms or wall street to survive, the basements and garages are just fine. My mom and neighbor do not need to be able to install and use Linux for it to survive. I do not have to be able to buy shrink wrapped copies of Word Perfect & Photosuite 2000SE for Linux to survive...(I paid thousands of dollars for software in a previous life already that is sitting on my shelf as a grim reminder that $499 office suites and $199 point release bugfixes...errr....upgrades are nothing more than paperweights mere moments after clicking setup.exe -- and since I am not an author I have no way to recoup be expenditures...) and hope to never need anything more complex than vim or gimp in the near future (As you can see - I am neither an author or artist so if I spend 1 penny or 1000 dollars on software I would never make any of that back to justify the expense.)
Linux will survive the same way it came into existense...Be the user base 100 thousand or 100 million...it does not matter.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I haven't seen this much hogwash in a long time. Maybe MS is gearing up for another offensive. The one thing I will give her is that Linux word processors uniformly suck. That's why I've been using LaTeX, which is damn fast and has much better output than any commercial word processor I've seen.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I want Linux, Apache, Perl, etc. to succeed so when the next project comes up for discussion at my meetings and I know what it will take using said software, I can pitch an implementation and be taken seriously. Else, I'm stuck squeezing square pegged software into rounded needs.
And she is completely correct - however, she, having been tinkering since 1994 should know that installers/shells/desktops are almost at that point now. De-facto standards are already in place: Gnome, bash, etc. Sawfish, as near as I can tell, is rock solid.
The big one, is, of course, documentation. And since the ratio of people who like writing to people who like coding is not good, until someone is paid to do documentation, documentation will still be substandard.
The solution comes along when someone sees an opportunity to make money selling the docs, packaged with a distribution.
O'reiley + RedHat?
Cyano
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
I use Linux. I use Windows. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. I basically prefer elegance and clarity of Linux apps, but I don't consider it a moral failure to have to do stuff on Windows. These are just tools, damnit. It's uncool that Windows is so bloated and unstable. It's uncool that Linux lacks this, that, and the other thing. But "uncool" is as strong as I get about it. There are more important things to worry about.
Incidentally, I wouldn't judge Linux word processing apps by StarOffice. Even when it's working right, I can never quite figure out how to deal with that weird, convoluted bit of software. But hey, what about Lyx? What about KWord? Abi? Amaya has finally gotten seriously stable. The day will come when one of these will give Word a run for its money.
__________________
The last place I worked at, I had an Ultra5. It ran Solaris 7 and then 8 as I upgraded to keep up with the Joneses. Then a coworker and I found a Helix (Ximian) port of gnome available. So we downloaded that and installed it on the Ultra5. We tweaked the bpp and when it came up, I swear I got a woody from it! The desktop was so smooth and beautiful. I immediately pitched my RedHat for Sparc CD into a duffle bag, as I was thinking of installing it.
If this is all true (AND SOMEONE MOD THIS POST UP) then I am damn excited for Solaris 9. I've been using Solaris since 2.6 (and even 2.5.1 and 2.4 once in a while) and would love to see an interface update-- along with an update on everything else they offer. Course I would also like to see them offer security out of the box to their services, as by default Solaris leaves everything turned on. I also hope that Sun comes out with another version of Solaris for x86. While I am eyeing those Blade 100s, I am weary to pick one up as to get it configured decently would cost me around $4K! Just a bit high for someone with a small computer budget.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
From here on in, when I refer to "Linux", I refer to pretty much any GNU/Linux distribution.
... well, screw it as far as I'm concerned. It's not worth it.
Linux means a lot of things. It means choice, it means stability, it means open source and Free Software.
This person wants to make Linux standard across the board. "One window manager. One shell. One 'look and feel'." Well, no offense or anything, but if that comes about, then it isn't Linux any more, is it?
Sure, it'll use the Linux kernel. And it'll probably run off Free Software. But "Linux" will no longer mean what we have made it mean, as a community. I'm not saying this is a horrible, bad things to do. But Linux has become popular because of what WE think it should be. It's popular because it's configurable. It's popular because it's powerful. It's popular because it's stable. And it's especially popular because we can make it pretty.
So, if we loose all those things, what's left? Honestly? If that all comes about, then putting aside philisophical debates, why would you run Linux? What'd be the point? Aside from it being Free Software, aside from it being open source, WHY? You'd be running a free, somewhat more stable version Windows or MacOS.
I don't get it. I like my Linux. It's powerful, it's configurable, it's pretty, and it's stable. It has gotten as far as it has because of those attributes. If it has to loose them to go further
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
McDonalds is not a success for it's "endless selection," but it's consistency of product. You can go to any McDonalds in the world and get the same exact thing.
;).
Some people - myself included - would say that 'McBlondalds' is a failure for this exact reason.
Linux does not have to be a successful Product(TM) to be 'successfull'. What you fail to realize is that Western Thought draws a parallel between ubiquity and success - I would argue the opposite. Successful things are not always the ones with the most market share - this is a horribly corrupt point-of-view. Why do people get mired in the 'economics of all things'? Not everything is a business - Not everything should serve the Almighty Dollar(TM) - and Linux is successful because there are people who use and enjoy it. Myself included - when I use Linux I always imagine thousands of talented people giving me a gift of themselves - with 'no strings attached*' - that they are 'geeks' like myself who are fascinated by computers and do this because they find it interesting - not because they intend to exploit the marketplace to make themselves rich.
When you look at the Libre & Gratis GNU/Linux you betray your own bias when you begin talking about 'market share' and dismiss it because it hasnt any 'corporate desktop' installs.
People who find themselves (like the journalist) in this position do not fully understand why GNU/Linux is (and will continue to be) a success**.
*Except that I also share (that's what the GPL is about)
**IMHO
I think you are missing the point that distribution sales are made because there is a demand for them, whether they are retail or OEM.
The only way either retail or OEM sales will take off is if there becomes a real demand from Joe Shmoe user. Until the distros become more standardized in ease-of-use/install, average people (e.g., grandma, baby brother, corporations, etc.) will not buy-in to Linux to make it mainstream.
I realized that some technogeeks want the million & one options to configure in their Linux distrobution. There is nothing wrong with that.
There is nothing wrong with having a default easy install.
Those of us who would-be ubergeeks such as myself would rather have a default install to start with the first time that we install.
I like to start with some easy options already installed. Then after I get used to finding my way around Linux, I will dig into kernel hacking, configurations, etc.
It makes things so much easier if I can learn with small easy-to-swallow nibbles into the different options in Linux rather than have the whole enchilada rammed down my throat at the outset.
About a month ago, I decided to take the plunge & get Linux. At the time before I installed, I could care less what XFree86, get-apt, chmod, chown, make, etc. was. I just wanted to get it up and running.
For some people, that is a far as they would wish to go. Get it up & running, then use the apps -- Gimp, KWord, games, what have you.
Others who are more technically minded can look into all the details to see how everything fits together AFTER it is running. These are the people who can customized to their hearts content.
I don't understand why we can't have it both ways. We certainly don't want to take away all the configurability in Linux -- it happens to be a strong selling point for it. However, we shouldn't force every Joe Shmoe new user to have to learn every nuance of the operating system in order for it to be usable.
What is wrong with plaintext with a simple markup here and there?
.doc files? Christ that must be an ineffecient operation!
Because without things like fonts and headers, most people are less productive. Most tools ehich edit these things don't work visually and therefore slow me down. KLyx works well, but works with TeX rather than SGML. Vi and emacs have poor spell checkers and are designed for syntax highlighting C or Perl, no typing out long documents with images.
Your publisher uses word
No matter hot much eithe of us complain the publisher won't change until Linux runs the world, and until then we have to interoperate with them more than they have to interoperate with us. It might suck, but its reality.
Don't blame your lack of knowledge on the proper procedure for creating a nicely formatted published work on the OS.
*laughs*. Why is it that you immediately assume I've never heard of piping and redirection and wc, and find the need to be rude to those that don't? ? Or that I have no idea about structured document app or makup languages? I do. But in this case I need to run somethimg which outputs Word.
An OS must work equally well as a desktop and as a server.
here can be only one OS on the desktop
There is also an assumption preceding these ideas. That is that end users should be doing installation and system administration.
Is Solaris any kind of OS for your Mom?
What is this hyperthetical "mom" intending to do with the computer?
The message is this: OSes are custom - they all have their niche (though it can be a broad one).
However if you want to complain about this then Microsoft (with their Windows everywhere attitude) appears to make a far better target.
I was agreeing and disagreeing with bits here and there, nodding my head sometimes, shaking it others, but then I felt sick when I read this: "In the eyes of the rogue programmers, the worst thing that could ever happen to Linux is to become gradually corporatized..... The rogue programmers will win, because they are many and vocal."
No, that is NOT while they'll win. They'll win because they're the ones doing the work. The programmers will win, because when they want a feature, they write it. There's a reason rants are a dime a dozen (case in point), but good software is hard to find. It takes work to write good software, but when you're done with it, you have something a lot more valuable than a rant. As the saying goes, if you want something done right, do it yourself.
If Emily Dresner-Thornber is truly passionate about her rant, she'll break out her favorite development environment and start hacking. Maybe she'll start a project on sourceforge. Or maybe she'll find an existing one, and contribute to it, gain the respect of the other people in the project, and push it in the direction she wants it to go.
Heheh, speaking of screen resolutions, have you ever noticed that most "normal" people with new computers that do umpteen gigaflops and have 64MB video cards are still running their machines in the default 640x480 resolution with 256 colors?
It doesn't matter how easy you make it, man... so why not at least get it right first before you put all the technicolor frosting on?
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
To get to that point, you have to match *client* expectations. Er, that's Joe Sixpack again. Plug it in, it asks annoying questions once, you're done. Pay more money, answer a few more questions, and you get a spreadsheet.
Linux is not there yet.
I want more, you want more, but most of the world doesn't. They want porn and instant messages and letters to mom.
I agree with dear Emily. Removing options, at least in one distro, will do wonders for client adoption, and that's where you start attacking the cost of an operating system. Young's vision won't work until end users see Linux as a viable option. -j, a rabid FreeBSD user
I forget what 8 was for.
I guess the point I'm really trying to make is, why are we (as a community) trying so hard to compete with Microsoft's Evil Empire? It doesn't really matter if Linux or BSD or Apache or KDE or GNOME becomes mainstream. What is important is that the option is there, and people seem to be flocking towards what is being developed.
Another way of looking at it is this: Free Software does not have to mimic Microsoft and other commercial software in order for it to be worth the effort. As it stands, the Linux desktops that I use are plenty easy enough for average users, and if there's any sort of a demand for it to become easier, some company or group is going to suppy it.
The free software movement isn't about replacing commercial software, it's about providing alternatives. Merely by the organic way that the movement has been growing (more people get involved, more people are contributing, the products are getting better and easier and more refined etc.) An analogy for free software could be the markets: the best projects are going to attract more users, develop reputations and therefore attract more developers.
Trying to use a heavy handed coalition to guide the development of the free software movement won't work, and definetely won't be accepted. The "vi or emacs?" question is quickly being replaced by "gnome or kde?" with a handful of sideline contenders. No consortium could ever successfully select between GNOME and KDE... it sounds like too much like central planning, which is shortsighted and can never keep up with the diversity of an open market.
If GNOME and KDE continue to develop seperately from each other, and both refuse to adopt any sort of consistency between the two (ie. do we need another aRts to be developed for GNOME?) the end result will be that one of the two will join the sidelines, or perhaps the market will produce bindings or wrap arounds to compensate for the inconsistencies.
Where is free software heading? Only time will tell, and the "open ideas market" will be the judge.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter of Linux never replaces the Evil Empire. It'd be nice, but the option is already there for people, and the free software alternative keeps getting better everyday. Stuff that doesn't keep up will be left behind naturally, not by some clear decision. Standards will develop de facto from user acceptance.
Finally, it is perhaps exactly the diversity that the author points to as a flaw, that actually gives the free software movement it's vibrancy. It's great because it can meet so many needs, from regular computer users to geeks who post on slashdot.
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
It is a common fallacy for a new user of linux/unix to compare it to some previous OS they used and say "linux needs X, Y, and Z to take over the world / survive"
With the possible result of Linux programs duplicating Windows misfeatures and shortcommings
Outlaw "funny" moderations. Trust me, the best way for a geek to be funny, is to just be normal. Any attempts at being "funny" on purpose appear lame to non-geeks as well as to recovering geeks and simply geeks of different flava. HTH /. to survive.
Wroot
Just curious...I run Redhat 7.0 fairly successfully.....but if there is something "better" out there.....I'd like to know.
Also, is it just me, or do we see these "what Linux must do" or "why linux won't be around in a year" articles every other day?
Hell, the only thing I even use windows for these days is Diablo 2.
JKF
No witty remarks here
It's funny you should mention that.
.RTF document that other word processors can correctly read/parse", well, Office would be gone instantly. The last time I tried to export an .RTF file from Word to anything else, it ended up blank. And, of course, their HTML is worse; I've seen IE choke on HTML generated by Word...
IIRC, the reason the government still uses WordPerfect is because Word wasn't flexible enough to do the sort of word-counting they needed in the first place. Also, they were pretty comfortable with it already.
I haven't used PerfectOffice, but I've used a few flavors of WordPerfect. Weren't the other ports, and the two versions before this one native? Try those, too. Also, I have used Wine; it has seriously gotten a lot better.
For that matter, if you're going to try using Wine, try running Word as well. I'm not much for word processing software in the first place, but I know Wine runs some other Windows word processors decently.
Oh, and yes, once you start adding things like ".DOC" format as a requirement, your list of potential word processor candidates shrinks somewhat. That's because Microsoft wasn't kind enough to let anyone else know how it really works.
However, if you had requirements like, say, "exports to a
Someone seriously needs to smack the Office team around a bit, and explain to them about "Standard File Formats" and "Compatibility" and "Standards" for a while. I mean, like, some amount of time equal to the man-hours and money lost because of such tactics. Or they could just give each of us baseball bats, and like 5 minutes alone with them...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Linux needs do nothing to "survive", it is a kernel and API maintained by a bunch of people who write the code in the spare time. A distro could always come along and *gasp* write their own fucking software and deploy Linux in an easy to use fashion. If you want to learn how to make Linux easy to use take notes from Apple. They took a Unix core and slapped a nice GUI and API on top of it. If you insist on releasing your distribution with all of the usual GNU CLI tools you're doomed to remain in the land of unhappy home users. Bleh
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
How do you get an MS product (like Word2k) to produce sensible html like Emily apparently did with
tags and nothing else? If you say "save as text" then what is wrong with any of the myriad of Linux text editors?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
The thing is, this non-unity is inherent to the design and sould of Linux. Linux can never be user friendly precisely because it is a hacker's machine. Who else but a hacker would be happy that almost all programs are distributed as source so that they can be compiled for any platform that Linux supports?
One of the things that this article touched on but didn't go into detail about is the installation procedure for most software. With Linux, if you're lucky, there's an RPM or a DEB somewhere out there (but those are frequently distribution specific, are usually written by someone other than the author of the software, and are frequently poorly done), but really it's practically impossible to properly maintain a Linux box without gcc or some other compiler. And what about Windows? Simple installer. Sometimes these installers aren't very good - but almost always the software will be installed and will run. With MacOS it's the same thing. There's never a library that you need to get. Even Linux applications that have been ported - jed, for example, has a Windows version. Do you need to install slang on Windows before jed? No, of course not. This is at once Linux's strength and it's fatal flaw.
I absolutely agree that Linux needs standard hardware specs. So far, Linux's general attitude has been "we'll run on anything!". But only sort of. And there's not always full support for a specific piece of hardware. And there are always bugs. I have yet to find an ethernet card whose MacOS drivers had "issues" where it couldn't do certain things, or crashed the machine under certain circumstances. Why? Because Linux is almost like an art form here - it's NEVER done.
So anyway, I absolutely agree with Emily's assessment of Linux. And though I love Linux to death (I'm a computer geek - and computers are my hobby), Linux is the Peter Pan of operating systems. It refuses to grow up - because with a little fairy dust and a happy thought, it can really fly.
I think that right there explains the number one problem with Linux right now. Not only is Linux not user friendly, but the Linux user community is positively hostile towards new users. What keeps Microsoft in power is that they know how to play nice with the computer illiterate. If you can get the computer illiterate on your side, then everyone else can just go fuck themselves.
ObJectBridge (GPL'd Java ODMG) needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
I have 16-bit color set, but I don't remember whether that was the default or not.
The shareholder is always right.
I think the default for Windows is now 800x600, and that's what I use.
The shareholder is always right.
It's just totally beyond me what she is talking about... Completely...
"No more calculating of cylinders for the swap partition" - hey, I started in '95 with Linux 1.2.13 and slackware/redhat. I didn't calculate any cylinders then, and I sure as hell don't today.
And why the heck do we have to focus on making money ? Sure, if you're selling the software, you better focus on making a living off it. And I'm pretty sure RedHat, SuSE, and the others are pretty busy doing exactly that. But the rest of us ? GNU/Linux is a *tool* for me - I don't make money off it, but without it I couldn't produce the stuff that I *do* make money off. In any healthy capitalism there is an element of socialism (we all pay taxes to build roads, but we pay individually for the cab). GNU/Linux is my road - I contribute, I benefit, and I have one hell of a highway to carry my business.
So, the HOWTOs are moon-language ?? Has she ever read one ? Maybe because I wrote one of them, I'm also talking moon-language, and therefore I can't see that it's all wrong and obscure to "normal" people. But saying there is no comprehensive documentation to a system that has LDP + O'Reilly + commercial support + the award-winning mailing lists and news-groups (at the high level) and the source (at the detailed level) is absurd.
Oh, and now choice too is a bad thing. The poor secretary would cry if she was given a choice - I'm sure she would, but don't ask me to pity that. Lots of secretaries are using non-windows. In fact, windows is something that happened during the '90s - we actually had computers in '70s too... And secretaries... Come on, open your eyes and show a little enthusiasm here.
My point is, that it's easy to be all negative when you're ill and have to write letters on a notebook running '98. Get well, have a cup of coffee, stop running slackware from '94, and let's talk this over.
Now let me try to comment a bit the major patterns that she suggested:
Linux needs easy to install
From my point of view that is really nonsense. Ok, everybody would appreciate an easy installation, but the installation is a thing that you do once in your life. So it would be a bit waste of resources to optimize that job. And if its to difficult then you could ask a service provider to do the job. For example not many people would have the idea to install a new heating system in their houses, but installing computer software (which is maybe at the same complexity level) has to be done by everyone..? And of course modern distributions address this issue very well. From my experience its much more easier to install than Windows.
Linux must end beta
Also funny. Tell me one software in the world that doesn't has to be patched (except "hello world"). Indeed the thing that I love with Linux is that the patches are well documented. And they are for free. I don't have to buy Version xy of the product to get a bug fixed. And I always can decide if a bug is affecting me so much that I need this fix or if the bug will never occur in my environment. Programs that I use frequently I will upgrade if necessary, programs that I only use from time to time I use them as they are (unless its a too big pain without patching).
Linux Must Have Documentation Human Beings Can Consume
Are users reading manuals? From my experience they don't and so the manuals you get with every new version of windows are thinner and thinner. Not so for Linux. I've never got so many manuals available on my system. And I mean really helpful manuals and not fancy looking "help files" which only give me lots of distracting links but no solutions. Yes, it requires some time to read all that stuff, but with every man page I've read my knowledge increases and its a knowledge that I can even use in the next version. And the more knowledge I have the easier it is.
Linux Must Have A Unified User Experience Why? Would you as a human being really like to live in the very same type of house as your neighbor does and drive the same model of car in the same color ("of course the customer can have any color as long as it is black" - Henry Ford about the Ford T)? I'm happy that I have to choice to select the Windowmanager that suites my needs best and that I can use different shells and tools for different tasks. There is no need and no use in providing one solution that should serve every customer. Even the car industry provides different cars, one sports car if you want to impress women, one family car if the sports car was successful and one van if you have to move to a new house after starting a family. Just imagine if you would ask a car designer to put all those capabilities (fun, many seats for kids, transport capacity) in only one car.
No, I think Emily didn't get the point or she's not and individualist. :-)
Constructive criticism? Actually, what granny seems to be doing here is to describe Linux as it used to be 6 years ago (that's a mighty long time in software engineering!), and blindly assume that it hasn't improved one bit. So far, most of the problems described have been addressed one way or another (who still installs from floppy? Who still needs to calculate how much cylinders into his swap partition?), and the rare that may still be current (readability of doc) are so vague as to hardly merit the word "constructive". Does she also criticize Ford just because her Edsel broke down on her when she still was young and beautiful?
However, a few of her points definitely make sense:
- Installation - Damn straight. I need a distro that installs with a few dialog boxes, and doesn't destroy things at whim. Windows 2000 can be vaulted for the latter (it wipes out the MBR) but I find it unacceptable that a distro like Mandrake 7.2 would do the same thing. Asking for all the available installation options, it then proceeded to kill off my MBR, and I couldn't boot to dual-boot to Windows 2000. Not cool.
Linux distro installs should recognize that a vast majority of new users will want to dual-boot. Even experienced ones, like myself, will still dual-boot.
Adopt the already-made standards - I love KDE. I love Konqueror. Imagine my surprise when, filling out a user name and password form, pressing tab to go to the next field, the password field, instead went to the URL location bar, where I started typing my password for all the world to see. Not cool.
And printing: let's get the printing up the first time, every time after install. Don't make me install Ghostscript drivers, and KDE, don't ask me whether I want to use "BSD" mode for printing. I'm using Linux. Don't confuse me.
Finally, let's get some standards down pat that make sense. If I choose to copy in Netscape 4.72, I should be allow to paste it into the KDE text editor. Simple. Brainless. If I click and drag a program from within the K menu, I should be allowed to reposition, like every OS from Windows 98 on. Sound cards: get them to work from the outset.
This is simple stuff, but it's amazing how few linux developers, and distros, even bother with it.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
This is not a Fugazi
i agree with most of what she has to say, i started with slackware in '95 myself, and while linux has come a very long way, it still has a very long way to go ;).. the beating teh standardization issue over the head is pointless though.. there already exist a number of linux distributions aimed at giving a common interface to things.. have you seen Mandrake's GUI installer recently ? it's very well done and getting better all the time.. the point is that the 'hackers' have their choice of distributions.. and so do the corporations all you have to do is pick a company and stick with tehm.. SuSE/Redhat/Mandrake/Stormlinux are all trying to do what she says and they all have different perspectives.. just check them out and see which one fits your needs .. or get slack and roll your own :) you don't see any one else selling windows.. here there is a lot of simultaneous development happening. my $.02
Okay, I'll bite: I don't really know what that phrase really means, though I know what he meant by "dreams of flying" and "sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar". So a little digging around got me this page. Now that puts the article in perspective!
Sheesh, didn't anything in the article actually get inside your head? The very existence of multiple distributions is a problem.
(8-DCS)
It is somewhat refreshing to read someone who knows Linux (or 'one distribution'), who's used it, and is willing to admit that (s)he would rather use Windows to avoid everything that for some reason draws me to Linux. Core files. Debugging. Um, stability.
________
Alot of the comments made have come to fruition, looks like someone brought this article out of the mothballs.
Still, there were a few valid points. Documentation does need to improve. Developers line up in droves for programming tasks but a precious few actually focus as much on the documentation as well. Embrace them, they are few and they are special.
He's also correct that a large number of us speak in technical terms we've grown so familiar with that we no longer recognize them as technical. If you can read this: "The MBR of the HD is fubar", then you know what I mean.
I do not like his recommended solutions. Practically every solution he offers moves Linux into looking more like Windows. There's already a Windows operating system, why build another? Linux fills different needs.
Windows is all about "canned apps hiding complexity". It's an operating system founded on the "least common denominator" of computer expertise. Linux is all about intricately configurable apps with tremendous versatility.
His solutions take away choices in the hopes of simplifying the user experience. Linux is all about choices. The gist of this article runs contrary to my beliefs of what Linux is and should be.
If Linux had to survive in the manner author suggests, then maybe it's better off dead.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
Actually, that might be the only positive to eating McDonald's. Their hamburgers are NOT made of beef(its 30% ostrich, and 70% soy..) so they can't have "Mad-Cow" disease.
:-)
JeremyI TechSeek- http://www.tech-seek.com
A certain entity known as "Microsoft" is making it a zero-sum game.
Why?
Because of Bill Gates "Windows on all computers"-vision, which Microsoft plays really aggressive on.
What good is a Linux server, if it cannot show the content that all the users of Microsoft Internet Explorer have become used to?
It IS possible for Microsoft to use their power in the desktop-arena to PUSH through to the server-side.
Why does it bother me? Because if they are successful, the applications for Linux both on the server and on the client side, will diminish, and it will lock me into ME ALSO using windows, if I want all the new stuff everybody else is using.
I agree that having a single "one size fits all" may not be the best solution, but right now it is our best bet. Show me ANY free OS that has come as far as Linux has today.
Of course, this is the choice of the distribution, I would personally like to see a distribution that totally breaks with the server side of things, and TOTALLY focus on the client.
Gaute
Because without things like fonts and headers, most people are less productive.
For throwaway documents, perhaps, but really specifying specific fonts and sizes is the wrong approach. Got some titles that should be in a different font than the main body? ID them as titles, don't change the font for each one individually so they look like titles. But that's how most people do word processing.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
But you at least cranked up the color depth so your .jpg's don't look like crap, right? Or are you one of "those"?
The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.
This is not a troll, but it seems as though the one part in this article where she lists some things she'd like to see in "Linux", she's writing some pro-Mandrake advertisement.
Mandrake has "a sickeningly easy graphical installation."
Mandrake has "big buttons that say 'Server', 'Workstation', or 'Developer'" and then 'POOF', Mandrake 7.2 with Linux kernel 2.2.17 is installed.
I agree with the folks above; this women is just posting an old email she sent to some anti-Linux guy back in the early 90s.
Wake up and smell 'drake! (or, hell, any other MODERN distro)
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
What linux must do is get better installers...
What linux must do is get better GUI...
What linux must bl is get better games...
What linux blah do is get better browser...
What linux must do is bla better word processors...
What linux blah do is get blahbl X...
What blahb must do is get better file managers...
Blah blnux blah do bl bla better standards...
What lblah blah do is get blahbl blah...
Blah blahb blah bl bl bla blah blah blah...
All of it true unfortunately... But desperately boring to listen to.
In the end though, it's really premature to say that Linux won't survive. Gnome 1.0 was released in March 99. That was two years ago only. (KDE was released earlier but QT at that time was not open source.) It wasn't until last year that Star Office was GPL and it's going to take a couple years for that to get integrated with the rest of Gnome. So a lot of what web-authors are continually whining about is really new technology that will mature in the next couple years.
Anyways... I don't want to talk about it anymore. If people don't want to use Linux on the desktop they don't have to. I think it will be a viable alternative to windows by 2003. I've been saying that since a year ago and so far my time line has been pretty good. Check out Linux in a couple years (and not with that same 200mhz machine your using now).
Ok enough with the sarcasm, but I am serious, we don't all have the time/energy/knowledge/care to hack away at Linuz. I personally am a network administrator, and I can program to a degree but know what? I don't have the time to learn what I'd need to to hack around with Linux. I just don't care. It's more important I know how to keep the Cisco routers happy than that I know how to program Linux.
I think this is a big problem with the Linux community: This "do it yourself" attitude. J. Random User doesn't want to do it himself, he wants someone else to do it. Why do you think things like auto shops exist? Technically, people could fix all the problems with a car themselves. However most of us don't have the time, knowledge, tools or experience to do so. Well, the same is true for computers. PEople in the world specialize in things and for most people computers are not one of those things. They need a system that is easy to use and easy to learn. To expect them all to become hackers is just not going to happen.
Basically her article outlines not what Linux needs to do to survive, there will always be some people that use it, but what it needs to do to thrive. You need to ask yourself: Do I want to see Linux on every desktop? If the answer is yes, then serious changes must be made, and these changes are going to have to come from the Linux hackers, not the general populace. You need to give users an easy, unified, recognizeable interface, you need to give programmers a unified API, and you need to make the whole damn thing more intuitive. Installing software can not be a process like "download the source, get all related libraries, uncompress and install, edit makefile and build". It needs to be along the lines of "insert disk, click button".
So there you have it, you have to decide what you want: Do you want Linux to grow in the desktop market or not? If it is growth is what you seek, then changes need to be made. Users want a nice, easy to use OS, not something so jam packed with cutomizability you need a degree to decipher it.
I've read through the comments so far and I've found a common thread, "we're smart, they're not so let's ignore the fact that they cared enough to offer us some suggestions." I hate having my code criticized as much as the next programmer. But, after taking a big breath and counting to ten, I reread what looked like an attack and find valuable information to make my product better.
The thing that I think is a fatal flaw in everyone's arguments about whether Linux will "thrive" (or even "survive") is that they assume two completely false things:
Both are completely false, and this is something we as Linux advocates need to remember. Is Solaris any kind of OS for your Mom? I don't think so. Neither are any of the *BSDs. Does that make either of them failures or likely to die soon? Definitely not. Do you run Windows in the datacenter? Not seriously. But Windows is still a success.
The future is interoperability. You will have PCs, personal workstations, internet appliances, and even set-top boxes that all can run the same basic "productivity" apps (though not necessarily the same binary), and you will be able to transfer a document from one to another transparently (hopefully, the docs will be in XML or SGML). Windows will run on some PCs and internet appliances (and maybe consoles like XBox), BeOS will do settop boxes and internet appliances, *BSDs will do appliances and a few PCs, and Linux will do workstations and PCs (and some appliances). If none have more than 40% market share, I would consider this a rousing success, as no one is powerful enough to dominate and thus hurt the impetus for interoperability.
The message is this: OSes are custom - they all have their niche (though it can be a broad one). In my opinion, trying to make a single OS do everything is a Bad Thing. This is the one thing I see Linux trying to do, and we really need to stop and think if this is appropriate (in my opinion, it isn't). Pick a couple of things to specialize your OS in, and don't try to be a Jack-of-All-Trades (and a master of none).
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
This is not a Fugazi
*phew* And that's not even dealing the Intel server NIC problem I've been hit with more than once.
Realistically, installing Windows is no easier than installing Linux, if for no other reason than those damn drivers that either refuse to install because you're installing a driver for a 3C905B-TX and you have a 3C905C-TX instead, or that some other driver just happens to conflict with this one. The only reason people really need to be concerned with how difficult Linux is to install is the hope to win over existing Windows users.
I'm personally far more concerned about the other issues, like the fact that the divide between KDE and Gnome loyals is getting wider. Utterly silly things such as instead of working to allow me to integrate a picture created in the GTK+ application, The Gimp, into something like KWord, they're all focusing on replicating the functionality of The Gimp in their very own QT clone. I'm not against them reinventing the wheel, so to speak, but the fact that everyone seems to miss the obvious thing that would help NOW -- allowing complete interoperability. There's no reason why I need two different configurations for silly things like file associations, widget theme, and colours, etc.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
OK, so you agree with the previous poster that MS software does have "hefty system requirements", at least for memory; you just don't think it matters that much.
Tim
When you click "apply" it should pop up a box that says "enter the root password" and the user types it in.
For security the program that popped up the box would be a very small suid one that used no toolkit, and is passed the shell script to execute on stdin. It would also have a button to display the shell script to the user, in case they are suspicious. This does mean the user has to type in the root password over and over as they try changes, but it removes the need for any user-level program to remember the root password and removes the need to have a command to drop suid privledges.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
You're labelling her as close-minded, and yourself as somehow open-minded, based purely on the fact that you have the technical expertise to effectively use the software. Obviously if you understand something (and have for a long time) it seems simple to you the more you digest it inside your head.
Think back to first year Calculus. Derivatives and integrals didn't make that much sense at first, did they? The more you use it, the more completely you understand it. In fact, after quite some time of repeated exposure to the same ideas, you understand them very well and the seem extraordinarily simple in your head. It becomes hard for you to remember how it felt like to *not* understand those ideas, or how someone else could possibly not understand.
Take yourself out of your shoes for a moment and open your mind to how someone with a completely different background and experience in an area you have particular expertise in might be intimidated by the complexities. Then, when you can do that, reread the article with a pinch of salt.
Knee-jerk flaming of the messenger and total disregard for their opinion are the marks of zealotry, which aren't always perceived as the fruits of a "rational" following. Keep that in mind.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
There's all these people out to tell us "what linux needs"
Funny thig is GNU/Linux already has the only thing that it needs, the ability to modify and make it into what you want it to be.
The original hackers didn't say to themselves "I'm not going to use this Kernel because it doesn't have a tape driver..." they wrote a tape driver and submitted the patch.
In her article, she complains about the documentation availalbe (I've always found it quite brilliant, having learned perl entirely from the man pages) yet she is a writer, who has been using Linux since '94 and claims to know it.
The GNU community was not built by people who complained that others didn't make improvements for them, it's always been about contributing and working together to build a better system that we can all benifit from.
I think that the most harm that commercial involvement in the GNU project has been in the influx of users who expect things to be done for them, and then when the nebulous "Linux" doesn't do it for them they get angry with it.
GNU/Linux is not on it's way out. Stock values are irrelevant when you're dealing with the economical module generated by the GNU philosophy the facts are that Linux use is growing, us who have been around for a while, try to stop newbies from never knowing that Linux is in fact the GNU system on the Linux kernel and that there is VI and that the GUI tools you are spoon fed by the distro (that usually don't work all that well) aren't all there is.
GNU/Linux might not survive in the module that the commercial folks involved might like it to, open source might die, but for as long as there are computer users GNU will persist and as our products get better and better as long as our free compiler remains the best on the marker, more and more people will flock to us, and the issue of GNU surviving will be a non issue, it will no longer exist, there will be only computing and computing will be free.
I handle a lot of office type stuff in StarOffice... business correspondence, proposals, invoices and budgets. It actually gets the job done, but it is annoying, clunky and slow. I haven't found anything else for Linux that even comes close in stability and features though.
--
Novell bought WordPerfect and a handful of other products, and tried to beat Microsoft at the Office game. Look at what happened. Had Novell focused on their strengths, they might have discoved Internet.
I am a balding, pushing 40 IT chief who has built his career on Windows. When I installed a web server, I decided to be cool and use Linux. I did it, and it never crashes. Wow. However, I won't replace all of the Windows user boxes at work, it is a battle I'll never win.
I now write apps that reside on a Linux server that users access with a web browser. At the end of it all, the user's work will actually be done on the Linux box, regardless of their OS. Not my business.
Rather than trying to eliminate the Windows machines, give them as little to do as possible.
So, Linux community: Are you going to go down the same road as Novell, or are you going to focus on your strengths and provide something Microsoft can't?
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
I find it funny how so many people can criticize Microsoft for hefty system requirements; At the moment I am running 3 instances of Visual Basic, Word, MMC, Interdev, 2 instances of Terminal Services client, & SQL server. All running on Win2k SERVER (used for development of COM components) on a K6-233 with 196mb ram, and I don't have a problem with things running to slowly.
I'm truly glad somebody has taken the time to express these very same sentiments that I have had during the past week as I try to install linux for the first time.
It's about changing screen resolution. Mandrake has a control panel that lets you change every little detail of the window in look n'feel, but the panel has no mention of how to change the screen resolution. (I know about Xconfigurator now, but they were laughing at me in the slashdot irc forum)
It's about clicking a box to turn on the sound without having to install additional software / or visiting the command line as "super user". It's about not having to "compile" applications for your particular distro.
I know that in time I will become proficient at linux, but that's because I have the technical inclination to do so. Forget those people who just want to "get something done" (like my mom).
I agree that linux is terrific for it's endless configurability, but that is it's death knell.
McDonalds is not a success for it's "endless selection," but it's consistency of product. You can go to any McDonalds in the world and get the same exact thing. That is one of the primary driving factors to it's success.
The success of Linux is not due to its configurability and quality of the kernel, but instead a testament to the microsoft hegemony, and that a few people will take _any_ half baked (escuse me, beta) alternative.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I've recently been trying to install Solaris 8 under VMware, and after two attempts taking 5 hours have given up for the moment, despite reading gallons of Solaris FAQs and web pages. By contrast, the many Linux installs I have done are incredibly hassle free and typically take an hour.
/var/sadm), and some packages are missing dependencies.
If you want to use Forte and Java, it's not surprising that Solaris x86 works well (after all, all three come from Sun), but I find the basic Solaris install is too vanilla - I need to install bash, less, vim, and so on, just to get it usable. The Solaris package management is not too hot either - it's very hard to find out which files belong to a package (until you find a specific file under
Linux does have problems, and some installs can be frustrating, but in my experience Solaris is much harder to get going. Also, there is not as much tech support info on the Net for Solaris, unless you buy a support contract for Solaris to get access to the SunSolve knowledge base. (At least Microsoft provides free Net access to its KB).
With a few robots an a little soldering, you could build a car with emacs. Hell, with a few old nintendo robots even procmail, your handy email filtering system, could cook you breakfast whenever you send mail to your boss in the morning.
My friend uses his computer joystick to control his remote control car. I used to have a customized network report sent to me every morning by my computer.
*nix is not an OS, *nix is not meant to be easy to comprehend. *nix is like the dirt. It is a complex aggregate of simple things. It is not visually appealing. But as does the dirt, *nix holds the secret to the growth of new things. *nix is not a product, but a starting point.
Without total comprehension, computing must necessarily suck. Any system designed to circumvent this rule must also suck. This was forgotten in the mid nineties. It is the Tao.