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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.
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.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
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? :-)
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...
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.
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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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Linux should not be reviewed because it's not a product.
If you want to review a product you should review a distribution. It's perfectly OK to review RedHat, caldera, mandrake etc and point out their flaws or praise their strengths.
War is necrophilia.
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.
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.
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.
You make an excellant point. Journalists are not hackers but they are writers. Their skills are sorely needed by the open source community. But I guess like most groups of people most of them are shits and would rather bitch then get off their ass and do something.
War is necrophilia.
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.
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.
" 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.
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.
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
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
I dunno where she got that 220Mhz laptop with 128M RAM... And it runs Word 2000!!
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!
Linux *is* a gift.
Linux is also many experiments. For example it's an experiment to see if people from differing races, colors, creeds, languages, and religions can get together and do one thing without killing each other. It's also a bunch of other experiments but I won't go into them here.
What linux is NOT is a product. Some people have tried to make it a product and some have even been somewhat succesfull but if all these companies died tommorow the experiment and the gift would continue.
The mistake the author made was to review linux as a product. Linux may be a failure as a product (not something I believe) but it's a success as a gift and an experiment. Remember Linus never intended to make a product and neither did RMS. The product-ness of linux is an happy accident.
I have two different critisims.
One is that the review is godawful wrong (when was the last time you downloaded a patch via gopher?), the author is confused about what linux is and lumps a bunch of things into her article that have nothing to do with linux. For example she does not seem to understand that Open Office is not Linux. Linux is actually a kernel with some stuff on top as a kernel it's also very very good.
Two I am critising the author for even attempting to make a review.
Products are reviwed, gifts OTOH are politely accepted and cherished, politely accepted and given to other people, or politely accepted and stored in the attic. It's rude to publicly critize the giver of the gift or the gift itself.
War is necrophilia.
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
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).
This is a fundamental shift in thinking from commercial software. Linux does not exist to take over the world, it does not exist to please grandma, and it does not exist to sell machines.
It exists because the people who work on it enjoy it, use it, and make it better. That being said, it will never be the case that linux developers from top to bottom will roll over and make their software ready for grandma. However, with the entry of corporate sponsorship of software, you can expect that things like desktop projects (GNOME, KDE), office projects (KDEOffice, OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, StarOffice) will begin to be able to cater very directly to being easy to use for someone with few computer skills.
Also remember that the OEM reseller has a tremendous advantage in making the OS easy to use. The end user doesn't have to install it.
Really, I think the reason linux has not been configured for newbies is that the free developers are utterly unresponsive to market demand and could care less what articles are written about it. The corporate sponsorship cares, and they will make it happen. But now the demand is just starting to exist, so it will take a little time. Linux can change its faces so fast. Five years ago enlightenment didn't exist, KDE didn't exist, StarOffice didn't exist, GNOME didn't exist, and people were psyched because fvwm2 was out and was fairly customizable. In another five years you can only imagine where it will go wrt end user ease of use.
"
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)
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Now that's hiding the command line from the user!
War is necrophilia.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
---
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]
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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?
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.
__________________
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
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
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
Sheesh, didn't anything in the article actually get inside your head? The very existence of multiple distributions is a problem.
(8-DCS)
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
-----------------------
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.
Then you will be very glad that they have now settled on SysV startup as the standard. Look for the LSB (Linux Standards Base).
I know for a fact that SuSE is one distro that has changed as of 7.1 to this standard.
Expect to see a lot of base changes over the coming months to every distrobution...
StarTux
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.