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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.
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.
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.
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.
" Another thing, and the last thing I'll talk about, is the fact that good human factors design (I'm talking about useability here, not happy dancing stuff, or eye candy) makes applications more useable for all humans, including hard-core coders. It shortens learning curves by allowing us to see and fiddle with just as many features as we want to at any time. We aren't all experts in every area of computing, or at least nobody that I know is, even those people whom I would consider computing gods. A little useability goes a long way there. Don't tell me you don't need that stuff unless you toggle in boot code on the front panel every time you boot!"
You seem to be confusing ease of use with ease of learning. Programmers care about productivity and are willing to put up with steep learning curves. Lusers care nothing about productivity and just want to learn the thing enough to do a couple things.
As an example consider VI or Emacs or ZOPE. All of these products are notoriously hard to learn but once you know them you fly!. You become so productive you feel like superman. Would any serious programmer be using word to write a program? I don't think so.
Sometimes ease of learning and ease of use conflict with other. Productivity often means not using the mouse and memorizing complex keyboard commands. Your average luser would never put up with that.
War is necrophilia.
with 128M of RAM and a 220 MHz processor ...Office is zippy on those specs? Please.
:) But anyway, I see no problem with her feedback and these are all valid criticisms in my opinion.
It is. X takes a lot of RAM, and while KDE and GNOME are growing slimmer by the second, they do too. Office 97 and Windows 95 will run on a P133 w/ 32 Mb of RAM. Not great, but okay. KDE (itself) will take 4 minutes between logon and desktop.
Huh? It's been around since '91 and has been "hot" for the last two years at least... hardly "flavour of the week".
Flavour of the week in an expression. Yes, Linux has only been popular for a relatively short time compared to Windows or netware or MacOS.
Upgrade this driver", "fiddle with this registry setting", etc
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.
However, I do agree in that a solid packaging system (which needs much more work on standardized package names, capabilities, granularity, naming conventions, etc) combined with a decent utility like apt-get (prolly on a RPM distribution - its the LSB and a more popular system) would provide an incredibly easy to use installation system.
But in the meantime its Gimp needs LibGimp needs GTK upgrade needs Bonobo upgrade needs GlibC upgrade. And that sucks. Still. there's only a couple on months before an easyto use apt based distribution (Mandrake 8) is released.
Duh. Welcome to Free Software, babe. That's the whole *point*.
I thought the point of free software was that it was more ethical to use Free Software than closed source software? In terms of Open Source, that's the exact opposite of Open Source - remember release early, release often? 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). Besides, some people use Linux for the same reason they use MS Word - because for their task, its the best tool for the job.
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.
Agreed. Mandrake would easily have to be the closest thing to getting Linux going on the desktop. But (for now) things like software installation are still headaches (lacking apt-get till version 8).
I'm salivating at the thought.
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"