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What's up with Lindows?
A reader writes "In this editorial at DesktopLinux.com, commentator Malcolm Dean questions whether Lindows is any sort of linux at all, and suggests that the world might actually be better off without yet another proprietary/commercial Windows wannabe (that runs Windows apps, no less). Dean asks how it is possible that, as Lindows.com founder Michael Robertson manages to claims in his latest newsletter, Lindows' ten million lines of code include a Windows Compatibility Module that somehow works better than anything else available today. "Has Mr. Robertson's team accomplished in a few months what took WINE years?" Where is the substance to back the hype? Besides, what if Lindows does succeed: do we really want to perpetuate the use of Windows software on a linux platform?"
How does this relate to the Wine project? Is there any chance of Lindows ever releasing any code back to them?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
The problem of Microsoft's monopoly will not be solved by making Windows emulating layers over Linux. Their monopoly is based on the "double" monopoly they have on Office and on Windows. If Office runs on Lindows or on Wine, you can trust Microsoft will find ways to make it runeable only on Windows, as complete compatibility is unpossible with all the undocumented features there is in Windows. IMHO the only way to break Microsoft's Monopoly is to break it on the 'Office' Apps, not on the OS layer.
What versions of Windows is this likely to replace ? If it`s only Windows 95/98 then surely this product is going to have a fairly short shelf life.
Why would anybody want to be able to run fewer programs than there was the potential for? There are thousands of extremely useful Windows programs out there (believe it or not, it's true!) and being able to run them on Linux can only be a good thing.
Programs are tools. Why would anybody choose to limit the amount of tools in their toolkit, when some of the forsaken tools could help them get their job finished much earlier?
Good luck to those who would add to the functionality of Linux!
While free software is a nice ideal not everybody has to follow that. There is still freedom to choose to follow the ideals you want to follow.
:-)
I personally think that we should try to follow the ideals of free software as much as possible when creating our own software packages. But there is still the fact that there is already a lot of good software available on Windows. It doesn't make sense not to use the software that you need to use (if there is no alternative on linux) just because they violate some ideals.
Just my opinion
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
If something isnt broke, why fix it?
Its not that people dont care, they dont know any better.They arent knowledgeable enough to know theres something better than windows better than IE, and so on and so forth.
They use AOL because they believe AOL IS the internet, not a client to access it.
They use Microsoft Windows because they believe Windows IS the computer, and that theres nothing else to use.
You see, if people arent given a chance to choose in a store when they go to buy their computer, they automatically assume that because Windows is all thats being sold, that Windows is all there is.
Proof- Not so long ago, people believe that in order to buy a PC, you had to buy an Intel Pentium, people even called PCs Intel Boxes, or Pentiums. When a person wanted to buy a Video Card before Nvidia arrived, People went for a Voodoo, not because Voodoo was the only card but because thats all that people saw in the stores, sure there were other cards but what card did all games seem to support? The Voodoo cards.
Sure theres always been choice, but if every corperation, every store, everywhere you go, you dont see any choice, you just see one product, eventually in your mind thats it, theres nothing else to choose from. After years of only computers packed with Windows, it will be quite a shock to see a computer packed with Lindows, but if Lindows can prove to the user that its better than Windows,
Like Nvidia beat Vodooo, and AMD beat Intel, Lindows may beat Windows.
However, IF Microsoft forces OEMs to only use Windows from Microsoft, and people like Dell dont even sell you a computer with anything else, well, what do you expect to happen here?
I'm happy to see Lindows stand up to Microsoft and give them serious competition, the problem with OS2 is, it wasnt competition at all, it actually helped sell Microsoft Windows because OS2 sat in the backround, no OEM sold OS2 computers, not even IBM the makers of OS2 sold OS2 on their own Machines.
Just like Mozilla and Netscape cant catch up to IE because AOL wont use Netscapes browser on their own software.
So what do you expect to happen when Linux users dont support Lindows?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
THia aituation reminds me of that with OS/2 back in the mid-90's. OS/2 was technically superior to Windows (especially in the win 3.1 era, before win '95), but because it allowed Windows and MS-DOS software to run transparently, there was little incentive to port applications as native code.
There were other reasons for OS/2's decline, but a lack of a native app code base was one major one. The efforts spent developing a Windows compatible layer on top of Linux would be better spent porting important apps (Photoshop, Games, Dreamweaver, etc.) to Linux as native apps. Of course before that happens, Linux GUIs need to be fine-tuned and driver support made less buggy.
Building tools to allow software developers to port their apps into Linux-native code would be best in the long run.
Virtual Windows on top of Linux and dual-booting (especially since LILO and GRUB are so persnicketty) are not long-term recipes for success.
Linux developers should either cede the desktop to Microsoft or develop native tools and apps and port Windows products to native code.
Just like OS/2, Linux had a technical advantage (in some ways) over Windows up until now, but with the introduction of Win XP, that advantage is lessening.
Time is of the essence. Lindows is a counterproductive retreat.
evanchik.net
Yes, BSD license is exploitable, that's what poeple using this license want.
*BSD operating system would probably not have had such a great influence in the world of computing if they used a different license such as GPL...
By the way NetBSD kick ass!
As I was reading the faqs on the lindows.com, a thought came to me. It seems to me like Michael and the rest of the crew aren't striving to make a linux os that also runs Windows apps moderately well. In fact, instead of comparing this os to Linux w/ WINE, I would compare it more to OS X. It seems like he's trying to build a new operating system, based on a Linux Kernel. With these extra 10 million lines of code, there has to be a little something extra than some sort of buggy emulator. It seems more like a fundamental rewrite of how one would approaching running Windows apps on Linux. But instead of Mac sitting on top of Darwin, it's Windows sitting on top of Linux. Just like OS X can run photoshop (something designed around Mac) or various unix/linux programs, Lindows can run Office (something designed around Windows) and various unix/linux programs.
For anyone who can't see what I'm trying to get at, screw you for not being able to read my mind. Otherwise, I'm probably just full of it...
Wroot
What kind of comment is this? Software is software, and right now some of the new, great software is a heck of a lot easier to write for the Windows platform.
:o) can be sometimes be terrible extermist advocates. Paying for software at all? Not OpenSource?
I'm a software developer and I strongly disagree at this point, if you're pointing at MS visual C++. The win32 API is one of the dirtiest and most unhandy API's I've worked with so far. For what I touched in the past only MSDOS beated it with it's terminate-stay-resitent-crap.
Personally I find QT/KDE a far more intuative and an easier API.
Well I asumeed here you refered to lowlevel and middle software. If you're doing with VB you're fine of with development time. But having (commercially) programmed VB applications in the past I tell you it's a horror to get them run across different windows systems. When I developed it it ran fine under win95. THen win98, did it run? No the printer API suddendly behaves differntly. Then they moved to Win2000, did it run? No again the API changed somewhat in behaviour.
You're right if programming targeted toward the market. If I today have to programm an end user application I want to sell, windows would still be my selection. Why? Since most users use it. 2nd reson? Because linux users (like me
(However if I want to build today a server, Linux is my selection, it's cheaper and I personally find it far more reliable (you need only the knowhow you've to aquire only once) If I want to build a high end embedded system Linux is my selection. I don't have to pay royality licenses, I have all the source, I can freely modify it, it has less overhead (kernel can be smaller than 500K). writing hardware drivers for it is tousend times more easier than win95/NT/2000/XP. If I would sell a complete "solution" I would also sell my application together with linux software. But still my Apps would proparly be closed source.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Well, the Java language is a very STRONG typed language and abstract. In situations it causes code to be a little more ugly.. in other situations it causes code to be very clean. Either way, it does not matter. Java is just a platform, you don't have to use the Java language(JL) on a Java Virtual Machine(JVM).
:)
:P How exactly is a trade secret of my company, and if we ever finish this damn thing might make us some money.
:) Optimizing for a Cyrix 686 is different than optimizing for a Pentium 4.
There are Scheme and Python compilers out there that make JVM bytecode. It is possible to make a C++ compiler to output JVM bytecode. The JVM is just a virtual computer so to speak and it reads Class files
Sun has done a good job of protecting the integrity of Java, and even sued M$ and won!
As far as JVMs go. IBM made a wicked fast one that in a lot of situations it ran Java code faster than MSVC could run C++ code. And JVMs will just get faster as time goes on.
In fact, some day JVMs will be faster than assembly. And yes that is possible
But imagine this.. lets say you are runnig notepad, than you load up calculator.. imagine if your opearting system could find the simularities between the two programs and only load the differences betweenc calculator and notepad.
It would take more CPU cycles to run each program, but both programs would stay in CPU cache longer and actually run faster in a multitasking environment.
Don't forget that JVMs can optimize for the specific processor they are running on.
But once again, i'll reiterate. If you write a program on the Java platform today, it will get faster through time, and work on any new opearting system. It is smarter to try to convince companies to write in Java than it is to try to reverse engineer undocumented buggy APIs made by a company called Microsoft.
What this discussion has come down to is mostly the linux users saying how MS monopoly sucks so forth. Personally I love the office 2k products. They're easy to use and they do what I want them to do. Star office I'm sorry to say is a product that doesn't come anywhere near office. It's incredibly slow to load up(I love how my mouse crawls as i load up any component within star). On to topic: Lindoze in my opinion is a waste of code.. for heaven sakes 10 million lines of code. I might as well partition a drive and run windows 2k on it... I recall lilo being able to dual boot :) But seriously instead of wasting 10 million lines of code to do somethign that windows can do better why not invest that 10 million lines into cooler software for linux.
Get the best of both worlds... I'd say yer lying if you were to tell me that Windows isn't one of the easiest operating systems to use. Along with the fact that it has one of the most complete libraries of software. Linux is a good OS.. but it still mainly for enthusiasts. Unless you really know what yer doing a linux box isn't too fun to set up..
As Linus did with UNIX, as the "clone wars" (I'm telling you, that would've been such a better name) of the 80's did with the IBM-PC, Lindows may be able to accomplish with Windows. As the car analogy comes back into play, all cars run off of gas, but have different features. Some people run electric/solar powered cars for the whole ideal (think linux). Then there are most of the people who run off of regular gas powered cars (think windows), they don't have time to put up with the inconveniences that the other cars offer but would most likely love the advantages of them as well. Then you see the hybrid cars (think Lindows), these are the only cars that have a chance of penetrating the market with the idea that slowly people can make the transition to fully non gas powered technology. Many of us here do use Linux because it offers us many benefits and we can afford to put in the time to reap the benefits of the OS. Most people just don't have the time to put in or don't see the advantages without ever using it. Lindows is exactly what this market needs to put Microsoft out of the picture as the sole distributor of Windows (sounds funny, but it makes as much sense to me as Intel and AMD both releasing x86 processors). Why will or why should people choose Lindows? Because it offers them more. If you have all the base options and give a little more, people like that. Just look at SUV's :)
I'm not sure why your posting was rated as "funny," because it's right on the money.
Take my mother. (Please! No, not really, but I couldn't resist.) A few years back, she wanted a computer. I, being the evil scum that I am, concluded that she would do better on the Mac than on Windows 95. I was right. She's had a couple of PowerBooks. She does a lot. She uses email (not through AOL), can get to the web, does finances on Quicken, writes up test papers and letters, manages addresses, and uses the spreadsheet. She is, if anything, above average as a home user. Every time I visit her, she has questions for me, usually trivial matters, and she's very afraid of making changes. (I bought her a Palm, and she was afraid to synchronize it, because she didn't want to "break anything.")
So, a few months ago she calls to say that some of her games aren't working. A conversation like the following ensues:
I: What changed?
She: I had to upgrade Quicken.
I: Just Quicken? Was there anything else?
She: Yeah, I had to get another number.
I: Another number?
She: Yeah, wait a minute. Here it is. 9.1.
I: You installed a major operating system upgrade without calling me first? That can cause a lot of stuff to break!
She: That's what I'm finding out.
People who are not geeks or computer scientists simply do not know what an operating system is. A minority of them know the phrase "operating system," but it has no more intrinsic meaning to them than "geegaw" or "rang deedio." If they know at all about it, they just know that it has to be there and has to work.
Nor should they, in an ideal world. The whole role of an operating system is to facilitate use of the computer and not get in the way. In the user model the operating system is the computer is the genie behind the screen. When they buy a computer, they buy a computer, and everything they get in the box that says "computer" is the computer. They may understand keyboard, monitor, and mouse as parts, but they don't understand, at all, that the OS is a fungible part of the system. There may be a disc, but they ignore it until something breaks.
The same thing is true of user interfaces. Well-meaning people like Jef Raskin and Donald Norman, as well as not-so-well-meaning people like Alan Cooper have been advocating for clean user interfaces that are invisible to the user for years. They're right, from a technical standpoint. They're all of them totally wrong when they try to explain why user interfaces are bad or how to make them better. The reason that user interfaces are not as good as they are is that the more invisible a component is, the less people are even aware of it when making purchase decisions. As a result, while really terrible user interfaces may result in some bad word-of-mouth, really good interfaces also suffer, because by definition, most people don't perceive them as elements. Beyond a certain level of frustration, market forces don't work on user interfaces and may even work against good ones, because mediocre interfaces have more visible features.