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Bob Young says Linux won't rule the desktop
Wee writes "I just came across this interesting Yahoo interview with Bob Young
in which he says that Linux won't rule the desktop but will instead focus on replacing legacy Unix systems and enhancing Linux's embedded presence. He makes some pretty good points. The oddest quote: "So our opportunity is not to replace Microsoft on the PC. If you've got a perfectly good working PC, why you would go through the angst of replacing it?". Not sure where to start answering that one. My wife (a dedicated Win32 user) liked his car analogy. I need to get her to read 'In the Beginning was the Command Line'..."
The problem that any number of underdog OS's have these days is overcoming consumer inertia. What I mean by that statement is this: once a set of products has hit a certain point and gains consumer acceptance, it is very hard to change the direction that that market is going. Microsoft has done this again and again with both its operating systems and its application suites, both of which are very closely tied together and tend to pull each other along.
What Young is doing is trying to get Red Hat into those markets where there either isn't consumer inertia toward a product or where the market is unsettled. If he can gain acceptance, then his end goal (making money through pushing Linux) is achieved. All in all it is a pretty smart move.
What Linux needs in general is a robust set of applications that consumers can use transparently with Microsoft products. If attractively priced, this could conceivably pull users to the OS, especially in light of Microsofts new licensing trends.
2 more cents down the drain...
Hmmm...
Of course, learning is hard, and choice is bad. My mistake. The current party line is "Free Software will never rule the desktop." I stand corrected, Ye Mighty Slashdot Gods.
And besides, Bob's affiliated with a company that decided to abandon the desktop as soon as the stock market went bust. Thanks for developing GNOME, guys; however, we just don't think you'll ever amount to anything. Thanks for playing anyway.
Bah. RH used to be good for the world of Linux. I'm not so sure anymore.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
You're talking Heresy here..
:)
I agree. Personally I don't use linux, and probably never will. (But I won't say never)
But I respect it as a platform, and am encouraged by it's growth, and maturation process. What really irks me though is the almost religious ferver (and the associated blindness to differing points of view) that some of the linux community have.
A couple of years ago MS dismissed Linux out of hand, and now they are naming it as their prime OS competitor. This in turn seems to be driving the Windows people to push for more stabilty, and security. Sounds good to me.
Will Linux take over the desktop? No. Not until my grandma can use it. But will it drive competition and innovation? I think that answer is quite clear.
Badger
Bob Young continues to demonstrate a good grasp of the market, and the position linux can best dominate in it. Red Hat has been distinguished by better management (from what we can see) than the other linux companies so far, and Young's ability to move to the market instead of the hype is setting Red Hat apart.
No.
Example: install Ximian Gnome, which supposedly represents the 'friendliest' Linux GUI.
Now try right-clicking on a compressed .tar or .tgz file. You'll notice there is no option to decompress such files.
These are very common in Linux land, you'll need to decompress them all the time.
If you use Ximian Gnome and need to decompress that file, you'll need to hop out to the command line and issue a command. If you're new, you'll also have to read the help to learn the appropriate arguments.
That is not user friendly.
Red Hat has given up on the desktop.
That may be smart business, and it may be a lost cause. It is certainly the reason Red Hat is just an average desktop among Linux distributions.
SuSE is better, Mandrake is better, the new desktop focused Lycoris and Elx are better.
I like what Red Hat has done for Linux, and if they want to stay in the server space, I wish them luck.
Someone else will fight on the desktop and I'll be fighting with them.
I agree that MS has basically won the Desktop war. But, where you and I may disagree, is that MS will take it's win in the desktop environ, and leverage it to win in other markets.
Do any of you remember, Paradox was the best DOS & Windows PC database around. Then MS got access and office 4.3 and 95 out the door. They got the OEM's to ship the software "free" (leverage) and MS Office became the defacto standard. (By the way, there are lots of other stories just like this one, I just offer this up for example.) Paradox disappeared! Sure, the WP/Novell/Corel/Borland disaster didn't help things, but the DB never disappeard, it was always available. In fact, the language behind Paradox (follow-on to PAL) has to be the most sophisticated scripting/programming language I've ever seen in a desktop DB. It's still light-years ahead of Access. [But I digress...]
We have to challange MS in some fashion that will prevent it from leveraging it's stanglehold elsewhere. How to do that, I am not sure. We must be sure not to fight the last war, and loose.
The PC isn't going away, sure there will be lots of specific use devices, and breaking the MS monopoly there is VERY important, but we have to also respond on the Desktop too.
As to not "being hyper-focused on beating Microsoft today" - I agree. I could really care less about MS. All I really want is decent competition. If RH/Linux (I'm sure that made RMS's skin crawl!) becomes the next standard, and they have no competition, it's be as sad as MS is now. But, beating MS is a means to and end. By beating MS, there is a window opened that allows many options to actually become options. That's the point.
Anyway, good post, I do agree with most of the points. To reiterate, we have to break the monopoly to be able to really offer a competitive alternative. To do so, I think will have to be challenged on the desktop. It might not be a direct challange, but it will have to even out the playing field. Is that Linux, or some other alternative? I don't know, I just know that there's going to have to be some decent, realistic, and viable alternative otherwise, we'll be saddled with MS for a LONG time to come.
Cheers!
You know what's funny? I've been saying that the desktop was doomed, that it was going to be replaced by specialty devices, for a long time now--far longer than I'm willing to admit. I've now become convinced that we're just not going to see it--entirely. What I think you'll see instead is something not at all far from Apple's digital hub strategy. In 10-20 years, we'll probably use PDAs for many of our documents and our scheduling, we'll use digital cameras for photos, specialized players for audio and possibly movies, consoles for video games, and so on. But you have to make those all talk together some way. This is the whole point of Apple's newer computers, the reason why they're spending so much time on i* software. That's where Linux ought to be headed. And for that, the desktop is still very important.
As for embedded devices, I'd actually really rather not see Linux there. I'd rather see a kernel better geared to embedded devices. Something extremely small, modular and effect, similar to 3DO's now defunct M2: extremely compact, fully reentrant kernel, a unique memory design where applications could read memory everywhere but write only in their own space, a file system similar to the Newton's, etc. Then let Linux be the digital hub. Hell, Linux already makes a good server, and is that not what we're looking at it becoming in the future? Imagine a world where your house is wirelessly networked, and the job of the desktop is essentially to keep everything syncrhonized. That's a server job. It's also one where you still need good desktop software. Sounds like an ideal place for Linux to me.
So the desktop wars may be in some sense over, but we'll still be using desktops for a long time to come, and I think that if Linux wants to compete, it needs to ensure it can go there.
A week ago I installed Mandrake 8.1 on the computer of a friend of mine and his wife. They are complete newbies as far as computers are concerned. After showing them where the browser and the mail program was and setting up their ISP account I turned them loose. They have been happily pointing and clicking with NO problems ever since. They agree that Linux is the best thing since the invention of beer.
Whovever says we're not ready for the desktop has their head stuck where the sun don't shine.
Here's a timeline:
- Mid-nineties: critics - Linux will never succeed in the marketplace server or desktop, it will only be used by hackers;
- Mid-nineties: Linus - we are pushing mainly for server functinality right now;
Result: late nineties: Linux starts to replace where Netwares and NTs have ruled before becoming the fastest growing server OS still only second to NT market share; also displaces different Unices, gets IBM support and is on the way to gain foothold on mainframes.- Late nineties and afterwards: ctirics - Linux is a viable server platform, but it won't be able to do any damage on the desktop
- Late nineties and afterwards: Linus - the OS is "good enough" for server for now, we'll push desktop
Result: [enter your prediction based on the precedent]Personally I still want a uniform data center (aka my PC) I can see a shift of data to Servers on the Internet like with Hotmail and .NET
But as soon as people start to have to pay for those services... I'll be happy to have all my data secured and backuped localy
One aspect of freedom is choice -- in this case, a choice of applications, a choice of tools, a choice of where your money goes. And just because Linux works well for many applications -- even on the desktop -- does not mean that Windows is *never* a good choice.
I'll lay out some cases in point from my own collection of computers.
My home has more computers than people now -- and in terms of installations, Linux is running about even with Windows. Of my three machines, two are Linux boxes (including my dual-processor IBM workstation and the Toshiba laptop), while the third is a high-end Windows 2000 box. I use the Linux workstations for software development, research, newsgroups, and simulation work, with my e-mail, word processing, and gaming on the Win2K system. It works beautifully; I don't have any hassles when clients and family send me Word files or PowerPoint presentations; why go through the effort of making such things work under Linux when I can have a Windows box at hand? On the flipside, the Linux workstation has vastly improved my coding environment, giving me scientific and exploratory applications Windows can't match. As for the laptop -- well, it ended up running Linux for strange reasons, and I now find it useful to have a portable penguin system.
My wife runs Windows 2K on her rather basic system. She spends her life in e-mail with organizations and companies that are Windows-only; if the Red Cross sends her a disaster plan as a Powerpoint presentation, she can just run it using... uh, Powerpoint. She also games like the rest of the family. I never was fond of emulators (including Wine) -- if you need Windows, why not just use Windows? Good lord, that's like doing all your "Linux" development under Cygwin... (no insult to Cygwin, of course; great product, but not a "real" Unix).
As for my daughters -- the 6 and 11 year-olds share a Windows 98 Pentium 133 that does nothing but play their education titles. No point to Linux there.
The eldest daughter runs a dual-boot system, playing games and learning Photoshop and 3DStudio under Windows while experimenting with Python, Gimp, and 3D rendering with Linux.
Okay, I understand and sympathize with the desire to rid the world of Windows; some days, the Microsoft monopoly makes me want to wipe Windows from all of my systems. I've howled invectives in the direction of Redmond... but then again, I taught my kids some new language this week while trying to get a damned onboard SCSI card working with the latest Linux kernels. Damned aic7xxx driver...
Nothing is perfect; nothing is absolute. Religious zealotry -- of the RMS variety -- turns me off, because I know that brains turn off when beliefs take precedence over rationality. It's not that I disagree with RMS so much as I find his attitude grating and disturbing. Free and open software is taking over my home without excessive conflict; we're doing it when and where it works, and not to win some ideological war.
Freedom is about choice -- if the Linux advocates truly believe in choice, they'll stop attacking those who choose Windows. Make Linux the best it can be, and stop worrying about what Microsoft is doing.
All about me
You would switch away from Windows for these reasons:
1) You don't want to be on the upgrade treadmill, in which you pay money to Microsoft every year, and continue to get software that needs more upgrades. One upgrade at $180 may be acceptable, but $180 per year amounts to $1,800 in ten years.
2) You don't want an operating system with a single point of failure: the registry. The registry is a primitive database that is, in practice, not maintainable. If something goes wrong, the suggested fix (from Microsoft) has been to re-load the operating system and all your programs and configurations and driver upgrades.
3) You are worried that some of the security risks of Windows were deliberately put there for surveillance, by order of the U.S. government. It puzzles you that the United States Department of Justice case is being settled with little or no penalty to Microsoft. Would the U.S. government do something this sneaky? Here are links to 600 pages of articles that say yes: What should be the Response to Violence?
4) You want the flexibility that comes from owning the source code. You may never use the source code, but if you have a big company, and you find some kind of problem, having the source code may be the answer. For example, if there is a bug in a driver for 1,000 pieces of equipment you own, and the manufacturer won't fix it soon enough for you, you can fix it yourself.
5) You want to avoid invasions of business privacy forced on you by Microsoft. Microsoft is requiring that the location and owner of each copy of its XP operating system be disclosed to Microsoft.
Bush's education improvements were
All the issues you mentioned are easily solved.
/path/to/program will solve most of your "have to be root" problems, though for security reasons I don't recomend it.
/usr/doc, would solve this problem straight away.
That's true. My complaint is that they shouldn't exist in the first place.
The reason the GUI doesn't report anything, is because its not its job.
So its the console's job to print these messages, but not Xs? Why is that so? What is it about desktop users (who almost invariably use X) that makes them not need to know that hdc hasn't been reponding for the last five minutes?
As for system updates, RedHats up2date and Ximian redcarpet are as easy to use as it gets, point, click and drool, while it downloads.
up2date doesn't handle installing packages off one's hard disk, cdrom or any local source. Its only repository is Red Hat updates. So I'll discount that as an option. Up2date is a maintenance tool, not a general multi-purpose software installer, which is sorely needed.
Red Carpet OTOH is great, but unforunately I can't find a way of creating my own Red Carpet repositories like I can with APT. If you can provide me with a link to such information, I'd be very grateful.
chmod +s
Exactly. I don't want everyone to be able to run the program I just want people who can run the program be asked for the relevant passwords rather than having a nasty `Kpackage needs to run as ROOT!' message thrown at them. Its not necessary and confusing for end users. Again. smart tools like the aforementioned Red Carpet and all RHs setup tools do this, but many don't.
As for the man pages, I am sure a short shell script to check for a man page, info page or something in
Exactly. Lets call it `help', and ship it with every Linux distro. Unfortunately that's not currently the case, which is my point.
Doing small things like this makes a big difference to end user experience. But thanks for your post - you've been a lot more polite than the other fellow who responded.
Mike