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The Failures Of Desktop Linux
PDAJames writes "Maybe Linux isn't quite ready for the desktop after all. After an earlier, very positive evaluation of SuSE Linux Desktop, ZDNet UK has carried out a more in-depth review, running the system in a production environment for two weeks, and found it wanting. A key problem area was interacting with the corporate Windows network. When will this stuff finally be ironed out?"
The review is pretty positive, really. They admitted they were testing the most difficult situation -- non-technical people using Linux in a Windows environment -- and were impressed on many counts.
The fact is it's probably never going to be possible to switch operating systems without some minor glitches... switching will always cost money and time, so there's got to be a good reason to do so...
Novell is certainly not dead and has greatly fallen to the fud of NT. NDS and Novell provide the best NOS administration environment period! No lpdad is not an answer because its just a protocal and not a solution.
I use to be a fan of Caldera now SCO because of the promissed Novell integration.
Now lets wait for the next release of netware which is rumoured to have a linux kernel.
Relying on active directory is writing MFC programs and expect to port them to Unix.
http://saveie6.com/
It sounds like someone was trying to set up SAMBA without reading the documentation or they were lazy in matching the networks. Having used SAMBA in a mixed SUN and Microsoft environment, it was considered a godsend from both the Windows admins and the UN*X/SUN admins.
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
Explain to your boss that your apps aren't 100 percent interoperable between customer machines. Who cares if it saves money if you've managed to frustrate everyone at your company.
A perfect example is a sales and marketing type company with IT setting the standards. When your sales people have to spend more time re-learning the system and less time selling who's going to look stupid? Definitely not the sales team.
When the target stops moving.
Which will be roughly about the same time Bovines achieve lunar orbit.
and found it wanting. A key problem area was interacting with the corporate Windows network.
Well, actually the real problem is that Windows server software is wanting: it fails to conform to standard protocols and formats. If Windows server software was built from the ground up around IMAP, XML, HTML, HTTP, WebDAV, and other such protocols, then Linux desktops and Mac desktops would work well with it. While Windows currently nominally supports many of those protocols and formats, they are second class compared to Microsoft's proprietary protocols.
What's the solution? Get rid of the Windows servers. That also lowers licensing, administrative, and maintenance costs. And Windows clients can talk fairly well to Linux servers running open source software.
Try sticking a Windows box in a totally Linux environment, and see how that goes.
No NFS support, broken kerberos support, no NIS support that I know of, no ssh client or server, no X server so no remote apps. Sure, some of these things can be purchased and installed, but most of the windows versions subpar when compared with the real thing.
This study is like putting Michael Jordan on a special olympics basketball team, and then wondering why it didn't make the NBA finals.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
companies that is.
You have this wonderful multi user OS and you use it on a single PC, arghhh.
Centralised computing is where most companies should be at, cheap disposable terminals on the desktop and a beast of a server under lock and key.
Linux will rule the enterprise desktop when companies grasp the mainfram had the right network architecture. Until then they're just wasting money.
This isn't a very meaningful comparison, because you're focusing on installation problems. Try to imagine a world where Linux is installed before you get your PC. That's more like the world of the business desktop where Linux is heading.
Having said that, my Suse 8.2 distro recognizes everything in my box, and I've got more software than I know what to do with. There always seems to be an alternative if I can't get what I want. I've recently had to do a lot of work in Windows, and day after day I find it a major struggle. This is because I've been using Linux at home since 1996 and I don't do very much in Windows. Believe me, Linux on the desktop is more a matter of your current experience. If you're not used to Windows' particular way of doing things, you wouldn't find Linux difficult. But you might if you were required to install it for yourself.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I kinda wish that existed.
Microsoft, as much as I hate them, is everywhere. The agressive approach to converting people to Linux - forcing them onto Linux computers - isn't going to work all that well. People need to get over their fears of the alien OS, and, to do that, we need to co-exist, side-by-side, until that fateful moment when the M$ system crashes and we're the only one left running.
Seriously, Linux needs to be there in front of the common end-users' eyes for a while for them to start wanting to use it. That means Linux has to be able to work in Windows environments, and it will be graded based on how well it works with other Windows machines and server setups.
Nicholas Eckert
vidstudent
Apples and oranges. Linux doesn't revolutionize the desktop, as automobiles revolutionized transportation. Linux's big selling point is that it's cheaper than Windows. If it can't interoperate or be used without more training or something of this nature, then the price advantage disappears.
Besides, the automobile took some time before it caught on everywhere--horses were still used for some purposes in WWI, and I'm sure the army wasn't the only one.
Matt
Complaining that it doesn't work well with Windows is like ... oh, say, evaluating an early automobile and complaining that there's no place to hitch up a horse
Actually a better comparison would be evaluating a car and saying it doesn't fit on the existing roads. That is a legitimate complaint when you have years and dollars tied up into your existing highway infrastructure. New technology won't be adapted unless there's no significant barrier.
Nobody is going to design a new road just to be able to run Linux... especially not in the beginning stages.
--D
Ok, there's plenty of posts that say "just get rid of Windows" as a solution to the interoperability problem. However, if I'm generous and give Apple and Linux each 10% of the desktop market, that still leaves 80% to MS. You don't throw out a product with 80% of the market just because you can't get your minority system to work correctly with it.
When will Linux take over? When it interoperates with everything, so that people can get used to using it. Then, you can slowly migrate systems as needed, instead of going all out with one system, then having to re-train all your workers, and iron out all the bugs at once.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
I didn't discover something I couldn't automatically do in Linux, and would require a day's tinkering to get working.
Barely a day goes by that I don't do something in Linux that is impossible (or very much more difficult) to do in Windows. Especially automatic things. An example: I want to check every hour to see if a website has changed. No problem, three lines of shell script in a cron job.
Yes, getting hardware set up can be tough sometimes, especially if you have brand new hardware. Sometimes the community hasn't had time to write a driver, or in the case of video cards, the manufacturer has stonewalled requests for specifications.
Getting closed source apps working on Linux can be difficult too, since there isn't much you can do to debug or fix them.
Note that most of your complaints were with closed source software, quicktime, nvidia drivers, Opera. The reason you didn't get much help with those is because there's little the community can do to support such apps.
A sidenote though, mplayer RPMs from freshrpms.net, and a quick grab of the hacked up DLLs from mplayer's site and you are set with most video formats. You can blame that one on software patents, since distros would be all over mplayer and the codecs, making it as automatic as possible, if it wouldn't open them up to huge legal liabilities.
Anyway, I guess my point is, a lot of your troubles came from issues that Slashdotters are often railing against, software patents, and proprietary software.
It's not all ideological, as you have found out, we do have practical reasons for our views. IP laws are harming Free Software development in real, tangible ways.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
An infrastructure is not ripped out and replaced in a day -- or even two. I doubt that we'll see Linux being used for wholesale replacements of corporate desktops in the near future. Until that day does come, Linux needs to play nice with the current prevailing technology. Environments are not necessarily rated as reliable or not reliable based on the individual components but on how well it works overall.
You mention that you expect a number of these kinds of responses. This is because people who manage these kinds of environments understand that Windows is here to stay for the meantime. We have a lot of critical applications that only run under Windows for which there is no open source alternative, for example.
I can't comment on how hard it was to convert from teh horse and buggy to the automobile since I have no firsthand knowledge of the event and it's problems and wouldn't presume to have such.
This may be the dumbest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. I use PCs, SUNs, and Macs on a daily basis and all three have advantages and disadvantages. To say that SUSE is so amazingly superior to windows, the operating system that 95% of the computing public chooses to use, is ludicrous. Linux has a lot of great advantages, but all types of machines on a network should be able to play together.
Case in point is my university's network. We have SUNs, HPs, Linux boxes, Windows machines, and Macs all on the same network. They all rely on machines running various OSes for file servers, etc. It all has to play nicely together.
You think its bullshit that systems should be interoperable? Well guess what, thats why Linux will be a second class OS for years to come. It isn't the top dog now, and unless it is pleasant to switch to it isn't ever going to happen.
What the poster wants is a pipe dream. Linux is not Windows, and it has it's own set of rules and design guidelines. A Unix network is a totally different beast from a NTLM/Active Directory network. THe protocols used are standard, and do not come in a package.
What teams such have Samba have done is pretty amazing by all accounts. They have gone from NOTHING, to a product which can enable a Linux server to server a Windows network without loosing many abilities.
The otherway is different. Yes a Linux computer can access Windows networks, and of course, no it won't behave just like Windows. But it does a damned mean job of accessing NFS shares.
You have to keep in perspective what we fight against. Creating interoperbility with Windows is chasing a moving target. MS will keep adding new things, like differnet encryption in XP, different encryption in Server 2003, and we will keep playing catch up.
This is a never ending cycle. For Linux to "win" the desktop, we need a clear goal of our own set that has advangates over Windows.
Yes, we need interoperbility, and we have that. It's not hard to set up a Linux SMB server, move Windows shares to it, and map it out over Samba and NFS, but it isn't plug and play, and probably never will be.
What it gives us though is a stepping block in order to migrate other boxes. Once Windows is out of the picture (as it is at my company), 100% interoperbility ceases to matter, and it becomes WIndows that needs to interoperate with us.
My two cents.
Until you try to hook things up to an MS domain. That's where it always falls apart.
People forget, but there was a time when there were other word processors besides Word. In fact, many of them had bizarre and confusing interfaces (Wordperfect for DOS, anyone?) When people had to do the inevitable switch to something new, they may have been befuddled for a while, but eventually, they got the hang of it.
I really don't think the issue is user acceptance near as much as ADMINISTRATOR acceptance. To get that, you're going to have to play nice with the existing infrastructure (after all, it was there first).
People can adjust to OpenOffice - we've done it here. But to replace our domain system with Linux would be near impossible. Forget the investments we'd be throwing out the door - think about all the other things like mapped shares, home directories, etc. It would be a massive undertaking to recreate all of that for very little reward.
I know MS plays their little games of half-assed interoperablility ("Windows 2000 is now based on LDAP and Kerberos! Well... Except for these little changes...") But if Linux is going to want to compete it's going to have to try harder.
Xandros has done this, but it's closed source. Kinda defeats the purpose, no?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The problems you encountered (sound card, nVidia) are 100% installation issues.
They have nothing to do with Linux being ready for the desktop. I can install brand new hardware in an XP box and Windows will not know how to handle it. That is, until I install the drivers from the manufacturer. But that doesn't mean XP isn't ready for the desktop, does it?
If you had purchased a computer with Linux pre-installed, you would not have had those problems. If you had only purchased components with good Linux support, you would not have had those problems.
Those driver issues will only be solved when Linux has 50%+ of the desktop market. That's plain economics. The vidoe card manufacturers don't all support Linux to the same degree.
And claiming something should work with Linux because it is "from the most popular manufacturer out there" shows your lack of understanding. It doesn't matter how popular a manufacturer is. It matters how well that manufacturer works with the Linux community.
This is why Microsoft needs to be forced to open up its protocols. The DOJ settlement partly does this, but I think you need to pay money to see the code?
Samba is good but with each new Windows release they insert more proverbial spanners.
That't not the big advantage for me. The big advantage is that I don't have to *accept* the XP EULA. I want to own my computer, not just use it to house software that somebody else is letting me use for a while, under terms that they can choose to change at anytime. I won't tolerate that.
To say that SUSE is so amazingly superior to windows, the operating system that 95% of the computing public chooses to use, is ludicrous.
Hold it right there, pal.
To say that 95% of the computing public chooses to use Windows is ludicrous.
Fact is the vast majority of Windows users did not choose it, it was simply preinstalled.
Furthermore, the fact that most people use Windows does not make Windows superior, nor does it preclude another product from being superior to Windows.
The basics of Active Directory have been around now for almost 4 years. I contend that it's not that it can't be done, but that it hasn't been the focus of the Samba group.
Want proof? Xandros HAS done it. They have Domain support out of the box. Of course, it's closed source...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I don't see what the problem is.
My Mandrake laptop plugs in quite well. This box has run with Wins configurations, DHCP, and Netware with no problems. It's run on private sector and government networks. Anyone who's ever plugged in to a government network knows how quirky they can be. Yet still no problems
In fact, I can't think of the last time my TCPIP stack got corrupted in Linux (or any major problems for that matter). Although, it happened to me in XP last week. It sounds to me that the people writing the article didn't have the tools needed to make a fair comparison. This is not the fault of Linux. Rather, the fault of the editors at C|Net for letting this stinker through.
The beauty of SQL is that it's incredibly easy to migrate from one database engine to another.
You have an ease-of-use bonus because Access is so ridiculously featureless, so it's not like you're losing your stored procedures and triggers like if you were switching from SQL Server/MSDE to PostgreSQL or Interbase.
As for training, I think someone else already mentioned, but most people don't really know how to use "Windows" anyway; your average computer user is too clueless to know how to remove a program he's installed. The issue isn't navigating the operating system itself, but the programs they'd be using. Mozilla/Konqueror do a beautiful job of intuitive use, and OpenOffice's look being not very unlike Microsoft Word/Excel eases that transition tremendously too.
I think the real problem most corporations are having is finding a suitable replacement for group policies and user permissions. I know this is one of the goals of GNOME, so I'm going to lay off of them there, but most corporations don't want their users screwing with many settings -- it dramatically reduces IT department staffing needs. I mean, even ACLs aren't implemented in any stable kernel yet (though I'm aware they will be in 2.6.x), and these are important when you have 5,000 employees of different access levels accessing the same shares of a file server in the datacenter.
Versatile: No question. Simply look at the number of architectures that Linux will run on compared with Windows. From the IBM Linux wristwatch to a scattering of top 500 supercomputers. Linux is well represented across the a wide range. API versatility is there too. From win32 (via winelib) to POSIX to Java libraries. Probably 90% of Windows software runs perfectly well or has a functional replacement for Linux. The converse is certainly not true!
Reliability: No argument there. It seems to be a curse/truism that all large software projects have bugs, but the architecure of unix/linux is undoubtably more reliable than the mish-mash that is Windows. Not to mention the bugs the MS themselves introduce. DRDOS anyone? Does it concern anyone that MS's attempts at crippling competitors' products might have an unwanted side-effect of reducing stability of their core product?
Security: Security wasn't even on the radar for MS, until recently. The notion of provably secure architecure is simply incompatible with closed-source, marketing driven software.
Power: I think my comment on 'versatility' mostly covers this. For a more concrete example, take an arbitary shell script from Linux, and try to replicate the functionality from the Windows shell.
NOT Microsoft: This is probably the point that caused the Flaimbait moderation. But, surely choice is good as an end in itself? Software ought to be a commodity, and even if Microsoft software was a bastion of technical excellence, having a choice is nothing but beneficial.
Sounds like microsoft's strategy. Make subtle deviations in the networking protocols from published standards so other OS's don't play well together. Everyone knows that a standard that microsoft adopts isn't the exact same as the published standard.
For example you have W3 HTML and IE HTML. You have Java and you have MS Java. If anyone using a non-windows box has problems running a java program or applet, and you can't figure it out, odds are it was written with a microsoft program.
Though I've known this for a long time, it keeps hitting home every weekend as I travel to a small town flea market and sell used systems + offer cheap system repair and troubleshooting.
Most people out there simply want to buy a computer that runs "all the stuff I run across on the store shelves". I've tried selling perfectly good used PowerMac systems and run into this, just like I run into this if I have Linux pre-loaded on a PC that I put up for sale.
You find roughly 1 in 100 people who praise the fact that you're using Linux (or a Mac for that matter), and they typically spend the next 5 or 10 minutes chatting with you about the superiority of your choice, etc. Then they walk off without buying. (They've already got plenty of computer stuff at home.)
To the general public, Linux being "ready for the desktop" simply means it'll easily let them install and run all the "bargain bin" software on CD-ROM they picked up at Costco or WalMart, their copy of Microsoft Office they paid hundreds of dollars for a few years ago, and they really want to buy after they get their new computer.
This is, ultimately, why Linux won't ultimately be ready for "the desktop" for years and years, if ever. Apple still can't seem to pull off even a consistent 5% market share, and they have hundreds of commercially available software titles!
Oh, for crying out loud. It's not THAT bad. Yes, the open source and Gnu/Linux communities have better intentions than a giant corporation, but that doesn't mean Windows is really all that bad.
I will admit, during the Windows9X days, using Microsoft products was a joke. But I can honestly say Windows XP is a good operating system. What more do you want it to do? It does everything I want it to. The only times it crashed were when I didn't have the right drivers installed for my hardware (old versions). I can get the same thing to happen in Linux (or any OS) if I screw up the drivers. The OS detects USB devices immediately after they're plugged in. It doesn't hog all my resources (maybe if you have a 300mhz CPU, 64mb of RAM and a 2gb hard drive, it doesn't work too well... but if you have a 300mhz CPU, 64mb of RAM and a 2gb hard drive, you shouldn't be complaining that you can't run the latest software on your 6+ year old machine) and I have no problems installing anything.
Microsoft supplies users with an after-distribution set of utilities called XP PowerToys, including a special calculator, web cam stuff, more system configuration (TweakUI), alt-tab replacement, "Open command window here" (like Ctrl-T in KDE). They make the OS easily more usable.
Bootvis.exe makes Windows boot faster. A lot faster, in my case. The only thing that sucks is that you have to reboot when you install some things. That was one of the nice things about Linux, being able to restart the X server instead of having to reboot. Sometimes in Linux you didn't have to reboot at all. Kernel patching amazes me.
I think the only thing that would make you zealots like Microsoft Windows was if you replace Microsoft with "Not Microsoft" and Windows with "Linux".
Windows XP
Pros:
You can actually play games(when they come out).
Cons:
Costs money, you have to activate it, which is a pain in the ass
Linux
Pros:
Free
Whatever that other guy said, secure, versatile, yeah, yeah
Cons:
Can't play games (right away).
All in all, I rest my case on the following: I can go to the store on the release date of any game and pick it up, bring it home, and find myself playing it within 10 minutes.
That is one thing I cannot say for Linux. (And I'd like to say that I love Linux, I use it for a server for all my game images, installers for both OSs, and I'm trying to master using Debian at the moment.)
I work in tech support, and in doing so I've learned...
most home users choose Windows
a startling number of people have no idea what is on their computer, and.....
Linux is too difficult for most non-geeks
Windows XP is too difficult for most non-geeks.
Linux is different than Windows, and only more difficult when it doesn't come preinstalled.