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Perens: Unite behind Debian, UserLinux
An anonymous readers writes "Infoworld is running a report on the Desktop Linux Conference, at which Bruce Perens suggested that in order to get Linux to the enterprise desktop, the Linux community should base their efforts on one single distribution... based on Debian.
Perens went on to say that enterprises will be willing to pay Linux companies to engineer versions of Linux to suit their needs, but that the base distro should remain free. He suggested that by 2006, 30% of enterprise desktops will run Linux." Here is a wired story with more information about his proposed UserLinux project.
If they're running Debian, then that's great. But you need to put Linux into the hands of the masses if you want to take over the desktop and the best way to do that is to seed the planet with Linux Live CD's with the same fury that AOL soils the planet with their CD's.
No gcc, no including twelve different versions of AWK; just the kernel, KDE or Gnome (pick just one), OpenOffice, games, and all the rest of the shit that makes everything go.
Right now, when you say "Linux" to a layperson, they don't know what the fuck you're talking about. A Live CD is a painless way for them to find out.
We can rebuild him. We have the technology.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
This is good thinking. Allthough i have been a long time SuSE user (you can tell by my spelling :-) but with the recent developments i think that the only other viable alternative (sorry Mandrake) for the future will be a single base on which commercial companies can build their own desktop distro. This way all base functionality remains available for everyone.
This focus on smaller sample groups is nice to see. It is quite obvious that in certain situations, Linux has some major advantages over Windows. In my experience, web applications (Apache+PHP+MySQL) and embedded systems are good examples.
In support of the above quote, I find it highly unlikely that Linux will be able to spur a "mass conversion" -- but that probably wouldn't be the best course of action anyway. I imagine that a better way would be to focus on a relatively small sample group and let the versatility of Linux convince people that it's a good choice. If the product is as good as many think it is, then the conversion of the masses may be inevitable. Time will tell.
Whilst reading all of the recent dropping of Red Hat Linux and purchasing of SuSE etc. I did wonder if this would lead to a boost for Debian. Take the Fedora project, for example. It seems madness to contribute to this over Debian, since with Fedora you really are just beta testing Red Hat Enterprise edition for them - the whole 'giving back to the community' thing is better handled by Debian since that is not meant for feeding back into commercial distributions.
So yes - I have to agree. Debian would seem to be the way to go following the absorbtion of the big names. Let Red Hat do its own work in getting rpms ready for RHE 16.8 or what have you - concentrate your efforts on improving things for the community at large instead.
Cheers,
Ian
Especially with Redhat's latest retreat into their proprietary turtle shell, I'd love to have Debian certified for apps like Oracle, etc. This issue has also come up recently among OpenACS developers.
It seems like there has been allot of anti-Redhat FUD lately. While I have always been a Debian fan, and I agree that every distro maker should base their distro on Debian, all this crap about Redhat leaving a hole in the consumer market because they made Redhat Linux a community project that is still heavily guided and sponsered by Redhat... that just smacks of anti-Redhat FUD.
Truth is that Redhat Linux 10 was released several days ago, and for trademark reasons it is called Fedora Core 1. Anyone who has used Redhat 8.x or Redhat 9.x, will be able to tell that Fedora Core 1 is Redhat 10.
I would love to see one internet based community developed meta-distrution of Linux, with one comprehensive package repository. This would be the Linux standard. Then companies that want to make a newbie-friendly Linux could cherry-pick the best software packages, make custom themes, and tweak everything and also provide support.
In my opinion, the thing that Redhat 8 through Fedora Core 1 do really great is that they cherry-picked a nice set of software packages, made a nice theme for the desktop, and put everything together into one nice coherent package.
Note that the good things that Redhat does with its distro do not conflict with having a Debian-foundation, and the fact that Redhat has decided to fracture the internet community because it refuses to have Fedora Core 1 be a customized Debian is just plain silly!
Other distros have shown the power of using a Debian based core: Knoppix, Libranet, and Lindows, to name 3 distros, all accomplish something slightly different.
1. Knoppix is a live CD based Linux distro with completely automatic hardware detection. Knoppix is a great toy, a great way to advertise Linux, and it makes for an uber rescue disk.
2. Libranet aims at being a general purpose desktop/server distro, and it adds value by greatly simplifying the installation and maintenance of the OS.
3. Lindows is supposed to be a newbie friendly / user-friendly Linux distro that emulates the look-n-feel of Windows. It is aimed at a large target market of casual computer users that want to save a few bucks.
So please tell me why Redhat couldn't use a Debian foundation for Fedora Core? All they had to do was create a small community layered ontop of the Debian community. Their job would be to cherry-pick software packages from the comprehensive apt repository that Debian already has, and integrate it all into one coherent system by tweaking settings and theming applications.
In conclusion, lets drop this Redhat ditched desktop Linux crap, and focus on the fact that Redhat is duplicating effort by not basing their community developed distro on Debian. It is starting to remind me of Christianity with its many demoninations.
but how do you deal with the things that are the core of linux?
if you install apache from sources it installs in a location that is NOT where redhat and Debian put it. Slackware and Gentoo are the only ones that dont screw it up.
get your standard's base going, then FORCE developers to use it. if the asshats that are making GNUbutts2.0 refuse to make it install where it is supposed to go be sure to announce to the world that they are baing asshats.
and try to get linus on the line and not allow any distro that does not adhere to the standard base to call it's self linux.
vEver since Gnome 2.4 was released, I have found more and more gnome zealots who MUST absolutely advocate GNOME at every possible moment. Here is a guide to some of their claims, and what they really mean.
/gnu/celeron gnu/packard gnu/bell gnu/box.
Unlike KDE, Gnome is free
Translation : GPL is freerer than LGPL. LGPL allows corporations like Novell and Sun to have propeitry forks and lock away their changes from the user. Now that Novell has taken over Ximian you can expect Gnome to get put under corpirate lock. With KDE you have the choice, you either PAY UP or pay with your source code.
Nautilus is much better than konqueror.
Wrong, if your using nautilus for anything more than a simple finder clone you can forget it. No split screen, no ioslaves and forget about being able to have a decent file dialog, not to forget that it is as unstable as hell and is STILL slow on >3 Ghz machines.
Gnome is easier to use
Yep, nothing like using gconf-editor to edit all except the most trivial of settings.
Gnome has eye candy
Yes, my pirated Win32 fonts with the patent infringing font renderer. Bit stream vera sans looks like Tahoma put through a shreadder! Of course I still reboot into windows to print using "Comic Sans MS.
Gnome has a new web browser
Yawb! Along with Galeon, mozilla, thunderbird, konqueror, atlantis, lynx, netscape and w3m. Yes I need another browser! Not to mention that its got a religiously offensive name and it dosen't allow bookmark folders. It also crashes like a crazy! Apple chose khtml for a REASON! its stable and light!
Gnome is themeable
Yep, choose from High, low and medium contrast, default, and clean ice. Wan't to change the colour scheme? USE GCONF NOOB, plus if you complain about it we will tell you to fuck off and go back to Windows or KDE.
Gnome has multimedia framework
Its a kludge of esd combined with broken xine libraries. No wonder it crashes all the time and dosen't work on 95% of video files
Gnome allows mac like operation.
x86 compatible 1 button mice are almost impossible to find, and it dosen't copy the whole macbar concept. Not to even mention their auto apply implementation is broken and dangerous! Plus if they did actually come anywhere close to copying the Mac the C&D letters would come flying up their asses.
Gnome is GNU software.
gnu/Yay, gnu/gnome gnu/for gnu/my gnu/debian gnu/linux gnu/500mhz
Inspired by the gentoo translate-o-matic.
For this purpose, commercial distributions such as SuSE and RedHat exist.
One size does not fit all.
The market will decide as and when Linux is ready for the corporate desktop, and in what form.
Microsoft is doing a marvellous job already of comitting suicide due to over-pricing its software, shoddy quality and vulnerabilities to malicious code.
Linux has been doing just fine for my personal computing needs since 1996. If corporate America (or anywhere else for that matter) wants to enjoy the privilege of using Linux, it can make like the rest of us and make an effort.
Stick Men
Also, a lot of IT managers don't know what Linux can do for them. Some IT manager working in a big TV/movies company was surprised to learn that mplayer was able to read Windows Media 9, Realplayer, quicktime
And that's not an isolated case ; a lot of sys admins responsible for office computers don't even know that OpenOffice exists, or they believe that it's broken, or clunky
I need a stable release that evolves a few times a year, so that I can read reviews and decide when it's time to migrate to keep up to date. Debian only offers the choice between a year-old distribution several major releases out of date that nothing will compile on, and a testing release that moves on a daily basis, often jumping several versions back or eliminating a package entirely.
I also need a GUI installer, so I don't have to hold people's hands through the install. Nobody should ever have to use dselect, unless they're migrating from DOS.
The thing that upsets me the most about Debian is that the stable release is not always stable. The package for Galeon has been broken for a year now. The download manager for the Woody version crashes constantly, though the bug in Galeon was fixed well over a year ago. My choice now is between the unstable stable version and the completely unstable unstable version that stopped working entirely for me around 1.3.9 (yes I filed a Debian bug report). The testing version has since disappeared.
There have been numerous stable Galeon versions since last year on two separate branches, but I don't have an option to roll back to a useful version because stable is hosed and testing is gone. This ultimately caused me to give up on Galeon and just download the Firebird binary and install it by hand. So much for the wonders of apt-get.
Debian needs to either step up its glacial pace or make testing an honest milestone release before Perens starts touting it as an industry standard. I'm thankful there's still competition from organizations that put Linux usability over Open Source ideology.
Amen, Brother! :)
;)
Personally, I run Debian Testing (Sarge) on my desktop, and Debian Stable (Woody) on my firewall. One of the nice things about Stable is that in general, the only updates are security-related. That means you can set apt-get update; apt-get upgrade in a daily cron, and not worry too much about pooching your system. Doing so under the Unstable branch (and to a lesser degree, Testing) would make life...uhm...interesting.
At work, our admin is a big Gentoo devotee. The package system is nice in it's own way. I was fond of the FreeBSD ports system back in the day, but Gentoo's ports seem to have a lot of breakage (broken packages, missing files, bad MD5 sums, etc) compared to the Debian apt sources. I suspect this is mostly due to the monumental volunteer effort into Debian's package maintenance.
On the other hand, I find Gentoo's support for Java packages/tools is significantly better than Debian's...Probably more due to licensing issues than technical, but it would be nice to have a Debian equivalent to "java-config --set-user-vm"
YMMV...
I just want to take over the world...Why does that automatically make me EVIL?
Just to give you a little background, I've been running Linux at home, starting with Slackware, moving to Red Hat, and trying out Debian, for 7 years. I've managed a remote datacenter of 10 Linux boxes with nothing but ssh and the occasional use of a cyclades terminal server for when things get really fubar (like the nfs server got a little hosed and i couldn't log into anything remotley). So I'm no stranger to building my own kernels and configuring hardware by hand, I just find Debian makes it so much harder than it needs to be.
She prefers it to windows xp because "it has better games", "cooler menus", and "no blue screens!"
Windows XP blue screens? What are you trying to run it on, a p200? I think I've seen my win2k install blue screen like 2 or 3 times in as many years. I've also never seen (or heard people complaining about) XP blue screening.
Oh, but maybe it's all those memories of windows 95/NT from when she was what, 4?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Did you try the Knoppix CD? This is possibly the best hardware detection in the Linux world and allows easy install of Debian right from the disc.
I switched to RedHat Linux back in March--a few months after buying a brand new laptop that had hardware specs that would have made it 3 times faster than my previous laptop but it actually ran the same apps SLOW (i.e., I had Office 2000 on my old laptop and installed Office 2000 on my new laptop and it was slower). Yes, the old laptop ran Win98 and the new one ran XP.
I had been running a Linux desktop on my home office server and used it as my file/print server and my stereo system. I'd thought about trying to installing it on my laptop but was sure it would fail miserably. Finally, after months of frustration of my new laptop running slower than my old laptop I ordered a brand new hard drive for my laptop. I yanked the pre-installed XP hard drive, installed the new hard drive and installed RedHat on it. Worked perfectly. It was no harder to install than Win98 (can't speak to WinXP, I've never installed that). Detected everything fine including my USB keyboard and mouse and inserted LinkSys 802.11b PCMCIA card. For my legacy Windows apps I bought Win4Lin so I can run Windows under Linux. The few Windows apps that I actually still use actually run faster under Win4Lin under Linux than they did under WinXP! And I still ahve the original XP hard drive in case anything ever goes wrong with the laptop hardware--I'll just stick the XP HD back in before I take it in for warranty work so they don't freak out.
Now, about 8 months later, I'm still on Linux on my desktop. Yes, I do miss being able to go to BestBuy and buy any old piece of hardware without checking first to make sure it's supported by Linux.
Sometimes I even think, "What the heck... I'll just go back to Windows." Then I think about the speed hit I'll take. I think about the crashing problems (I had more crashes under XP in the 3 months I had XP on my new machine than in the 2 years I had 98 on my previous laptop). I think about having to worry again about Microsoft's latest DRM plan and whether they'll let me continue to use my computer in the way I want [I used the DVD player on my laptop twice under XP, one with a region 4 DVD and once with a region 1 DVD. Windows told me I could only "switch" regions 4 more times and that was it. No such problem under Linux]. I think about the viruses that used to be a threat and all the security problems of last summer that I totally was able to ignore. I think about the fact that I'm 100% legit on my licenses and can safely tell the BSA or anyone else to take a leap. I think about the fact that my Linux install came with OpenOffice that does MORE than MS Office [at least more useful. I'm sure MS Office has some features I don't use or care about, but OpenOffice came with a PDF converter built in... no need to buy a PDF converter or Destiller... and every Word document I've opened has only required minor pagination adjustments and has saved to a file that is 10% as large as the original Word document].
Windows is a drug. It's easy to be tempted to use it. But I'm on Linux and am not going back to Windows. At some point I'll need a new laptop (I have an HP laptop so, of course, it's not eternal)--but I'll be installing Linux on that too. Or maybe go to a Mac... But Windows? Nah, I've had enough.
Sure Debian is stable compared to others, but too OLD and STALE.....old gcc, old kernel, old etc.... my partners & I found we couldn't use it in my startup business (using RedHat 8 for now, but trying to figure out what's next). Fedora has the problem of the other extreme, too bleeding edge with unknown stability. So, to find a business-class distro, that has free ISO's available for testing technology of next release, I'm wondering if Mandrake might fit the bill. Anyway, if Debian moved just a little faster, would be a great thing.
First, let me agree with the previous poster who said that if they want games, they should buy a console system.
Next, let me point out that Gamers have system requirements that far exceed those of "average home users". These requirements are usually measured in FPS or in Mb of video card RAM.
Finally, let me point that many people have claimed that "average home users" (i.e. my grandmother) want to:
Given that KDE and Gnome are both eminently qualified to support that short list of applications (on eight-year-old hardware, no less), then why in the name of all that's holy shouldn't the "average home user" be running a Linux box?!? New systems are available for less than $300; $200 if you'll use a cable modem or DSL!! Toss on an extra $100 if you have to buy a new monitor, or get one at ebay.