More Linux Predictions for 2004

An anonymous reader writes "Experts, shmexperts - it's time for the Linux community's own predictions, felt the editors of LinuxWorld Magazine. Prognostications in their Jan 2004 round-up cover media players ('turning your phone into an iPod will be hot by the end of 2004'), IPOs ('Of course, LinuxCertified, Inc'), and MS ('Microsoft will start an intensive campaign to promote their Longhorn technology as Linux standards compliant') - that last is one from Samba's John Terpstra." The original story was back in November.

Comments

my first prediction is a CLIT FP

[Sexual Asspussy]

#2 - Linus comes out of closet
#3 - SCO cleans up in the courts

Linux prediction for 2004

[AriesGeek]

It will continue to suck.

Love Always,
News For Turds

Re:Linux prediction for 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

Be sure to send an email to aries@ariesgeek.com and let him know how much you appreciate his wasted trolling. He's probably a GNAA member too, so any gay niggers should hit on him.

My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU/HURD makes Linux obsolete.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, no. Not because the HURD kernel is unlikely to be finished this year (though that's true as well), but because what you said makes no sense whatsoever.

Firstly, GNU/HURD is redundant. GNU is an operating system whose official kernel is HURD. You only need the /kernel when the kernel being used is something other than HURD, eg Linux. Obviously if you were to run a variant of BSD using the HURD kernel, you'd want to use the / notation too, eg "OpenBSD/HURD". Why you'd want to do the latter I can't say, but that's what you'd do. But the point is, GNU with the HURD operating system is called GNU.

GNU being a complete operating system, it wouldn't make "Linux" obsolete. It might however make "GNU/Linux" obsolete.

What I suspected you meant to write was "HURD makes Linux obsolete" or perhaps even "GNU HURD makes Linux obsolete" (GNU in this case refering to ownership, rather than combinations - note the lack of a slash in this case.) This makes sense - you're replacing one kernel (Linux) with another (HURD) rather than kernel with a redundantly-named operating system. You might alternatively have meant to write "GNU makes GNU/Linux obsolete", where you're writing that an operating system makes another operating system obsolete.

Of course, the prediction, even when rewritten to make sense, seems a tad unlikely to me, but, well, whatever.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

But the point is, GNU with the HURD operating system is called GNU.

That should, of course, have read "HURD with the GNU operating system is called GNU". My apologies.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you so angry? What is the real reason?

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

HURD with the GNU operating system is called "useless waste of hard drive space"

Re:My Prediction:

[Overly Critical Guy]

I've been reading the Linux predictions for every new year, and every year, time passes and nothing revolutionary happens.

I remember in 1998 when Linux was supposed to "surpass Windows on the desktop." I've been hearing it every year since, as well as Linux being "desktop-ready."

Please, hurry up! I really, really want to use it and not be forced to go to OS X for a UNIX desktop. But I have a feeling we'll be stuck in GNOME/KDE world for another 5-10 years.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

There was evidence to prove that Overly Critical Guy is a lyingcocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've been reading the Linux predictions for every new year, and every year, time passes and nothing revolutionary happens."

Interesting. I too have been following the Linux industry for many years, and perhaps my eyes are more open. For instance, the world's largest computer company fully positioning itself behind Linux and allocating $1 billion was certainly a "revolutionary" development.

Sun Microsystems getting a contract to deploy Linux on 500,000 - 1 million desktops in China was definitely "revolutionary". But you don't think those are?

Or was your poorly-worded, vague and ambiguous comment directed at actual desktop apps? Because, you see, Linux developers can't win with such people. There are plenty of small projects out there attempting to make a "revolutionary" desktop, but the vast majority of people want something that works similar to Windows. If all distros went with something like TreeWM, you'd be blasting the community for making things too unapproachable and strange.

In short, you lose. And normally I don't reply to sad trolls who clearly have nothing better to do in their lives, but this is just in case someone else is reading who really believes that IBM and Sun's moves weren't massively revolutionary.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly OCG.

Microsoft's monopoly collapsed years ago, and it's obsolete anyways, since there are computers that cost less than $350.

ESR and the rest of the crew really have their hand on the pulse of the tech community.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux does continue to make modest but solid progress in the server area, but nothing close to the "world domination" bullshit we hear every year from the fan boys. Put a sock in it, you might get a few more servers this year, and that's about it. Oh, other than all the "revolutionary" stuff that nobody apparently wants.

Go Linux!

Re:My Prediction:

[Overly Critical Guy]

Your overreactive reply is amusing. I didn't claim that Linux didn't make progress this year, but I was merely pointing out that every year, I hear all these grand predictions about the leaps and bounds Linux will make, and at the end of the year, it feels like we've gone full-circle and are still chasing the tails of Microsoft, or upgrading to the latest point release of KDE, or whatever.

I don't deny those were great victories for Linux this year, but I'm talking about the predictions made.

Or was your poorly-worded, vague and ambiguous comment directed at actual desktop apps? Because, you see, Linux developers can't win with such people.

Sure, they can. I fully believe Linux will have a superior desktop in this decade. It's just taking a REALLY long time.

There are plenty of small projects out there attempting to make a "revolutionary" desktop, but the vast majority of people want something that works similar to Windows. If all distros went with something like TreeWM, you'd be blasting the community for making things too unapproachable and strange.

Yes, I would. What does TreeWM have to do with this? I want Linux to be the ultimate desktop. This means not working with something similar to Windows (while in the same breath, criticizing Windows and Microsoft in every article).

To the person who modded me as Troll: Next time, reply with your disagreement instead of censoring my opinion just because you don't agree with it. I'll rationally debate with you, believe it or not!

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

I want Linux to be the ultimate desktop.

Are you supporting any of the existing projects or are you working on one of your own? Surely you aren't just a lazy whiner?

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

"it feels like we've gone full-circle and are still chasing the tails of Microsoft"

"We've"? Since when have you, OCG, been among the "we" supporting and backing Linux? You sound like so many, meandering around with your quasi-intellectual rhetoric, blasting Linux and then... when you realise this Linux thing _is_ going to be big, making a subtle about-turn.

You suck huge, massive sweaty panda scrotums, OCG. I'd pick some quotes from your posting history to show how this "I want Linux to succeed" image is complete nonsense, and how silly you look.

Get out more.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

There was evidence to prove that Overly Critical Guy is a lying cocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

To the person who modded me as Troll: Next time, reply with your disagreement instead of censoring my opinion just because you don't agree with it. I'll rationally debate with you, believe it or not!

You were marked as a troll because you are a troll. You are totally incapable of rational debate because you think that your opinions are facts.

BTW, nobody buys the "I'm just a poor guy who likes linux and wants what's best for everyone" gag. You're a MS apoligist and an opponent of all things open source. Give it up. Nobody believes you now that you're crying "wolf."

Re:My Prediction:

[RoLi]

I remember in 1998 when Linux was supposed to "surpass Windows on the desktop."

Oh, please provide some evidence for your wild claims.

I've been hearing it every year since, as well as Linux being "desktop-ready."

It certainly is desktop-ready. *IF* the applications are there, Linux takes over. Just look at the 3d-modelling world which has gone over to Linux almost completely. If the applications are not there, Windows stays in place, obviously. That's why all the gamers are running Windows and will do so for a while.

This has nothing to do with Linux on the technical side. Linux certainly is desktop ready and has been so for quite some time, no matter what Trolls like Overly Critical Guy claim. (Actually the Windows-GUI is quite primitive and horrible to work with once you are used to Unix-style copy/paste, 3-mouse button GUI-support and multiple desktops)

It all depends on the applications. As some cities migrate to Linux and governmental apps get ported to Linux, the migration gets easier, faster and cheaper for other cities and the migration accelerates.

Linux will take one market segment after another, it will take years, not just one year and governments and coroporations will be long running Linux before home users and gamers, just like WinNT was used long before in business than at home, but in the end Linux will take over the desktop just like it took over embedded systems and is taking over servers.

I remember people like Overly Critical Guy:

1993: Linux will never be useful for anything
1995: Linux will never be useful for anything except webservers
1997: Linux will never be useful for anything except webservers and fileservers
1999: Linux will never be useful for anything except for webservers, printservers, fileservers and clusters
2001: Linux will never be useful for anything except for webservers, printservers, fileservers, clusters and embedded systems
2003: Linux will never be useful for anything except for webservers, printservers, fileservers, clusters, embedded systems, 3d-modelling and mainframes

Overly Critical Guy, you look like the catholic church fighting science. You condemn Linux but have to take a little bit every year. Of course you never admit that you were wrong. Of course you never have any evidence (like for that ridiculous "Linux overtaking Windows in 1998" claim). And of course you don't realize that every year your beloved Microsoft loses one little bit of grip.

My prediction for 2005:

Overly Critical guy:

Linux will never be useful for anything except for webservers, printservers, fileservers, clusters, embedded systems, 3d-modelling, mainframes, government desktops and cellphones.

Re:My Prediction:

[RoLi]

To the person who modded me as Troll: Next time, reply with your disagreement instead of censoring my opinion just because you don't agree with it. I'll rationally debate with you, believe it or not!

Yeah, sure. Debating with you is like talking to an undercover Microsoft sales representative and for all I know you might as well be. Wouldn't be the first time Microsoft is paying people to pollute web forums with shameless pro-MS propaganda.

Re:My Prediction:

[hdparm]

The thing is... he should nave been marked as moron, which he is and not as troll which he clearly is not.

He is expressing lame and biased opinion (over-and-over again), which isn't based on facts but on half-assed bullshit and FUD. Being troll takes some creativity, plenty of humour and plenty of knowledge. He does not have any of it.

To prediction now: 2004 will be the most successful year for Linux and Free software so far. Platform has greatly improved and is mature, robust and dependable upon. Few available desktop offers are awesome (Fedora, Xandros, latest Mandrake and SuSE) and Linux will gain more share on this market as well. It seems that big corporate / government IS decision makers are finally willing to give Linux/OSS a real try, rather than to only listen. And you know what - that one try is all Linux needs - once you saw it going, you'll never go back to whatever you used before.

Re:My Prediction:

[Xpilot]

Sure, they can. I fully believe Linux will have a superior desktop in this decade. It's just taking a REALLY long time.

For me, Linux is the superior desktop already. It has been for the past 3 years. It's not as hideous or as insulting to use as WinXP, which others claim in all seriousness is "superior" to Linux desktops because of its "integration and usability". Whatever the hell that means. To each his own.

The majority of people who complain that the Linux desktop sucks is the ones who get the hang-ups over "integration" and the fact that Linux does not work like Windows does. For me, I couldn't care less about integration, and the fact that it doesn't work like Windows is a feature, not a bug.

Re:My Prediction:

[Overly Critical Guy]

From your post, I draw the conclusion that you disagree with my opinion simply because it is consistent over time. How is it lame and biased to point out that grand predictions for Linux are made every year and not always fulfilled? Do you wish to hear no criticism ever?

To prediction now: 2004 will be the most successful year for Linux and Free software so far. Platform has greatly improved and is mature, robust and dependable upon. Few available desktop offers are awesome (Fedora, Xandros, latest Mandrake and SuSE) and Linux will gain more share on this market as well. It seems that big corporate / government IS decision makers are finally willing to give Linux/OSS a real try, rather than to only listen. And you know what - that one try is all Linux needs - once you saw it going, you'll never go back to whatever you used before.

I've been hearing it since 1998. It's simply not true, and never fulfills itself every year in which I hear it. Sorry.

Re:My Prediction:

[Overly Critical Guy]

For me, Linux is the superior desktop already. It has been for the past 3 years. It's not as hideous or as insulting to use as WinXP,

Do you know how to change themes?

which others claim in all seriousness is "superior" to Linux desktops because of its "integration and usability". Whatever the hell that means. To each his own.

That means everything from cut-and-paste actually working to programs installing and removing themselves without resorting to underlying system package managers like RPMs.

The majority of people who complain that the Linux desktop sucks is the ones who get the hang-ups over "integration" and the fact that Linux does not work like Windows does.

Incorrect. The majority of people who complain that the Linux desktop sucks are ones who simply point out that it is poorly designed and not properly implemented. And, believe it or not, people desire an integrated system. I don't understand opposition to that.

The criticisms also stem from the fact that it is often TOO much like Windows. KDE, for instance.

For me, I couldn't care less about integration, and the fact that it doesn't work like Windows is a feature, not a bug.

I have yet to see any paradigm shift away from the Windows-like imitations any time soon.

Re:My Prediction:

[Overly Critical Guy]

It appears I have riled a frothing fanboy. Barring the fact that your rantings are amusing in themselves, I'll reply point by point to explain my perspective.

Oh, please provide some evidence for your wild claims.

You don't believe people were saying this in 1998? Every year, I have heard that "Linux will surpass Windows in the desktop," and it never does. This has been going on for many years, particularly on Slashdot. I don't need to provide claims for simple statements and opinion made years ago. It's common knowledge.

It certainly is desktop-ready.

No, it is absolutely, 100% not. What you see as "desktop-ready" is really a bunch of graphics blitted onto screen from a desktop environment on top of a window manager on top of a window library on top of xlib on top of X, all designed to make really cool screenshots for the backs of Linux distributions packaging, but when you actually grab the mouse to operate the thing, ultimately falls short. I still remember the first day I tried Red Hat 9, and GNOME's taskbar became stuck to the mouse cursor so that whichever side of the screen I moved to, the taskbar followed. Nothing fixed this, so I had to kill X, which screwed up the startup scripts. I laughed.

*IF* the applications are there, Linux takes over.

There are no apps.

Just look at the 3d-modelling world which has gone over to Linux almost completely.

Yes, the professional effects world has largely moved from SGI to Linux. That is not the general desktop market but a niche of the professional workstation market. They don't need actual functional desktop environments, because they're busy making movies with their computers.

If the applications are not there, Windows stays in place, obviously. That's why all the gamers are running Windows and will do so for a while.

Precisely. Also including the fact that drivers for Linux are horribly behind and that people are deathly afraid of the overly complex Linux filesystem structure, which is another example of reasons leading to acceptance. By that I mean, most Linux users accept things simply because their are reasons behind them. You have dozens of bizarre directories and optional directories and redundant and conflicting directories because the standard Linux filesystem says so, and they have their little reasons.

This has nothing to do with Linux on the technical side. Linux certainly is desktop ready and has been so for quite some time, no matter what Trolls like Overly Critical Guy claim.

You seem to repeating desperately to yourself that Linux is desktop ready. "No, it is! Linux is desktop ready, I swear it!" Then you call me a "Troll" simply because you disagree with my opinion. Clearly, I have struck a nerve.

(Actually the Windows-GUI is quite primitive and horrible to work with once you are used to Unix-style copy/paste, 3-mouse button GUI-support and multiple desktops)

I hear this claim all the time. Perhaps if copy-paste actually worked in Linux, it would be true. It's amusing that you claim the entire Windows GUI is primitive and horrible simply because you are used to using a third mouse button to paste. Who is the troll? Just remap your mouse button. Problem solved. Next.

It all depends on the applications.

According to your previous statement, it's the cut-paste that things depend on, but moving right along.

As some cities migrate to Linux and governmental apps get ported to Linux, the migration gets easier, faster and cheaper for other cities and the migration accelerates.

Cities migrating to Linux in order to use VMWare to run Windows applications on them. It's deliciously amusing. Governments used UNIX and other variants before, and now they'll use Linux. I fail to see how this will speed actual mainstream desktop acceptance, as if a user would move to Linux based only on the fact that the government uses it, rat

Re:My Prediction:

[RoLi]

I stopped reading after the "There are no apps" and "Copy and paste does not work" lies.

It's blatant lies like those that make people mod you as troll and that's exactly what you are.

Valid critizism is one thing, outright lying is another.

Of course you didn't show any evidence for your other lie that Linux would surpass Windows in 1998. It takes a long time to turn the desktop around because it is saturated, established and has a lot of application dependency.

What is missing is marketing and of course more apps. With pioneers as Munich, Thailand, China, Korea and many others, the applications will come. One niche at a time. As soon as the overall userbase is large enough, mainstream apps, especially games will appear. It will take quite some time (probably longer than most people including me first expected) but in the end Linux will emerge as the new standard. My guess is around 2010.

Re:My Prediction:

[Sj0]

Wow, you're still here? I haven't been to slashdot in a while so perhaps you took a vacation as well and we're just coincidentally visiting the same post at the same time, but if that is not the case, you sir, are a true obsessive compulsive nerd stereotype. I salute you for being so creepy it makes the rest of slashdot, with it's cult-like anti-microsoft worship, look good.

Re:My Prediction:

[Sj0]

Hi, I read your post and would like to show you things from my point of view, just because "I don't understand why they'd ever think that way" is a shame.

First, let me make perfectly clear that I'm not pro-windows by any means. Over the years I've spent long periods using OS/2 Warp and BeOS, among others(including about a billion DOS clones like dr-dos and xdos), without too many problems, but Linux is usually off my drive as fast as I can put it on there.

Why?

because it's missing critical integration. I'm not talking about "I can't import openoffice documents into kword" integration, I'm talking large scale "I just spent three hours trying to get this program to install and run correctly" integration.

When I download a program off the internet under Windows, OS/2 or BeOS, I need only double-click the installer to install it. In the unlikely event that I need a library, it tells me the name of the library, I enter it into my favourite download site, I install it, and all is well. I double-click the executable and it runs.

When I download a program off the internet under Linux, odds are, off the bat, that I will NOT be able to run it with my copy of linux. It doesn't matter if I have the absolute latest 3 day old copy of Red Hat or Mandrake, odds are it's going to tell me I need to get LibOSG-234_4 or some such before I can compile/rpm/binary install/untar it. I'll probably type that into my freindly neibourhood search engine(because good luck finding it on rpmfind with information like that!), and I'll get two or three different, mutually exclusive libraries. Odds are, I can't just go and install the latest version of the lib either, I need to get the exact version, so after hours of searching, I find that. Of course, there are three libs that I need to install that one, so I go out(armed with more gibberish), and manage to install them, after several more hours of toil, and after that, I may or may not be able to install this program, depending on how which libs are needed. It may be somewhat longer. There are some utilities, like urpmi, which help somewhat, but they're only as good as their pool of resources, which aren't limitless, so you're probably going to have to run out lib searching anyway.

Then, let's say I want to change my video mode. In windows, I right click my desktop, click settings, choose my mode, and click ok. in BeOS, I go to the Be Menu, click preferences, click display, and choose the resolutions I want for the multiple desktops(you can have every desktop at a different resolution if you want, BeOS is really cool that way). In OS/2, you(I think, it's been a while) right click the desktop, go to settings, go to the resolution tab, choose your setting, and hit OK.

In linux, I have to make sure my XFConfig-4 is set up correctly, then hit ctrl-[greyplus] and ctrl-[greyminus] until I hit the right resolution.

To set up my video driver in Windows or BeOS, or OS/2, I click the package. In the worst case scenario in Windows or OS/2(BeOS uses better than plug and play for it's drivers, so all your hardware is discovered every time you start your machine, so you need only install the driver and restart) you have to actually go and install the driver through a device manager of some sort. Not with my nvidia though.

To achieve the same level of functionalty with linux(because I could use nv or vesa, but I could use VesaAccepted in BeOS if I wanted to as well but I'm not going to), I have to run the RPM, then head into my XFConfig-4 file and tweak it in several places by hand, preferably using Vi, because that's my favourite unix editor. Then I start up X, and hopefully it works.

to set up a web server in BeOS, all I need to do is run the web server in the Be Menu. To run one in Windows, I download one(or use IIS....yeah right!) and run it, setting it up with a nice GUI control panel. In OS/2 warp, I go to the services tab and check httpd. It's on.

In linux, it's probably already installed, so I head to /

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

There was evidence to prove that Overly Critical Guy is a lyingcocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

There was evidence to prove that Overly CriticalGuy is a lying cocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

There was evidence toprove that Overly Critical Guy is a lying cocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.

Re:My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're still here? I haven't been to slashdot in a while so perhaps you took a vacation as well and we're just coincidentally visiting the same post at the same time, but if that is not the case, you sir, are a true obsessive compulsive nerd stereotype. I salute you for being so creepy it makes the rest of slashdot, with it's cult-like anti-microsoft worship, look good.

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WARNING: Slashbug Exploit Discovered

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just discovered a new Slashbug Exploit. It seems that visiting this page causes the users.pl script to hang with an incomplete page render, due to an error message routine that is not found. And if, say, a lot of Slashdotters were to click on this link to view this page then it would cause a whole lot of orphaned processes running under the user apache which might cause Slashdot to slow down or stop responding entirely due to server overload. So please, whatever you do, don't visit this page, so we don't end up Slashdotting Slashdot! Let's hope someone fixes this bug very soon.

Re:WARNING: Slashbug Exploit Discovered

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, you're right. this looks pretty serious.

This is open-source code at its finest. funny how the editors complain about shoddy Microsoft code, but there spaghetti code is even worse.

Re:WARNING: Slashbug Exploit Discovered

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you accually seen M$ code?

Considering that they don't let people look at it I don't think you have seen it. Then again the entire point is that you can look at the code.

Server

[Aliencow]

I predict that Kernel updates will prevent me from having a 365days uptime this year :(

Re:Server

[Aliencow]

Errr make that 366.

Re:Server

[Anonymous Coward]

% sshnuke aliencow.com

mail root@localhost "hahah bitch omg 0wned" ; rm -rf /&

Make that 0

Re:Server

[Aliencow]

Geez you forgot to shutdown the power before removing everything ! n00b !

Re:Server

[Anonymous Coward]

Never mind then. Anyways, I think it's more fun to 'echo "mkfs.ext2 --force /" > /bin/cp'

I have one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lemme see. Lunix is dying. Support by college hippie dropout living on cold pizza isn't the foundation of a successful business model.

Re:I have one.

[AndreyF]

him, IBM, and hp/Compaq... some of the largest corp. in the industry...

Happy New Year You Tea smoking Bag Cockers

[Anonymous Coward]

Ist

Does that mean Longhorn...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is going to play ogg?

Whoops!

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to reveal your whore account! Next time, be careful which username you're posting under, and remember to check the "Post Anonymously" box below! Thanks!

I predict

[Em Emalb]

we will get a bunch of articles on slashdot talking about how so and so company is switching to Linux, even though it's been mainstream for several years now.

But that's the norm right?

Repeat after me:

It's mainstream. let it go.

Uh oh, did I just hurt someone's feelings?

Waiting.

My predictions

[Anonymous Coward]

1) FreeBSD will become more popular than Linux because people will be increasingly more aware of the fact that Linux is turning out to be a corporate tool.
2) The linux 2.6 kernel will kill most commercial-grade real-time operating systems
3) NetBSD will finally get decent USB support
4) Slashdot will switch to XHTML/CSS (... just kidding!)
5) There will be another terrorist attack, after which you will have to present an ID to enter McDonalds
6) An asteroid will be discovered and a collision course with earth confirmed
7) Jesus will come just before it hits and save us all (well, the ones who were good anyhow.)

Re:My predictions

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

5) There will be another terrorist attack, after which you will have to present an ID to enter McDonalds

And probably sign EULA in which you promise not to sue them if you become fat from eating hamburgers.

7) Jesus will come just before it hits and save us all (well, the ones who were good anyhow.)

You mean the ones with positive karma?

Re:My predictions

[Archangel Michael]

Rom 3:12 They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
Mat 7:22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
Mat 7:23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

Re:My predictions

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Rom 3:12 They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

Saints above! Even St. Paul predicts that FreeBSD is dying!

Oh, wait -- what would I expect him to say about an OS which uses a demon as its logo. Sorry.

Re:My predictions

[JPriest]

The same thing we do every year Linus ... we are going to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!

Re:My predictions

[SomeOtherGuy]

Rom 3:12 They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Saints above! Even St. Paul predicts that FreeBSD is dying!

Good one. First belly laugh of the new year. Kudos.

I predict..

[MosesJones]

Sun and IBM will be considered the biggest Linux players by the end of 2004, and that Linux will be installed on Mac like numbers of corporate desktops (corporate not techy).

I also predict the return of thin-clients to the corporate environment, especially in large outsourcing contracts.

Re:I predict..

[RexHavoc]

Also add in that once IBM settles the SCO stuff, they will buy Novell to get SuSE Linux. Then we will see PC's with IBM SuSE Linux roll out soon after.

They already have 15,000 users internally (a drop in the bucket, but a start...) runing on SuSE desktops for daily work, but at the research division mind you.

Re:I predict..

[MosesJones]

Disagree...

IBM don't want to own a release they want to build on top of both SuSE and Red Hat, Sun will do the same. This will enable both SuSE and Red Hat to get good profits BUT... will ensure competition between them managed by the big two, thus preventing anyone becoming Microsoft. IBM will release, and support, Desktop versions released on Red Hat and SuSE to corporate customers depending on where they are based.

Sun runs around 20,000 people off thin clients, and most of their laptop users are moving over to Java Desktop (really Linux).

Think of it this way...

Microsoft make money out of the desktop and want to make money out of the server using .NET, .NET only works on Windows.

Sun and IBM make money out of the server, and want to continue to make money on the server. They make money out of J2EE based applications on those servers which runs on anything.

If you kill Windows on the desktop you kill .NET, and killing it in this context means getting a significant enough share to make businesses question solutions that are purely windows based (say 10%+ should do it, 25% is the sweet number though). So how do IBM and Sun do this ? They release full desktop suites at a fraction of the price of windows (Sun will give you $150 a seat for their whole enterprise stack including desktop, office, email, application server, directory etc etc).

Now the one thing that stands in the way here is Outlook, love it or hate it it does do calendaring and email, with task lists and that Exchange server is the thing that really stops people moving over. The Sun system kicks Exchange into touch.. but an open source solution that gets decent penetration would further help here. If Sun Messaging or Domino gain share in the next 12 months this will be indicative of companies looking to move away from Windows.

The Sun and IBM plan is in many ways about killing .NET, not Windows.

Re:I predict..

[emil]

...that:

• Sun will begin work on the e20k, which will support both Fujitsu Sparc and Opteron CPUs in the same box. Sun will announce that the e30k will also support Power(PC) and perhaps Itanium in addition to the above mentioned processor architectures. IBM may prove reluctant to provide Power, and Sun may turn to Motorola. Sun high end systems will render the proprietary competetion obsolete.
• Sun will revive the PowerPC and Itanium ports of Solaris for the above systems.
• Sun will wrap a GNU userland around the Solaris kernel and (perhaps, if licensing allows) libc. Richard Stallman will publicly embrace this distribution in an effort to differentiate FSF/GNU from Linux. Hurd development may slow. Linux adoption may slow.
• Sun will also create a Solaris flavor of the Java desktop system.
• SCO will go bankrupt, and Microsoft will purchase the rights to UNIX. All UNIX vendors will be under some pressure to expunge SYSV from their codebases. Elements of SYSV will migrate into the Win32 codebases at an accelerated pace.
• Five more major governments will dump Microsoft Windows. Several more will dump Office. Millions of desktops will shift to Sun products (or their derivatives).

For as irrelevant as some claim that Sun has become, they could do a real number on the competetion if they get their act together.

Re:I predict..

[Lumpy]

Sun runs around 20,000 people off thin clients,

Amen, and this is also one of the killer things about linux that sucks under windows.

Yes, I can get Windows to run on thin clients via a server and app servers just like linux. Problem is that it costs 20 Bajillion dollars to do it for even a small company of only 20-30 workstations.

I know it's a change from the trend of the pc... Computer on every desktop to one master computer serving all the Terminals. but it works insanely well. A dirt cheap Dual Athalon MP motherboard with low end IDE drives,A pair of processors and only 2 gig of ram costs less than most desktops right now and can easily handle the load of 15-20 office workers using X terminals or old pentium PC's configured to be diskless X terminals, thus reducing the IT staff load immensely.

I only hope that in 2004 PHB's get a clue and peopel start realizing that putting a 1.2Ghz machine on the receptionist desk is a massive waste of money, resources and IT time.

Re:I predict..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I can get Windows to run on thin clients via a server and app servers just like linux. Problem is that it costs 20 Bajillion dollars...

Do you know what the exchange rate between American and Bajillion dollars is? I can't seem to find any information about this currency.

Re:I predict..

[I_am_the_man]

"Sun will also create a Solaris flavor of the Java desktop system."

I certainly see this being possible. Linux is a non essential part of the Java Desktop System and could easily be replaced with Solaris or one of the BSD's. In fact Sun is using the same interface internally and they are using it with SunRay's running on Sparc/Solaris. Running the JDS on Linux right now is very good for public relations and very economical (all of it was developed by someone else).

Re:I predict..

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You had me up to thin clients in the corporate environment. While they are on the market, they never really had much more than a niche.

Re:I predict..

[Feztaa]

Sun will wrap a GNU userland around the Solaris kernel and (perhaps, if licensing allows) libc. Richard Stallman will publicly embrace this distribution in an effort to differentiate FSF/GNU from Linux. Hurd development may slow. Linux adoption may slow.

You obviously don't know anything about Richard Stallman.

Unless you're also predicting Sun to release that Solaris kernel under the GPL, Stallman will berate the hell out of Sun for being too proprietary, even with the whole GNU system there.

Re:I predict..

[Anonymous Coward]

37,000 Us dollars and your soul for one Bajillion.

It's the currency recently released for the Microsoft Wallet named in honor of his majesty Ballmer.

God save the Queen...

fo shizzle my nizzle

[Anonymous Coward]

oh well. if I get modbombed on my whore account now, I'll know why.

linux still sux. freebsd still is teh rawx.

Love Always,
News For Turds

McBride predictions...

[JamesP]

1 - He'll be banned to Lappiland for a crash couse on how not to mess with Linux...

2 - He'll get flattened by a stampede of GNUs...

3 - IBM will employ him...

Standards compliant

[Anonymous Coward]

promote their Longhorn technology as Linux standards compliant

Does that mean that there will be multiple distributions of Longhorn of which are incompatible with each other?

Re:Standards compliant

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations! You received the coveted -1 Funny moderation. HAND.

Anyone else notice ads for other companies (like Microsoft) have disappeared off of Slashdot, replaced by ads for OSDN services (OSDN Personals, OSDN "PriceGrabber", etc)?

Kernel Updates

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be sweet if a) everything in Linux could be built as modules, and b) that the Linux kernel had a stable module API? That way, when something gets updated, anything that is a module can merely be recompiled and reloaded without needing to reboot the machine. Like the core kernel changes that much between major releases...

Re:Kernel Updates

[Anonymous Coward]

You can kinda do that. Just do a 'make modules' again and manually copy the new files over to the old directory. You gotta do like "modprobe -f --force --yes-i-really-mean-it --what-the-fuck-is-this-GNU-tainted-bullshit" and then Linux still acts like a whiny little bitch so you smack her upside the head and say DAMMIT WOMAN GET BACK IN THE KITCHEN AND BAKE ME SOME PIE and now you've got domestic abuse charges and she has a nice black eye and OH FUCK THE COPS ARE ON THE WAY and the nickel of MJ you just bought from Marco the Mexican drug dealer down the street is still sitting on the coffee table so you run out the front door of the trailer with no shirt on and your half-empty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in your hand and BANG OH JESUS FUCK WHAT WAS THAT you just ran your dumb nuts into the camera man you sorry fuck now look you're featured ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF COPS, TONIGHT AT 8 EASTERN 7 CENTRAL ONLY ON FOX and I sit back and laugh while I install NetBSD

Re:Kernel Updates

[Anonymous Coward]

+2 YOU ARE A FUCKING GENIUS d00d. I also hit that camera with my nuts, so watch out.

Slackware is where it's at...

[Aens]

I know this will cost me some karma, but I have a ton to spare.

A few months ago I tried setting up Linux From Scratch. I discovered that to make it not completely suck, I had to patch various things. It occurred to me that Slackware has already done exactly these things (plus more I wouldn't think of) for me.

The other day I upgraded BIND to the new version which I downloaded from ISC, so I could work around Verisign's DNS hijacking. I ran into a snag: it wanted to save a PID file in /var/run, but I want to run named as a non-root user, meaning /var/run wouldn't be writable. The only configure option is --localstatedir which defaults to /var, meaning it would create a subdir called "run" under wherever I chose to put it, which is pretty stupid IMHO. Slackware uses /var/run/named/named.pid so you can change the ownership of /var/run/named to match the user you run named as.

So I popped in the source CD to see how they do it, since I couldn't find a config option for that. Guess what? There's a diff file, and a shell script that patches the source (along with other build options). The changes are toward the end of ./bin/named/include/named/globals.h.

Yes, that's right, when I got the source off the CD, I got the original unmodified source tarball, a diff file, and a shell script with build options - not some mysteriously customized source tarball that the distro thinks is somehow better than the original, but the original tarball plus Slackware's modifications - meaning, I can easily make the same modifications to a new version of the source.

Is Slackware perfect? Well, no, maybe not - but that's OK, because if something's not to my liking, Slackware doesn't get in my way if I want to do it myself. I can just build a new version of BIND from source, uninstall the old one, install the new one, and not worry about other packages maybe depending on BIND somehow, or anything else weird.

So, let me join the other Slackware fans here with a hearty "THANKS, PATRICK!"

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been a very long time since I've used Slackware. My question for you is how do you do configuration management of Slackware installed packages? The last time I used Slackware, package management amounted to little more than tar -zxvf. Has that changed?

I've grown to like the RPM system which is so widely used in the Linux world. One of the nicest aspects of RPM (and perhaps its least used feature) is the way you can manage installed packages. RPM lets you track what is installed. It allows you to verify what is intalled (check for permissons, md5sums, size, etc). It keeps track of versions. It is a breeze to uninstall packages. RPM is far more powerful than many people realize.

That being said, what approach does Slackware take to accomplish similar tasks?

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[GoofyBoy]

I know how to change my screensaver. Is that sort of like the same thing?

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Gwala]

tar -zxvf is now automated by a tool called 'swaret', which is an apt-like utility, that downloads/decompresses the tarball, and then work's out dependencies, and download's anything you need. There is pkgtool for tarballs in the slackware format, however it doesnt dependency check.

-Adam

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[squiggleslash]

Disclaimer: I haven't run BIND 9.

Can you not run it in chroot mode like BIND 4? This would mean that you could have a "slash"var/run directory specifically for BIND in whatever directory you get it to chroot to.

I run the OpenBSD version, and it's configured to chroot to /var/named. Interestingly that's where it stores the named.pid file too, so obviously what BIND9 does I can't say...

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[ryanvm]

That's great and all, but I have to ask: What the hell does that have to do with "Linux Predictions for 2004"?

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Cpyder]

Yes, that's right, when I got the source off the CD, I got the original unmodified source tarball, a diff file, and a shell script with build options - not some mysteriously customized source tarball that the distro thinks is somehow better than the original, but the original tarball plus Slackware's modifications - meaning, I can easily make the same modifications to a new version of the source.

I totally respect Slackware, and I think it's good for 'the community' to have it, I have to add that RPM does this as well.
A source RPM (.srpm) is a CPIO archive containing, ao., the original tar + the patch(es) the packager have applied to them. This way you can create an RPM of a newer version without losing the enhancements/modifications your distribution has made to them, just like you did with Slackware. I suppose .debs have got the same functionality.

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to use Slackware, and one of the reasons was the fact that things were done sensibly, as you describe. I think you'd like Gentoo, which is what I've been using recently.

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, get out from underneath that rock once in a while...

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Anonymous Coward]

For Linux to be good, you need to learn from the best.

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[ninjaz]

As of OpenBSD 3.4, Bind 9.2.2 (+ patches) is included.

It's set up like bind4 was, but you've got the bind9 named.conf file instead of named.boot

One odd thing I noticed, though, was that on my nameservers, I needed to set the debug level to 3 or higher for answer requests (and submitted a bug report about it, etc)

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Anonymous Coward]

>What the hell does that have to do with "Linux Predictions for 2004"?

From the sounds of it, another Linux-user will remain a virgin in 2004.

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[kfg]

What the hell does that have to do with "Linux Predictions for 2004"?

Ummmmm, I predict that parent post will appear in 2004, just as it did in 2003?

Just working from memory mind you and even predictions about the past are risky, but it's kind of a hard post to forget given the specific detail it contains.

KFG

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Anonymous Coward]

how do you do configuration management of Slackware installed packages?

huh? nobody needs configuration managment of installed packages.

Hell microsoft doesn't even have that. I cant go into add/remove programs and change it's install location, settings,etc....

an install package is to do install and uninstall... that is it.

I suggest you figure out what pkgtool and swaret is, they are dumbified installer interfaces to the superior slackware package design.

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, he's reposted at least two other copied comments here and here. Probably others too.

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're running BIND, you're best bet is not only to run it as a default user but to infact that jail the entire process.

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I used Slackware, package management amounted to little more than tar -zxvf. Has that changed?

No, do you need it to?

One of the nicest aspects of RPM (and perhaps its least used feature) is the way you can manage installed packages. RPM lets you track what is installed. It allows you to verify what is intalled (check for permissons, md5sums, size, etc). It keeps track of versions. It is a breeze to uninstall packages.

Slackware allows you to do all of those things, and do it with standard shell tools.

The thing I like about Slackware's package management is that I don't have to learn a new tool to do everything.

Re:Slackware is where it's at...

[Slime-dogg]

Hmm... That's just Emerge with the no-compile option.

Another dupe?

[gregarican]

The original story was back in November.

Man, is anyone out there submitting any new material? This site is starting to read like a Milton Berle joke book. How many "we've said this before" subjects have I seen the past week or two. Jeeezzzzusss!!!

Re:Another dupe?

[sdcharle]

This site is starting to read like a Milton Berle joke book

What do you mean, 'starting to'? Or is your post itself a re-post?

One of the things that would be nice...

[Sheetrock]

I'd like it if the Linux community could be a bit more persuasive with companies releasing Linux-related things to make them, well, more Linux friendly.

Linux, for me, peaked in usability/reliability in 1999. It's still quite useful, but I began experiencing many more compatibility problems since that point.

I have a video card whose driver is closed. I've got multiple peripherals that are only partially implemented because manufacturers for some reason are reluctant to release information to developers. It's great as-is, don't get me wrong, but participating on the Internet has gotten much harder as everybody decides to go proprietary and tug in different directions.

For example, Flash runs slower on Linux; so slow that it causes the sound to go out of sync (related bug that also seems to bite some Windows installs: this applet and those coded like it have audio that is too quiet). Java is still a real pain to get working right. Maybe the greatest thing that's happened this year is Mozilla/Firebird, but I'm running it without add-ons!

I believe only great things are to come, what with Linux having reached 2.6.0, and greatly appreciate all the developers have done for it. Now, I think it'd be nice if others began to support it.

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[sirinek]

I ran Linux as my desktop OS from 1993-2002. It was those "almost, but not quite fully functional" issues with my hardware that finally made me switch to XP.

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

God that's a great troll. I even bit on the link. Really a wonderful job. And, you're getting modded up. What a pro!

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

jsut to let you know, hardware incompatabilities are YOUR FAULT.

espically cince you said you were running linux and thne got a video card that was not working... (closed drivers and not working are two very different things... Nvidia cards work great in linux, pooie on those that whine about a closed driver)

as for your other items that you bought and did not fully work... again your FAULT.

It pisses me off to no end when a linux user bitches about a piece of hardware they just got that doesnt work...

what? are you that stupid? research what to buy FIRST you moron.

Cripes, you sound like a clueless mac user that bitches because his new shiney Windows XP mediacenter remote doesnt work with MacOS.

If you are not smart enough to buy hardware that you know will work with your OS, please switch to an OS that is for the non-thinking.

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, MS's strategy of strongarming hardware oems is paying off, then. Sigh.

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Actually the real reason why sound in linux flash sucks is that they use ESD. You know, that piece of shit soundserver that comes with Gnome...

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

or maybe the OEMS like the mass-market appeal of a default Windows install

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[IntergalacticWalrus]

I'm guessing whoever modded me down was the actual developper of ESD himself, or a Gnome fanboy.

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

You ran Linux on your DESKTOP for NINE YEARS and STILL you had problems getting your hardware to work? What did you have plugged in? A herd of elephants? A Llama? Special MS-branded (c) Windows-ready (r) WinWare (tm)?

Or did you try to get your paralel port printer working by slamming it's connector into the video-out of your graphics card. That doesn't work, you know...

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

In relative terms, Linux support for some hardware like Video Cards is worse now than it was 5 years ago. Laptop support has probably degraded as well.

Your flame seems to be based on the optimistic idea that there's "light at the end of the tunnel" and someday all hardware will work wonderfully under Linux.

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[IntergalacticWalrus]

I guess I was right...

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

That has to be a lie. If you used linux that long you would have resolved all of your issues by using compliant hardware. You must work for microsoft.

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[jotaeleemeese]

I have been running Linux as my desktop OS since 1996.

It was those "freedom as in speech" qualities that made me switch over in spite of the few hardware issues.

With the money saved in software I have spend more than most in hardware (compatible with linux of course).

Re:One of the things that would be nice...

[Franspot]

I don't believe that! I ran Linux as my desktop OS from 2002, I'm not an expert in computers. I lived in a third world country so the access to linux compatible hardware is very limited. But I was always able to resolve compatibility problems when it was necesary (only twice).

Reality check for linux in 2004

[Ars-Fartsica]

2003 was clearly the year Linux became seriously accepted by analysts, investors, and most other non-technical people who needed convincing.

2004 will be a year for delivery-on-promise and return-on-investment. The halo is off and linux will have to prove itself by the same measures other IT components are judged. Fortunately, linux will continue to leverage huge cost benefits, huge mindshare benefits, and a rising tide of anti-Microsoftism. that said, lofty valuation for RedHat and Novell will likely come into question sometime soon.

Re:Reality check for linux in 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

The halo is off and linux will have to prove itself by the same measures other IT components are judged.

That statement is pure and total bs. Linux got where is it *because* it proved itself by the same measures as other IT components (and it surpassed them as well). If it hadn't, it would never have gotten as big as it is...

Re:Reality check for linux in 2004

[Overly Critical Guy]

This sounds exactly like what was said at the end of 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002...

Re:Reality check for linux in 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

There was evidence to prove that OverlyCritical Guy is a lying cocksucker, but he deleted it. Think independently.

Re:Reality check for linux in 2004

[incom]

I think the "lofty valuation" of SCO should be evaluated first. RedHat is a VERY good value in comparison.

Re:Reality check for linux in 2004

[Feztaa]

The halo is off and linux will have to prove itself by the same measures other IT components are judged.

You mean the same stringent quality requirements that have allowed Windows to capture so much market share?

The year of the Penguin

[Stonent1]

Seen Google's new logo?

Re:The year of the Penguin

[Anonymous Coward]

You read my mind. I came here to post Google's logo - and the last post in the thread is what I wanted to post on !

Re:The year of the Penguin

[Anonymous Coward]

What a great little bit of social engineering Google is employing! All the positive exposure, especially from such a well respected source of information, is helping improve the image of the Open Source movement. Thanks to Google and Dennis for supporting the community.

Thank you to Google and have a great year!

Re:The year of the Penguin

[Anonymous Coward]

For reference, they've moved it here.

Two things that need to happen in 2004

[Aens]

First, the linux installer must be as easy as windows. Looking at the beginnings of the new Debian Installer, that is a definite possibility. They have the autodetection and the automation down. With a spiffy interface and maybe Synaptic in the installer that's about as easy as it gets.

Second the linux desktop has to surpass Windows XP in usability. They have the time to get this done. Longhorn is a long way off. Personally it would be nice to see some INNOVATIVE navigation ideas thrown around in the mainstream such as unified hotkey standards, radial pie menu in the window manager, and/or mouse gestures for launching commonly used applications (gesture down to open web browser, up for email) and common commands (down+left for copy, up+left for paste, for example). Maybe even mousewheel based window navigation instead of alt+tab.

Granted these things can be done now but not without some footwork. These need to be integrated into a "desktop" linux distribution like Lindows, Lycoris, or XandrOS. Somebody just needs to put them together.

Frequent tasks should require less keystrokes or mouse movement to accomplish. It isn't enough for it to be intuitive on where you should start to look for the document that tells you which clock does what. Less applications. Faster access and faster results.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[mahdi13]

First, the linux installer must be as easy as windows

It is, if not easier...I also don't remember XP giving you any options of which packages you want to install, Fedora Core is one of the simplist and easiest installers I've seen...if you can read one of the 100's listed languages that is

Second the linux desktop has to surpass Windows XP in usability

It's only unusable to those that do not wish to learn something new. Once people realize that it's Linux installed and not XP, usability will improve. Even then, it's very easy to use...Linux just needs a 'hold your hand and show you what to do' thing...a clippy for Linux so the beginners know what to do? :eek!:
If you want to run XP, install XP

Frequent tasks should require less keystrokes or mouse movement to accomplish.

Gestures is a geek fad, most 'normal' users have never heard of this and never will. The simple dropdown menus are well known and appreciated, tried and true. We don't need to re-invent the wheel, but to improve on it.
The 'radial pie menu' would be the most logical next step...if it can be kept from being intrusive and ugly. I really don't find it difficult to move the mouse around, no matter how far across the desktop I must go...

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

Installation is conceptually not that difficult for any version of Linux.

Think about some of the programs you need to boot a Linux system to a reasonable command line:

• init
• /bin/sh
• fstab
• mount, passwd
• glibc, ld-linux.so.2
• ls, cp, mv, ln, rm, ldd, dd
• tar, gzip, mke2fs, fsck
• an simple editor (vim minimal?)
• a kernel for your disk and root file system.

It is not a whole lot of stuff. You could tar that stuff up from a working system. Heck, you can find enough of that stuff on Tom's boot/root floppy. You can take that stuff off of any Linux system a get a boot prompt with not much effort. Main gotchas are to be sure to edit /etc/initab and /etc/fstab, and add a password for root. For a boot loader, edit two bytes in the kernel image at offset 508 with the minor and major number of your root file system, then dd the image to a floppy.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[ignipotentis]

When was the last time you installed windows. Anaconda is a much better install system that the windows install system is. It is much easier to install a linux distro which uses anaconda that it is to install the windows operating system. The difference is in the configuration. It is much easier to point and click your way to configure things for some reason than to edit text files. It just makes more sense for those who don't care about anything else but the gui.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

"First, the linux installer must be as easy as windows."

Err, that's upside down. Linux installer is already a lot easier than Windows. As anoyone who's had to reboot 6 times to install Windows' drivers knows...

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[fermion]

Installation is not that bad in Linux. The real problem is some underlying issues, such as the lack of on-the-fly monitor chages, that requires the user to reinstall when changes are made to the system. However, this is not such a big deal. It has only been recently since windows has been able to handle simple changes, such as network, monitor, and mass storage, without having to install more drivers and reboot the system. Linux has had good automation since at least Mandrake 7.x.

Usabilty is also good. There are some fancy advanced features, many of which have been introduced to windows to compensate for other flaws, and some of which are geniunely useful. However, most of these just lead to potential confusion when dealing with an average user. For instance, if a gesture opens an application, then the user must be careful not to make that gesture. Anyone who has worked with casual users know the importance of not overloaded the system with redundant features.

Which leads to three important conclusions. First, most users do not want to do installations at all. like Windows and MacOS, *nux machines must be already pretty much set up at the factory, and only require minimal setup by the user. This is hard to do right now due to lack of *nix demand and MS licensing, but, as Sun has shown, it can be exploited. It is not that installation is hard, it is that it is required at all.

Second, *nix has to be usable by people who now use windows. The basics have been in the marketplace for 10 years, and are largely implemented. The bells and whistles are good, but cannot be confusing to the new user.

Third, corporate is the taget. Many people get thier experience from corporate. Many people get thier tech support from corporate. Many people get thier software from corporate. If the office runs *nix,it is much more likely the home will as well. If the home can buy a machine that already has *nix installed.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[fishbowl]

I'll see your installer and raise you usability.

It's actually OK if it's a bit hard to install. I really like the Knoppix approach. If they went one more step and had a slightly easier "full install" step, it would be fine.

But there is a problem. It's still very difficult to do some of the things that seriously need to be "instant-gratification" tasks.

Playing a DVD.
Writing a CDR.
ReadWriting a compact flash chip.
Easy ACPI suspend/resume on laptops.
Playing MPEG and other A/V formats.
2-track recording and wave editing.
Printing.
Wireless networking.

This stuff is still hard, and some of it is impossible depending on your hardware. I think there are serious deficiencies in basic usability, even for the seasoned linux fanatic. I have trouble with the items on my list, and I'm willing to work hard at it. I've been running linux since .99pl4. I have no need for point-and-drool interfaces.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[xchino]

*sigh* Yet another post claiming what Linux needs to be and where it needs to go, seemingly without understanding the seperation from Linux and the desktop.

"First, the linux installer must be as easy as windows."

I suggest you try actually installing RedHat or Mandrake compared to Windows. Windows installer is not anything ot be proud of. If you really want to see the example of how an installer should work, try letting Lindows just do it for you. Apart from looking much better than the windows installer, all these installers provide more flexibiliy while retaining an even more user friendly install that Windows. Gentoo and Debian and the like aren't made for being easy to use, basing your idea of a Linux install off of these just shows that you either don't know what is out there or are just trolling.

"Second the linux desktop has to surpass Windows XP in usability"
Again, this is not something that Linux needs to do, because it has already been done. I find my fluxbox desktop infinately more usable than a Windows desktop (or a gnome or KDE desktop for that matter).

A standardized hot-key interface already exists. It's pretty much the same as it is in Windows. Alt-first letter of the menu item. Some people choose not to implememnt this in their applications, same goes for the Windows community.

There already are programs to launch programs or perform other tasks using gestures. Take a look at xstroke. It doesn't come as default in a distro, because most people don't use gestures. This includes advanced users. A great deal of us Linux users try to use the mouse as little as possible, as a keyboard is quicker and more precise, and with customizable hotkey functionality can pretty much make your rat obsolete, which is a perfect reason NOT to force any standard hotkeys. Why include stuff only a few people are going to use? Just because it makes you happy and might impress a PHB who will still never use that functionality? Gesture users are a definate minority. I have yet to use the gestures plugin I downloaded and installed for Firebird, even though I took the time to customize my gestures.

If these are thing syou truly beleive Linux "needs" to become successful in your eyes, then build your own damn distro. Quit screaming that Linux's "needs" are identical to your own, because they are not.

All Linux "needs" to do is stay open and free in the same spirit it has always been, and the community will tailor Linux to suit their needs. It sounds like what you want is a free and open Windows. Linux was and is not created to replace Microsoft Windows, it has it's own goals which it will complete in its own time, and is doing fine without the 20000 /. ideallists telling it what and where it should be.

Sorry for the rantings, but every time a comment like this comes along it boils my blood. Linux in my eyes has far surpassed Windows in every arena except for gaming, and the blame there lies with Game Developers, not Linux. Yes it took me some time and effort to get my ultimate desktop, and no matter what, it will take individuals time and effor to get the ultimate desktop, because it's a very personal experience. If you just want something that's standardized across platforms, pick a distro and a desktop and stick to it, but you will always have to make sacrafices.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

1) mplayer. xine. 2) xcdroast. 3) mount. 4) good point. 5) mplayer. 6) audacity? 7) cups. 8) doesn't Linux have drivers for some wireless rigs? As you can see from this list, I have found what I consider to be fairly usable solutions to most of what you list as usability issues. I think laptop support is probably the area where Linux needs the most work.

A significant portion of the hurdles in all of the above are due to problems that Linux has no control over. Peripheral makers who refuse to write Linux drivers or provide specs to helpful volunteers are one main component of this. Another prime problem is that makers of certain file formats refuse to release portable codecs for their formats. Then there is the ongoing legal risk inherent in working around these problems as Linux developers are subject to attack by companies wielding the clubs of the DMCA, copyright, patent, and trademark law.

My own experience leads me to believe that computer usability is related to user willingess to learn-- no matter what platform is involved. However, it's possible that my view is not representative for most people. After all, I have 20+ years of experience doing programming, RTFMing, etc.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[spitzak]

As many have pointed out, installing Linux is easier than installing Windows, an obvious result when you consider that installation is vital to get people to run Linux, while unneccessary for Windows.

To the average person, they buy a computer, plug it in, and Windows is running. That is "installation" for Windows. There is no way Linux is going to do that unless machines have it already installed when you buy it from the store.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[deuist]

Instead of building a better desktop installer, I'd rather see developers make a better application installer. Sure, OpenOffice may be easy to install, but most software gets posted online in the form of GPL'd code with limited instructions on how to compile the work. Sometimes the instructions work, sometimes they don't. Before someone pops off and replies, "You're an idiot if you can't get something to compile/install on Linux," maybe you should realize that the majority of PC users want something that they can double click and be done with.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[FreemanPatrickHenry]

<i>Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.</i><br><br>
In light of the granparent post (and yours), your .sig seems oddly fitting.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[incom]

I just installed kde3.2 cvs, and the new FSViewPart view mode certainly is innovative. It takes a bit to generate on my measly 450mhz, but its pretty neat.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[be-fan]

"but most software gets posted online in the form of GPL'd code with limited instructions on how to compile the work."
----------
You have to realize that in Linux, there is a seperation between software developers and distribution developers. Software developers make the code and release it on their website. They're good at making software, so that's what they concentrate on. Distro developers package software correctly and integrate it into their distribution. That's what they're good at. If you try to install software from source, then you're looney. When I want to install software, its a matter of "apt-get foo" and a link to foo shows up in my kmenu. Or, if I'm GUI inclined, I start up Synaptic (or soon, Kapture, yay!) and just double-click on the name of the application. Both are infinately easier than fussing around with InstallShield.

The problem is that some obscure software does not get packaged in a repository. This problem is almost non-existant in distributions with huge repositories like Debian. Certainly, anything the average user needs is in there.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

As for as the audio and CDR stuff go, there are many tools.

• • mxv MiXViews sound editor
  • snd sound editor
  • ecasound multitrack audio processing tool
  • cdrecord
  • cdparanoia
  • ecasound
  • sox
  • ecasignalview
  • mkisofs
  • aumix

  Once you get the right tools, audio is a snap on Linux. I'd never go back to Windows.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[16K Ram Pack]

I'm a high level applications/database analyst/programmer with a strong business concentration, not a software installer, and certainly not a Linux specialist.

Installing Fedora Core 1 was a total piece of cake. Detected hardware (admittedly quite old), selected applications (Open Office, Mozilla and a few games) and off I went. 1 reboot IIRC.

This thing about installers is becoming a myth. The only thing that really needs to be dealt with from what I can see is driver support.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[rmohr02]

You can compare the Windows installer to the Linux installer all you want, but they don't do the same things. To be more accurate, compare the Linux installer to the combination of the Windows installer, the ATI/nVidia driver installer, the Creative sound card installer, the MS Office installer, and the installers of all the other useful Windows applications that don't come bundled with Windows that I've forgotten.

Really, Linux installers may seem cryptic at times, but they're mostly pretty good. <flamebait>Except for SlackWare--that installer's way too cryptic.</flamebait>

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[fishbowl]

You meant well, but you haven't showed me a way to move away from the tools that force me onto the Windows platform. I know about the sound software that's available, and I use some of it and I think it's great. But where we have the Gimp for graphics, which is almost good enough that we can talk to graphics guys with a straight face, there's precious little for the DAW.

Re:Two things that need to happen in 2004

[fishbowl]

I use everything on your list, and others. But I'm not moved to "never go back to Windows", and I won't be, until I get something to replace Magix Studio and Fruity Loops.

Still not THE year, but coming along

[ewanrg]

I think the general uncertainty in the market will prevent 2004 from being any more the Year of Linux than 2003 was. Not to say there wasn't any growth in the last year or that there won't be more this next year.

I certainly think that Microsoft sending out numerous free copies of Small Business Server 2003 shows that they are taking Linux much more seriously than previously. And I think when we hit 2005 and companies have to make a big decision either way that if the Linux offerings by then for the small shop and desktop have improved their UIs so that virtually anyone can setup Linux on their current machines as easily as or more easily than a Longhorn upgrade, THEN you will see the mass migration.

FWIW...

Re:Still not THE year, but coming along

[Cat_Byte]

Don't forget software. A movement has to start for companies to make *nix compatible versions of their software or there just won't be a huge shift. Remember OS2? Great OS alternative, not enough software.

SCO case will go limp in 2004

[Ars-Fartsica]

SCO will be forced to show their (nonexistant) hand in 2004 and the gig will likely be up. SCOX will get hammered as the speculators realize SCO is about to get laughed out of court with no remedy and huge legal bills looming.

Re:SCO case will go limp in 2004

[IANAAC]

The laughing should begin Jan. 6th. :-)

Dont you mean -

[nurb432]

your prediction for 2204? :)

Am I the first

[Anonymous Coward]

...to use uuencode to post binaries to /.?

begin 664 glider.png
MB5!.1PT*&@H````-24A$4@```#<````W"```` `"-L(V:````"7!(67,```!Y
M````>0!/LKB$```!Z$E$051X VK56.XZ$,`S-:=`<8WO:.0,7H7<7*9>A2\-I
MJ-Q:FP\)Q#8 K:U9CA@@>]CAQ_!R[;8OMEX8\0G^M$CMRZ6QN0T*D?.,YP)$>
M$D3U;LB@4^Q&05^0?9VG>=T+`D+GR0X75V7!_D^C7=3L\,<U ^4EO0>A$MY%B
MM[A+%L4?J?.DW=UE)]5.^J-UL%O)F^(2<![ LWNH\95S"\1KL7C(NJIVGT=^L
MQ%-;'Q"P]<%WXRGV+YCR)6 G=(IKS1?J+IOPT^Z/"AU?C@QI/Y-+X5SE8$:ZS
M.8#@SRODT <,;RD,>DZ3'BI27`#Y_!*A\'_W)&93Q/@,]/Q]6#+T"D,U.1)B >
MX\GL6`70\D6U8QEDG*?(6)L_$!7@H9Z)?V*,-,8SX%@!)C 3&DQ1_'Z[OF_'\
M>/]2AER1J?EBVX<TLORTS+-7@.D-M0)$E >_/_,/.O\3W3&9(9(;.[L+[!,.-
M[XGDN0J4CX7OG,OPB-"! C.^R>OV-5#M9+>7YKO#]ENTS:NQ6^:Z=!O)\'Y&R
M?SSWP(! D.Y[K8$"R'>>6%^Q6^8<3X[)D=SBX3I3^E/-=(O]9WX?Q-.Q?T /A.
M]URPY,N,>GYZ`Q+/.M&[6]3ZW2"0VD]4HEULHW;5GKH@ V)3R4Y[GU;;W[GWL
MYL\.?Y1?L:3=2E?NR4`````\=$58=&- O;6UE;G0`($EM86=E(&=E;F5R871E
M9"!B>2!'3E4@1VAO<W 1S8W)I<'0@*&1E=FEC93UP;FUR87<I"OJ+%O,```!*
M=$58= '-I9VYA='5R90`X-64Q864T83)F8F$W.&5E9#1F9#AF,&%C9C( S-S8P
M.64X-&8U-#DV8V1E,C!B-60W-F,Y8V)C,CDX8S1A96 )C)><)V@````!)14Y$
$KD)@@@``
`
end

Re:Am I the first

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. I've been doing it for a while. Also, Slashcode eats BASE64 better than uuencode. Something with the lameness filters and junk characters.

-- akedia

Re:Am I the first

[Anonymous Coward]

no, I remember posting statuphile pics to /. years ago, back when hot grits and natalie were new.

Mostly just an ad

[Anonymous Coward]

These articles are usually senseless folly. Almost every response is of the matter "Linux is already huge, but this is the year it's going to be huge"! Linux on the desktop? This is the year, they say. Big IPOs are on the horizon, Linux will dominate the 64-bit arena, SCO is nothing but good news, and Tux is gonna get laid!

It's a week and a half late, but Bah! Humbug!

linux....

[Anonymous Coward]

1. linuz nuts will realize that the os eats ass and will switch to MS

2. linux goes the same way as bsd (dead/dying)

3. Profit!!

Parrot overtakes Java, C# and Python

[Anonymous Coward]

in popularity as coding in awkard assembler becomes fashionable again.

Disagree, installation is basically solved

[Ars-Fartsica]

I don't think installer issues are relevant anymore, and in particular you cite the distro that has the weakest installation tools of all. I would like to see more work on installers, but I don't think this is a sticking point anymore.

As for the desktop, I suspect 2004 will see KDE and GNOME work more closely together via freedsktop.org thus making most flame wars irrelevant as interoperability will be vastly improved.

Greeaaat..

[cjjjer]

Another *Year in Review* or *Predictions* article about something open source. If I want a year in review I'll read the change log otherwise it's all fluff and as for predictions it's mostly all hype for the corporate marketing machine. If more than 10% of the predictions come true I'd be surprised at best.

Andy Tenenbaum...

[Wooky_linuxer]

Predicted that some 13 years ago.

Nope.

[DAldredge]

Will not happen.

Why, because RMS is too busy canning the HURD OS project lead because of doc license issues. The lead wanted a free license and RMS wanted a much more restrictive license.

Torvalds will be...

[EduardoFonseca]

... hired by Microsoft. RMS and ESR will join the SCO legal team. Bill Gates will get even fatter. Steve Ballmer will resign from MS and join some wicked monkey-dance group.

slashdot.org will be bought by Fox News. CowboyNeal will become a Fox News Anchor.

The world will collapse.

Re:Torvalds will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Fox News thing isn't that far off when you look at the bias of moderators here. You can't give something a negative mod simply because it's not what you prefer. NEWS for nerds. They all talk big about being spoonfed biased information and do it themselves.

So here is my prediction. Slashdot will either start kicking bias mods out or go down the toilet.

P.S. what's up with all the page not found errors when replying now?

Re:Torvalds will be...

[TeknoHog]

Tom's Hardware will go to hell.... to cool their 6.66 GHz Pentia.

Re:Torvalds will be...

[Craig3010]

slashdot.org will be bought by Fox News.
you're shittin me...could have sworn fox news already owned this bitch

Re:Torvalds will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. This sounds a lot like a documentary that I saw a while back. It was called "Antitrust" or something like that.

Re:Torvalds will be...

[AkaXakA]

The world will collapse.

That's what you get if you use CowboyNeal as an anchor.

Yeah!

[simetra]

And when you install stuff, you'll have to search the internet for all required .dll files - or the sources thereof, and compile them and put them where your appication install routine expects them! That'll go over really well with grandma!
You'll also have to build your own printing system and manually edit your registry whenever you want to change anything!

Stuff to look out for in 2004.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a lot of stuff coming out for Linux in 2004, here is a list of the most antisipated stuff. Distros

• Mandrake 10
• SuSE 10
• Slackware 10
• Fedora Core 2
• Lindows 5
• Gentoo 2004
• Knoppix 4
• Debian 3.1. Ooops, thats delayed until 2010 :)

Desktops

• Xfree86 4.4
• Xouvert
• KDE 3.2
• Gnome 2.6
• XFCE 4.1
• More Boxes

Applications

• Mozilla 1.6
• Mozilla bird collection
• OpenOffice 1.2 or 2.0
• Nvu
• Evoloution 2
• Gimp 2
• KDevelop 3
• Mplayer 1.0

Look forward to these, I know I am waiting for Mandrake 10, I am currently trying out the new snapshot :).

Re:Stuff to look out for in 2004.

[GoofyBoy]

And I look forward for each of these releases the slashdot article announcing them filled with postings which;

1. Claim that this version fixes all bugs, works perfectly and logically and will finally seal M$ coffin.
2. Claim that competing product X is dead.
3. Claim that this product is dead, since similar product X is obviously much superiour.

Re:Stuff to look out for in 2004.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think 2004 will also be the year when people can run Chandler

Re:Stuff to look out for in 2004.

[MosesJones]

Desktops

1) Sun Java Desktop

2) IBM Linux Desktop

What it is under the cover doesn't matter, its the name at the front that counts.

Re:Stuff to look out for in 2004.

[glwtta]

You know, just listing a bunch of applications and incrementing their current version by 1 isn't that much of a trick.

Re:Stuff to look out for in 2004.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I think 2004 will also be the year when people can run Chandler.

Right, and they'll be running it on the Hurd alongside Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Stuff to look out for in 2004.

[Carewolf]

KDE 3.2
Xfree86 4.4
Xouvert


A bit pessimistic, I think. KDE 3.3 is scheduled for december 2004 if released on time, and talks are going for making it only 3.2 and half, to give more time for KDE 4.0. That would mean summer 2004. Xfree86 4.4 is already in RC2, with the core-team out the way 4.5 should be out by the end of 2004 too. Also Xserver at freedesktop.org is way more interessting than Xourvert, and should make a lot of splash in 2004.

These are really old arguments

[IANAAC]

When was the last you bought a PC with XP loaded? You most likely didn't get the actual XP media, but a ghost image to restore from to restore "factory defaults". The same thing can easily be done with any new Linux machine. If you are looking for polished installers, look at any distribution: SUSE, RedHat, Mandrake... they ALL have very polished installers.

As far as hotkeys, why would you want to standardize them? I can define any key to do what I want currently with my distro (SUSE). Different people work in different ways. Why restrict them to what you think should be standard.

Your "frequent tasks" comment doesn'r provide any examples, but you could look back to hotkeys to provide solutions.

Re:These are really old arguments

[Aens]

Standardized hotkeys across applications provide a standard human interface for all users.

I should be able to move to another computer and use the same OS in the same way. I shouldn't have to guess at hotkeys.

Re:These are really old arguments

[KozmoStevnNaut]

What we really need is a relatively standardized interface for hotkeys, like most (all?) KDE apps use the hotkeys you define in the Control Center.

Having a single place to configure hotkeys for all apps (except for extreme cases like Emacs and Vi) would be a blessing for users, because when they *know* the save function is bound to ctrl+s in all the apps (word processor, browser etc) they use, I would guess they become a lot more confident.

Of course, it wouldn't really work for Emacs or Vi, but it could be supported as an optional feature, if someone really wanted it.

It's all part of the experience as a whole.

Re:These are really old arguments

[ballwall]

He's not saying 'lock down hot keys', he's saying make the default settings similar across the board.

This is the same point/counterpoint that always gets brought up. It needs to be as easy as possible out of the box, but still have the option to customize. That way you appeal to both crowds.

Re:These are really old arguments

[Anonymous Coward]

You should if you are moving to my computer and I have customized the hot-keys to my liking. If you have your own user-id, you also should be able to customize hot-keys. Hot-keys exist to provide efficiency.

None of this is to say that across various GUI toolkits and desktop environments and what-have-you that the defaults shouldn't be as consistent as possible... and this extends to things like menu command names, menu bar menu order, etc. But to say that such things shouldn't be customizable is simply silly and counter to the spirit of free software (which exists for the purpose of protecting user freedom to examine, modify, and share software). Also, a sensible application might offer the ability to view and edit all available hot-keys under its control.

Re:These are really old arguments

[Our Man In Redmond]

As far as hotkeys, why would you want to standardize them? I can define any key to do what I want currently with my distro (SUSE). Different people work in different ways. Why restrict them to what you think should be standard.

You've obviously never done support for non-technical users. A standardized interface and layout make it much easier to troubleshoot a problem.

Us geeks expect that we can customize our keyboards to do one-handed Dvorak layouts if we like. Joe User expects that if he's in an application and he hits F1, it brings up Help, not a new browser window or a machine shutdown.

This is one of the things that Apple and (to some extent) Microsoft has right, and Linux still has, um, room to grow in. A consistent user interface.

Re:These are really old arguments

[IANAAC]

Joe User expects that if he's in an application and he hits F1, it brings up Help, not a new browser window or a machine shutdown.

As far as I know F1 pulls up help in all standard apps, whether in KDE, Gnome or Bluecurve, because that's at the app level. Context sensitive help can also be called by F1 in KDE, Gnome and Bluecurve at the Window manager level. ALT+F calls the file menu in all standard apps and CNTL+Q exits the app. CNTL+C copies and CNTL+V pastes. That looks pretty standardized to me. Perhaps the (grand)parent post was complaining because everything wasn't standardized to Windows.

It's a different OS. Sit a Windows user down in fromt of OS X and you'll see similar initial differences - all easily adapted and learned once it's used for a bit.

Re:These are really old arguments

[Anonymous Coward]

1. As far as I know F1 pulls up help in all standard apps, whether in KDE, Gnome or Bluecurve, because that's at the app level. Context sensitive help can also be called by F1 in KDE, Gnome and Bluecurve at the Window manager level.

F1-style context sensitive help is very limited in both KDE and Gnome. Examples;

Evolution - F1 works on the main window, but not while creating a new message.

Kate (a good KDE text editor) - F1 does nothing.

I could go on and on and on -- Nautilus acts like Evolution, and Konqueror's shift-F1 help works for a couple buttons and little else -- though trying F1 in a few apps yourself should give you the idea.

Re:These are really old arguments

[UserGoogol]

But there is no standard human. You should be able to carry your user preferences with you.

Re:These are really old arguments

[Our Man In Redmond]

I think the grandparent post was trying to sell the virtues of customizability. The point I was trying to make was, choice and customizability are a Good Thing until you start supporting large numbers of users. Then you want conformity as it keeps your support costs down.

my prediction

[Naomi_the_butterfly]

my prediction is that at least one ultra simplified *nix distro (other than OSX) will make a bit of headway into the average home user demographic, but just a bit.

Re:my prediction

[Lumpy]

try mandrake 9.2

it's easier than windows XP.... even with the fisher price mode turned on in XP.

I had my grandmother install a game (icewalkers) and she said... "That's it? no parade of confusing installer boxes to click yes or ok on? Wonderful!"

mandrake is easier to install an app on than windows XP.

This is if the app is packaged right. most linux install problems can be linked to the package or app it's self being a mess.

Don't blame a poorly written or packaged app on linux... linux is ready now. what we have to wait for is all the app writers to pull their heads out of the sand and start making installable versions.. and yes this means statically linked in some situations.

Re:my prediction

[Naomi_the_butterfly]

actually, I meant the distro. Maybe your grandma was lucky, or just smart. I used to teach computers to 70 year olds many hours a week. I know from whence I speak.

Re:my prediction

[Lumpy]

It's not hard to say, insert the CD, ok now when the CD icon appears... click on it. ok, now click on the file named XXXX great.

that is it. if your 70 year olds cant handle that, they certianly cant handle anything that microsoft throws them and a MAcOS install would be equally difficult.

Grandma isn't lucky, she made me install lots of things when she was under windows because windows installers are too confusing to her. mandrake rpm's just simply install and then finish. no silly questions unless there is a dependancy error and that is the fault of the software packager.

Re:my prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Could the problem be the developers of the application including every gee-whiz installer option and not Windows?

Just wait until lots of mainstream apps hit Linux and then you'll see dialog flying all over the screen like we do on Windows =)

Re:My prediction

[NtroP]

Hmmm. I hate to feed the Trolls (if this is one), but I do find that this really IS a pervasive sentiment out there.

I know that many business operate with that sort of attitude. I have friends that say "My department has a budget for licensing and related costs - if I don't spend it I will loose it. Besides, if I have any problems, I can just call tech support and they can bail me out. Seems like a pretty good investment to me."

This may all be true but I can only speak from my personal experience. We have a large mixed-platform network (~10,000 nodes running Windows98-XP, MacOS 7.6-Panther, RedHat 6.2-9.0) that is distributed accross about 35 locations. Being a non-profit organization we are constantly hit with ever-tighting budgets and a tiny IT staff.

Over the past several years I have run into many situations where licensing has "cost" way more that it should. Rather than go into an overly-broad generalization, let me give an example that occured last week: I was tasked with upgrading our backup system which had reached capacity. After doing some research on the larger players (NetVault, ArcServe, etc.) I chose an "enterprise-level" backup solution. My particular choice was heavily weighted because our backup system is critical and after the nightmare we had with Welchia, et al, I wanted our backup server to run on Linux and be able to back up to a multi-terrabyte RAID array we'd purchased. I also wanted a "universal management client" that would run on any of our client platforms. Anyway, I won't go into whom I chose, but the problems I've had since then have almost ALL been related to licensing.

First off, the "core" program is reasonably priced. But every client that you are going to back up has to have client software loaded (requiring a reboot unless it's linux - so now I have to wait until after hours to install) Each client comes with it own license that's tied to that machine. OK, no problem. I'm just doing initial testing and each client has a 30-day evaluation license (except it doesn't take for some reason - call tech support - they can only give me a 7-day eval license key - WTF? - OK, I'll use that.)

I run a test backup and it misses about a thousand files - Oops, silly me me "Open Files" require a separate plugin (that costs as much by itself as the client plugin.) So I install that plugin and re-run the job. It still misses hundreds of files. I investigate. All the files were saved to the server by older mac clients and had "invalid characters" in their name (like forward slashes, etc.) Strange, all our mac and PC clients can access these files - why can't the backup software? (Call tech support - I need the UNICODE plugin for windows 2000 Server. It costs as much as the original client software. This particular server is NT 4 - Sorry, no plugin for you! You must upgrade to Server 2K ($$$) and then buy the plugin license. WTF!!!)

I don't WANT to upgrade that server. It's just a file and print server. It does everything I want it to do the way it is. Besides, I'll have to buy server 2003 for it - How will M$ licensing affect me then? What other hidden costs will I have to prepare for in my uncertain budget?

OK, I can use our existing backup solution to back that server up until we get it upgraded or migrated. By now my 7-day keys have expired so I can't do any more test backups on my other servers (MsSQL: separate plugin. MysQL: separate plugin. Filenames beginning in 'T': I'm sure I'll need to buy$$$ a separate plugin.) So I figure I'll just register the backup server and the five-or-so clients I want to do the longer term tests on. I head over to the registration page and fill in the information and am about to hit submit when I notice some small print between the last field and the submit button. I actually read it :-) it says, in part:

"

I certify that I am responsible for management of the use of [BlahBlah](TM) at this disclosed location and on the systems identif

Re:My prediction

[16K Ram Pack]

That's a hell of a post!!

The big thing for me with using FOSS (Windows or otherwise) is the more open file formats. I once had a file corruption in Word, and it didn't matter what I did, I couldn't stop it corrupting when an embedded image was displayed. I went to the backups which had saved fine, but they had the same corruption. I had to resave it.

In today's terms if such a thing happened in OOo, I'd take the OOo document, unzip and play around with the XML. There's a good chance I could at least keep the rest of the document without the image (this assumes such a thing could happen with OOo).

I used to hate that I couldn't write word files from a server. With OOo, I could either install it on a server, or write the XML and Zip it. It's all, well, OPEN.

MOD PARENT UP -- INSIGHTFUL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this at 1??? Horrible moderation!

Office monopoly will begin to crack

[astrashe]

I think we're on the brink of the collapse of Microsoft's office suite monopoly. There's a lot less lock-in with office than there is with windows, so it's much easier for people to switch to open office.

Microsoft's pricing and online activation system has already pretty much removed office from consumer pc's. People who used to take cds home from work are doing without, and it's only a matter of time until the word about open office gets out. I'm not claiming that open office is as good as microsoft office, but it's good enough, I think.

I think that microsoft is making one of the biggest mistakes in its history in the way it prices office. The strategy seems to be aimed, as near as I can tell, at keeping corporate revenues high while allowing MS to cut prices for low end consumer machines.

A corporate workstation with xp pro and office pro pays microsoft almost 3x what a consumer user with xp home and works pays. I don't think that reflects costs or utility to the customer.

The most useful part of what people pay microsoft for comes from xp home -- it gives you the ability to run the huge library of windows software, access to the huge array of hardware device drivers, and core networking tools. What you get, for the buck, from jumping to xp pro or adding office on to the back, provides a lot less utility for each dollar spent.

If you decide that the corporate market can bear substantially higher prices than the consumer market, and if you notice that the main differences between a corporate user and a home user is office, then loading up the costs on the office side makes sense. I think that's what they're doing, and I think it's a fundamentally unstable pricing scheme.

So I predict that we're going to see corporate workstation users going with xp home and open office. A lot of computers that have been sold with $375 worth of microsoft software on them will now be sold with $94 worth of microsoft software on them.

MS-Office still makes sense for a lot of people. If you run exchange server, and want to use outlook as a groupware client, it makes sense. Excel users who earn a lot are going to get the spreadsheet they know and want, no one's going to tell a $150k/year guy to learn a new spreadsheet. But those types of users don't add up to a monopoly.

If the office monopoly begins to crack, it will be a really big deal. It will be a decline in a core microsoft business, and will suggest that perhaps the best days are behind them. And it will be the result of an open source project.

Windows to linux is a very wrenching change, in a million little ways. But MS-Office to Open Office is a lot more doable.

I think that's where MS's empire will first start to crack.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[110010001000]

"Microsoft's pricing and online activation system has already pretty much removed office from consumer pc's."

Oh brother. I think I can stop reading this one right here.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[Anonymous Coward]

Except...
Microsoft's Office environment is beginning to look like a platform instead of just a product. You know how we cobble together a myriad of applications to generate reports? Now in Office as the Research Pane. Many more things in office allow it to be extended, customized and linked to other sources of data.

I think businesses will be quite happy to keep Office around, and home users (who want to do some work at home) will have to follow suit.

I just pity the admins who will be tasked with keeping the data infrastructure running...

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[rmull]

They will not use XP Home because it doesn't allow the machine to be added to a domain. Small business, maybe, but not corporate.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[debrain]

no one's going to tell a $150k/year guy to learn a new spreadsheet.

If an employee of mine makes $150k/year, I might expect him to learn a new spreadsheet on his own time. The more money they make, the higher my expectations, especially if they are in a liquid position (ie. easily replaceable).

Which would cost more? Replacing the $150k/year person, or the continued software licenses? It's a cost-benefit analysis, not so easily waived.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[nelsonal]

I consider myself to be an excel user who knows and earns a fair bit, and I've used all the competing products (I haven't tried abilty, but I could switch to Lotus, Quattro, or open office tomorrow and not miss a beat). Yeah, we have some propretary financial services addin's that are excell only, but they've adapted quickly in other areas, so they'll switch with the users. It would seem that part of the reason that the person makes $150k/yr is that they are smart and flexible enough to learn a new spreadsheet within a few hours time. Better yet, they've already know how to use all of the office tools. Office is definitly an easier hurdle for windows, I'm glad Sun had the gumption to buy a suite and give it a try. FYT, I think office is makes more money than windows, now.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[Lxy]

MS Select customers actually get good deals.

Windows XP Pro License: $127
Office XP Pro License: $297
Key numbers that never require activation: priceless

Open office.org (WTF do they insist on adding .org? that sounds horrible) is a good product for the general user. It does 80% of the things that Office does. The problem in my environment is that other 20%.. we have to do things in Office that Open Office JUST CAN'T DO. We need application integration. Some of our custom apps are written to integrate with Word and that integration doesn't function. Asking for OOo intergration? Not gonna happen.

Secondly, the power users of Word are going to miss some features (most of them on the "who the hell uses THAT?" feature list). Yes, people use some of those obnoxious features. I've actually had people scream at me for not installing Clippy.

So while OOo caters to a good percentage of Office users, it's the annoyances and the useless features that limit its deployment.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[astrashe]

You're right, it was a stupid mistake on my part. I don't think it affects my office argument, though.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[astrashe]

I wonder how many people have scripted ms-office, or use it as part of a larger custom application. But you're right, that's the sort of situation, like the ones I mentioned (people using outlook for groupware, etc.) that will keep people in the ms-office camp.

I'm not saying that there won't be a huge market for ms-office. I run it myself, and I have scripted it myself. I like it. I just don't think it will remain as a monopoly. Almost everyone has to use it if it's going to remain as a monopoly.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[astrashe]

I have a paid for version of office on my home windows computer. I like it.

But I see a lot of people in this situation. They go to wal-mart, and they buy a HP machine for $500. They're not comptuer people, they just want to go online, hit the web, send email, and type up some stuff from time to time.

Because they buy at wal-mart, they don't get a crack at the $234 OEM price on office professional. Something comes up, and they decide that they'd like to have office -- someone sends them a powerpoint file, or whatever. And they find out that office is $450. They're just not going to spend that.

In the old days, they would just bring the office cds home from work. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it is what happened. But now they can't.

My point was that if people start running open office at home, there's going to be a userbase of people who run it. If a pointy headed boss runs open office at home, and says, "this is good enough," maybe he'll figure it's good enough for the people he manages.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[Cat_Byte]

One big problem. It can't open all of their old Office documents yet. I have openoffice on my machine but keep having to use my laptop to open Office documents sent to me in formats it can't open correctly. The whole world isn't going to open all of their documents & reformat so the burden still lies with OpenOffice.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[freeweed]

Something comes up, and they decide that they'd like to have office -- someone sends them a powerpoint file, or whatever.

I realize the point you're making, but keep in mind that Microsoft releases viewers for all of their document formats for free. All they have to do is start selling Word for something reasonable (say $50) and that would cover 90% of Office use in the home.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[robertjw]

I think Open Office is good enough to compete with MS-Office, but most importantly it reads and writes MS-Office (word, excel) files very nicely.

Converting to Open Office will not only crack the Office suite monopoly, but it will give the Linux desktop a foothold in the corporate world. Many office users primarily require MS-Office to do their jobs. If corporate IT can move these users to Linux and using Open Office they will.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[sysadmn]

Microsoft isn't blind to this. The $149 Student and Teacher Office Edition is licensed for up to three computers in a single household. Their challenge is to prevent the price cutting in the home arena from affecting the Corporate prices.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[westlake]

In the old days, they would just bring the office cds home from work. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it is what happened. But now they can't.

actually you can and it's perfectly legit, under a "Work at Home" licensing agreement: Tech Tips

Something comes up, and they decide that they'd like to have office -- someone sends them a powerpoint file, or whatever. And they find out that office is $450. They're just not going to spend that.

no, but they might spend $150 for the no-ID-required Student-Teacher Edition, which can be bought off the rack and installs on up to three systems. Office at $50 a seat ain't bad.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[adam872]

In my experience, those who earn those kinds of salaries are rarely in an easily replacable position. Furthermore, they are often given whichever tools give them the ability to do their jobs most efficiently. If that deviates slightly from a "standard" then so be it. The 150k a year salary might look high on the P&L, but if they are good they add substantially more value than that to the organisation (i.e in new sales, new ideas or increased efficiency). Their pay starts to look cheap then....

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[adam872]

Agreed. Good on Sun for stepping up and providing an alternative.

I think the reason why Excel has become such a standard is that it's a bloody good spreadsheet in it's own right. I couldn't say the same for Word and Powerpoint (which have gotten harder to use and more bloated as time has gone on), but Excel beats other mainstream spreasheets I have used hands down. There are obviously more specialised products out there that do a great job in certain disciplines (such as SAS or Mathematica) but Excel is great for general purpose stuff like I do...

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[Anonymous Coward]

About $100 gets Works Suite with MS Word 2002, a somewhat limited spreadsheet and database and a calendar app. It boggles the mind that the standalone edition costs more than Word + a herd of other apps.

Works Ste 2004 Win32 English NA CD
$99.99

Vs.

Microsoft(R) Word 2003 Win32 English CD
$229.00

Of course, you can get either for less by NOT shopping microsoft.com.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[mic256]

I've actually had people scream at me for not installing Clippy.
Office 2003 doesn't have Clippy anymore...
Some of our custom apps are written to integrate with Word and that integration doesn't function. Asking for OOo intergration?Not gonna happen.
The same was said aboud WordPerfect and Word back in 1994. It was predicted that secretaries where to used to wordperfect interface and key bindings and that they would never switch...

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[RoLi]

Changes like that don't happen overnight. I see OpenOffice making inroads predominantly in:

• Schools. It's much more reasonable for a teacher to tell students to download OO than to pirate/buy MSO to do their homework
• Price-sensitive small corporations
• Home users with not too big office usage

It's an uphill battle at the moment, but as soon as OO gets critical mass it will become the standard and MSO will be dwindling fast.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[esarjeant]

Companies with apps that integrate with Word will likely not be candidates for either OpenOffice or the latest version of MS Office.

The advent of the MS Office Convertor Pack isn't going to make your Office 2003 upgrade all that comfortable for downlevel compatibility, especially if you can't afford to upgrade everyone. MS is expecting that you will adopt a new compliment of technologies, so you will need to consider retooling app integration if you really are considering upgrading to the newer version of Office.

OOo has a reasonably good SDK http://api.openoffice.org with Java, C/C++ and BASIC-like support. You can prompt the user with forms, integrate with a database, etc... Although not an ideal workflow solution like Lotus Notes, it can be constructed in a similiar fashion to MS Office.

In any event, it seems plausible that MS will be losing a substantial revenue stream as users either remain on "legacy" MS Office environments or consider open solutions for document management.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[RdsArts]

Perhaps, but for how long?

Office is MS's cashcow. Without a steady large income, other projects suffer. The Office products begin suffering. Income lessens. Rinse, repeat.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[Anonymous Coward]

1. no, but they might spend $150 for the no-ID-required Student-Teacher Edition, which can be bought off the rack and installs on up to three systems. Office at $50 a seat ain't bad.

...and this is not like cheating and stealing...because???

That said, even if nobody cares about the ethics of such a deal, it's not an obvious move for Jane Enduser. She still thinks that the CompUSA guys know WTF they are saying. (Come to think of it...some of them probably do know what they are saying now, but mainly because of migration from the collapsed tech sector.)

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[2short]

If you pay anyone $150k/year that you consider "easily replaceable", I'm not sure I'm willing to rely too heavily on your business sense.

While we're at it, if he's learning a new spreadsheet because you're paying him, he's not doing it on his own time; He's doing it because you're paying him, and he's not doing something else for you he could be otherwise. So, which costs more: the continued software licenses, or paying your employee to learn a new spreadsheet. That's your cost-benefit analysis. Take whatever rate you value that persons time at, estimate how much time it will take to learn the new system (at the presumably high level of competence he has with the old system) and balance that against the cost of the licenses. Seems to me it's going to take an awfully expensive license to justify not giving your 150k guy whatever system he already knows and loves.

This is why in most busineses I've dealt with (outside the mega-corp world) the procedure is: Hire the $150k/year guy, then ask him what he needs.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[jmertic]

We need application integration. Some of our custom apps are written to integrate with Word and that integration doesn't function. Asking for OOo intergration? Not gonna happen.

Try this. We have many of our apps inhouse that use Word and Excel via automation that I'm strongly considering moving over to OO, especially our one vertical app that we sell that requires Word 2000/XP/2003 in order to function.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[2short]

The same was said aboud WordPerfect and Word back in 1994. It was predicted that secretaries where to used to wordperfect interface and key bindings and that they would never switch...

Ouch, bad memories. I was working help-desk in 1995 for a group of secretaries who were being forced to make exactly that switch. And that's exactly what was said, and it was true. They never did switch. We of the help desk, rather than get called every time they wanted to italicize something (no, really), set the preferences then available in Word that made all the keyboard shortcuts and some other things as much like WordPerfect as possible. Several years later, most of them still couldn't do anything that couldn't be done the WordPerfect way. The presence of those "act just like WordPerfect" options was the only reason productivity did not just entirely cease.

I suppose in most environments there's the implicit "to keep your job, learn the new software", but these were civil servants...

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[rowanxmas]

Name one person you know who has installed these.

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[110010001000]

I know I have already been marked as flamebait in my earlier port for daring to go against slashdot groupthink, but here are 3 facts: 1) Office doesn't cost $450 2) Office comes bundled with the HP machines in most cases 3) People still bring home Office CD's from work, because the licensing for Corporate versions doesn't require online registration

Re:Office monopoly will begin to crack

[spongman]

At $150/year, this guy could buy his annual office upgrade during a weeks worth of bathroom breaks.

I guarantee that if you forced a new spreadsheet progrm on him, you'd lose more money through lost productivity than you'd save from not having to pay a lifetime's worth of office upgrades.

Ars Technica's Linux Predictions for 2004

[Seltsam]

Here's a thread at Ars' OpenForum giving their predictions. whiprush's initial post is very insightful.

Slackware is almost where it's at...

[capt.Hij]

After the whole redhat/fedora thing I started looking around and tried out slackware, debian, fedora, and freebsd. I pulled out an old machine that wasn't beeing used and did fresh installs. The first thing I tried was slackware, and it was great. There were some quirks with partitioning, but I could break out into the shell and do it manually. I was hooked. Next when I tried debian, I knew slackware was the real thing (worst installer I've used in years).

Next I tried freebsd and the damn thing was rock solid. Most of my previous expierence was with IRIX and AIX machines, which help make slackware feel "right." However, when I started playing with freebsd it felt "more righter." Moreover, it was clear that slackware was trying hard to feel like BSD. I quickly realized that I would rather use the original!

When I tried fedora I was pleasantly surprised. Nobody came to my door to rape my cat and beat my wife or anything. Also, the desktop is nice and the support quite broad. The result is that I am now using Fedora on my desktop machines and will be converting my server over to freebsd.

After finally taking a look at freebsd I finally understand what some folks mean when they say the right tool for the job. I have really fallen for the mix of freebsd on a server and linux on the desktop. Also, I think that fedora will do well once it gets a second hearing. I just hope that they move a little slower than the proposed 6 month turn around time...

Re:Slackware is almost where it's at...

[commodoresloat]

When I tried fedora I was pleasantly surprised. Nobody came to my door to rape my cat and beat my wife or anything.

Are you sure you installed it correctly?

Re:Slackware is almost where it's at...

[Anonymous Coward]

I figured out what the problem is. You need to explicitly set the -rapecat and -beatwife flags before the install process; these features are not enabled in the default install.

RedHat: Reloaded

[Performaman]

Well, for me 2004 will be another year with RedHat 8.0. Stupid $80 SuSE 8.2 set I got for my birthday hangs on booting on my laptop (Sony PCG-FRV25). The same happens with the 9.0 live eval cd. Damn.

Re:RedHat: Reloaded

[PaperMCSE]

debian.org

Re:RedHat: Reloaded

[iaredam]

have you tried booting the laptop with the 'nofirewire' flag, I had a similar problem with an old sager laptop and set it to noprobe, and nofirewire and it booted without a hitch

Re:RedHat: Reloaded

[Anonymous Coward]

is the boot up on your suse 8.2 hanging on the sound card? at least in 9.o there is a work around for that. dont know if that is your problem, but it might be worth looking into.

Perhaps...

[Oen_Seneg]

...Steve Ballmer gets drunk and decides to open source all of Microsoft's products.

Re:Perhaps...

[Snover]

I'm fairly certain that guy has perpetually drunk and high on some highly illicit drug for years, and it isn't open sourced yet...

Re:Perhaps...

[zhenlin]

Perhaps the SCO Legal Department gets even more drunk and decides to open source all of Microsoft's products. After all, they own everything, right?

Re:Perhaps...

[JoeBaldwin]

Bring on the vodka.

Re:Perhaps...

[AkaXakA]

I know that was a joke...but. What if they actually GPL'ed all their stuff ( by accident or other means) and the source got out... Could they revoke it?

More of the same

[Anonymous Coward]

The Linux community will still fail miserably to work together to present the world's mainstream desktop users with a serious alternative to Windows. Linuxites will still focus on how far Linux has come (a long, long way by any rational measure) instead of how short it falls in terms of compatibility and overall usability. As long as that's true, Bill Gates can keep building %50M houses and laughing at the Linux ankle-biters.

Re:More of the same

[IANAAC]

I guess alt.os.ms-windows.advocacy lives afterall. Wonder why they keep hanging out in Linux/BSD/OSX areas though.

Re:More of the same

[Lumpy]

Linuxites will still focus on how far Linux has come (a long, long way by any rational measure) instead of how short it falls in terms of compatibility and overall usability. As long as that's true, Bill Gates can keep building %50M houses and laughing at the Linux ankle-biters.

Nice try Mister Ballmer....

so what? did you lose a bet to Bill or is this your late Christmas present to him? or was this a new requirement under the 2004 Microsoft Employee Handbook.

GOD DAMN IT GOD DAMN IT GOD DAMN IT GOD DAMN IT!

[Anonymous Coward]

I put the mute on the speakers before clicking the link because I'm a good little Slashdotter who knows better and then opened it in a new window with my fingers poised on "Alt+F4" and then I see CUTE LITTLE SEAL ANIMATION AWWW HOW CUTE! So I figure OH OK THIS IS LEGIT AND I WANT TO HEAR WHAT THE CUTE WIDDLE SEAL IS SAYING OH I WUV YOU! And then I take the mute off and BRAGGH WWW.ANALSEX.COM out the FUCKING SPEAKERS and now EVERYONE IN THE OFFICE IS STARING. FUCKER FUCKING FUCK FUCK FUCK I FUCKING HATE YOU ALL ARHGHHGHGGHGHH!H!H!!!!!!1~`~~tilde~``!!!!!oneoneon eeleven~~`~~

Not quite true.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's pricing and online activation system has already pretty much removed office from consumer pc's. People who used to take cds home from work are doing without, and it's only a matter of time until the word about open office gets out. I'm not claiming that open office is as good as microsoft office, but it's good enough, I think.

Many of my customers allow their entire offices to use Remote Desktop to allow users to reach their desktops from home or the road. No extra license is needed in these cases. Windows XP is becoming a no-brainer upgrade for many many people.

Re:Not quite true.

[2short]

Three cheers for Remote Desktop. Any lousy box with internet access instantly becomes my rather nice (expensive) box at work, with all it's expensive software, fast access to files on the office LAN, no sycronization issues, etc.

I don't need to buy squat software wise for my home box because 90% of the time it's just a monitor (I did get a nice monitor).

RedHat Aquired

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat will be aquired by Novell.

Linux games will double!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another prediction: GNU/Linux games will double their numbers to a whopping FOUR games!

I predict...

[Dirtside]

I predict that predictions made for 2004 will be no more accurate than the predictions that were made for any other year, and we should all stop wasting our time.

People wouldn't make so many predictions if they were forced to wear a signboard at the end of the year with a list of all the predictions they made that didn't come true. Say, that sounds like an idea....

Re:I predict...

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict that predictions made for 2004 will be no more accurate than the predictions that were made for any other year,...

Including this one!

Hahahahahaha....

Happy new year!

-- ac at home

My prediction

[gutier]

I predict that Linux will continue to be the small bit player that it has always been and still is today, buoyed by technical people who believe technologically superior products will prevail today's economy.

I predict that more and more people will realize that the licensing cost of software is an extremely small portion of the cost of maintaining business systems for corporations, and that the same people will become more puzzled by what OSS means and how it improves their P&L.

I also predict that Linux zealots will continue to predict that this year will be the year of world domination for Linux, just like they did in 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, ...

My Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

Overrated.

MOD PARENT UP -- INSIGHTFUL

[Anonymous Coward]

For Linux to be good, you need to learn from the best!!

link

[morcheeba]

It looks normal now, but I assume you mean the 2004 new year's image that has now been archived with the other holiday logos.

Re:link

[glitch23]

Oddly enough I don't see a logo for Christmas on that Google page. What's up with that? I hope it's not the stupid "Seasons Greetings" logo. What happened to Merry Christmas? Afraid to offend those who don't even celebrate Christmas by calling it what it is?

Where's Mandrake?

[tickleboy2]

Which distributions will show the greatest growth in 2004?

I was surprised that Mandrake didn't make the list. Mandrake in my experience is one of the easiest distributions to install and use and has made some impressive contributions over the last year (9.2, MandrakeMove). Still I have to admit I haven't tried SUSE so maybe I'm missing out on something...

Re:Where's Mandrake?

[hawkeyeMI]

Every time I've tried mandrake and redhat (and that's going back to RH 6 and madrake 7, which is admittedly not too far...) they have showstopping problems that do not exist in distros such as Gentoo and Debian. I've tried all the redhats up through 8 and all the mandrakes up through the latest... what is it, 8.2? 9.2? My roommate gave me the CDs and I tried it but I don't remember the exact version. Are the problems fixable? Sometimes. Would I rather use a distro I don't have to fix in the first place? Most certainly.

Re:Where's Mandrake?

[tickleboy2]

What kind of show stopper did you encounter? The only problem I've ever had was with Centrino notebooks but that's because there are no linux drivers. If you do decide to give Mandrake another chance, check out the Linux Questions forum dedicated to Mandrake.

Re:Where's Mandrake?

[Nasarius]

I don't know which problems you're referring to, but the biggest problems I've had with Mandrake and SuSE is upgrading packages. I just can't seem to properly upgrade GTK+ on either distro. That's why I went and made my own distro based on LFS. It works so much better.

Re:Where's Mandrake?

[hawkeyeMI]

Things like whole menus disappearing, control center modules that crash every time I try to load them and the like. These last couple of times I probably didn't give it enough of a chance, but I feel like most distros (SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, I don't know about Slackware, never tried it) are too modified-up, they lack base compaitibility for everything. You never know what's been patched. My current favorite is Gentoo but I've thought about trying LFS one of these days... The last thing I want to do is start a distro flamewar. If there's one thing I've realized from trying a bunch of different Linux distros it's that they're very much a matter of personal taste, and there's no accounting for taste.

Re:Where's Mandrake?

[tickleboy2]

I definitely agree with you there. I guess I was just surprised because I normally have had no problems with Mandrake. But I've used computers enough to know that what works for one user most certainly doesn't mean it works for another! ;)

But you can't deny the media hype in 2003

[Ars-Fartsica]

I am not saying the rise of linux is without substance. What I am saying is that in 2003 linux was vetted by simply being linux. There was a great deal of hype, but this was to be expected in the early stages of corporate adoption.

I stand by my statement - in 2004 people who are making investments in linux will get over simply adopting what is in the limelight and start judging linux as an IT investment.

Re:But you can't deny the media hype in 2003

[robertjw]

True, there was lots of hype, but there has been significant improvement in Linux - both kernel and applications - within the last year. I would disagree that "linux was vetted by simply being linux". Linux has been recognized as a viable, maturing tool that can finally be adopted by corporations.

Just because the corporate world has finally 'discovered' Linux does not diminish any of the qualities that brought it to this point.

Re:But you can't deny the media hype in 2003

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because the corporate world has finally 'discovered' Linux does not diminish any of the qualities that brought it to this point

Except that the corporate world has different expectations. While Linux has shined at ISPs, DotComs, and as a UNIX replacement, it's still got a long way to go before it meets the "NOS" functionality of NetWare or Windows.

The price is still right, but corps may have to learn about missing features the hard way.

shared memory experts?

[smoon]

shmexperts must refer to experts of shared memory -- what exactly does that have to do with predictions of the future?

I predict that a new algorithm for thread-safe access to shared memory will be developed using either semaphores and spin-locks. But them, I'm no expert.

Missing Cairo, XServe etc

[Ars-Fartsica]

Xouvert will likely not be the X project to take off over time - I suspect freedesktop.org will become the de facto kingmaker and they seem to be going with XServe,

Also you are not mentioning Cairo at all, and I believe this will be a huge X enhancement in 2004/5 whenever it comes along.

As for apps, I continue to advocate Gnumeric and AbiWord, which I believe are superior to their less-polished looking OpenOffice equivalents.

"And The Future?" by PJ of Groklaw

[PSaltyDS]

Our brainy heroine and penguin loving paralegal babe, PJ at Groklaw, posted an article covering some New Year's trend spotting. Some of the goodies:

1. Invester's Business Daily makes up its Top 10 Tech Stories of the year without mentioning Microsoft in any context.

2. A speculation comes from Chris Gulker in an IT Managers Journal article that Microsoft will introduce an MSLinux when Longhorn turns out to be unsellable. (Good thing or bad thing? I think good, if it happened.)

3. The example of Smart Displays, where per-user licensing inhibits even Microsoft's innovation, as cited in a Register article:

"The final nail in its coffin was Microsoft's absurd decision to kow-tow to the tin god of its licensing agreements. If you took your smart display downstairs, nobody in the den with the computer could use it. Single user licence, repeated Microsoft marketing droids. 'We can't compromise our standard licensing policy."

4. From the counter example of what can be, in the MagicBike project of the Parsons School of Design, PJ muses: "The idea is, when everyone gets to play, innovation is the result. Innovation doesn't come from money or walled-in projects, although money can help implement ideas. Innovation comes from people, and as George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, talent can show up simply anywhere, where you least expect it. The lower the barrier to entry, the more likely you are to get wonderful ideas. It's one reason I keep it possible to leave anonymous comments on Groklaw, despite the down side to that."

5. Vince Cerf's vision of the ubiquitous net is cited, reaching even to other planets.

PJ concludes: "Yes, [Microsoft] must adapt in order to be part of the future. I think it's a given that no one wants a wireless product that can only legally connect to one PC predetermined during setup. Not after somebody sent the mayor an email from a bike in Union Square station in NYC. Or even read about it. Once you have the concept and you see what is possible, you know what you know, and Brand X doesn't work for you after that. Like the song says, there's nothing like the real thing."

I know most of these points have been previously featured on /., but I like the compilation of them as a converging threat to Microsoft's paradigms that may cause significant rethinking in 2004.

Besides, I think I have a crush on PJ... :-)

Re:"And The Future?" by PJ of Groklaw

[Saeger]

I think it's a given that no one wants a wireless product that can only legally connect to one PC predetermined during setup.

Well then, best get to work mentally engineering the people to accept it! We'll start with the easy anonymous pedophile threat that no upstanding citizen can object to, then move on to terrorism, communism, "theft of bandwidth", and wardriving hackers that steal credit card numbers and private info "OVER THIN AIR!".

It's a winner.

--

Re:"And The Future?" by PJ of Groklaw

[TrancePhreak]

I predict people like you will continue to spend time bashing MS instead of actually getting work done.

Re:"And The Future?" by PJ of Groklaw

[LouieLing]

2. A speculation comes from Chris Gulker in an IT Managers Journal article that Microsoft will introduce an MSLinux when Longhorn turns out to be unsellable. (Good thing or bad thing? I think good, if it happened.) I thought it already had: http://www.mslinux.org/ :)

Happily for Linux, you're blowing smoke!

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is a buzzword now, like outsourcing and utility computing. It will happen because of the hype. People will probably back off later where it turns out to be a stupid idea. For the moment, though, adoption won't be slowed just because it can't deliver.

Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[bmajik]

What Linux standards ? How many differnet "Linux" distros are compliant with these standards ? what are they ?

Furthermore, how would it benefit Microsoft to tout that "longhorn is compliant with xx". Microsoft already has source level compat with much free software via the Services For Unix Interix SDK. Windows can be an NFS client or server with SFU. CIFS interop between linux and windows could be better I suppose, but my feeling is that samba needs to move upwards, and microsoft has little incentive to move downward to acheive this.

I guess i'd just be curious to know where this statement came from. It sounds mostly like a "wouldn't that be nice" without a lot of thought behind it.. like an emotional victory rather than something of technical significance..

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[Anonymous Coward]

by the time longhorn comes out, samba 3 will be stable, and it will be what allows longhorn to talk with a linux machine, therefore windows will work with linux (repeat for all the other techs where linux is reaching to be compatable with windows)
marketing, gotta love it... atleast thats what the marketing said here in this ad.

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[OneFix]

A lot...compatibility with EXT2/EXT3, 100% samba compatibility, drivers for printing to CUPS servers, etc...

In reality, this should be called open standards compatibility...but, some of this would be bad for M$...like EXT2/3 compatibility...makes dual booting easier...

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[spitzak]

Drive letters, ^M^J translation built into the OS, lack of environment variables like $HOME, non-GMT time stamps on the files, inability to handle many punctuation marks in filenames and ISO-8859-1 case-insensitivity and thus the inability to handle UTF-8 correctly in filenames, refusal to provide some GNU tools like a Unix shell...

All of these little details cause us far more grief than the differences in the GUI. And Microsoft could address these easily, eliminating a huge fraction of the hostility that is directed at them. This is what most people are talking about when they say "standards compliant" or whatever.

There is no need for them to provide Linux ABI compatability or even POSIX compatability. What they need to do is to stop ignoring the simple little details where it is obvious to everybody that the Unix design is better. I really think this direct ignorance and disrespect for everybody is the real reason so many hate Microsoft, not because of their closed and monopolistic nature. If NT had been even mildly Unix-compatable there would be no Linux today and probably Micorsoft would be considered a rather benign directing force in the computer industry.

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[bmajik]

dude, what are you talking about ?

drive letters are primarily provided for backwards compat. They're slowly going away.

$HOMEDRIVE and $HOMEPATH are both defined on this XP machine.

you can make files (and other objects) case sensitive if you like; services for UNIX install will do this for you if you so desire.

Services for UNIX does include many GNU utilities... i use tcsh on my XP laptop quite frequently. gcc is there if you want bash, zsh, or anything else you can think of..

UTF-8 is a poor standard - it's what happens when there's too much legacy tied to ANSI C and C style strings. With UTF-8, strlen no longer means anything :/

NT is actually UCS-2 from the ground up - a much more reasonable way to do unicode, IMO.

NT is unix compatible enough that you can clean compile many userland unix things form source with interix/SFU.

Please let me know when you find something where NT differs from unix where the unix design is "obviously better to everyone".

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[RoLi]

If an out-of-the-box Windows installation could run Linux programs it would be the death for the Win32-API. Microsoft would be pretty dumb if they do that.

Microsoft does everything to make their stuff as incompatible as possible, all of the sudden they won't start to change that.

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[TrancePhreak]

Yeah, because we all know the *nix API's are so easy to program for, have a lot of easy to read documentation, thousands of example code, and as fully featured as the Win32 API.

Or maybe you should stop smokin da wacky tobaccy.

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[spitzak]

drive letters are primarily provided for backwards compat. They're slowly going away.

Okay, tell me how to open a file on the A: drive without starting it with "A:". And make sure it is a name I can figure out from the normal file browser.

$HOMEDRIVE and $HOMEPATH are both defined on this XP machine.

Okay, tell me how that is compatable with the single environment variable $HOME

you can make files (and other objects) case sensitive if you like; services for UNIX install will do this for you if you so desire.

Not if you want any other programs to be able to read/write them.

Services for UNIX does include many GNU utilities..

Services for Unix is not included by default.

UTF-8 is a poor standard - it's what happens when there's too much legacy tied to ANSI C and C style strings. With UTF-8, strlen no longer means anything :/

strlen() means HOW MANY BYTES ARE IN THE STRING. A VERY useful value. You obvioulsly have ZERO experience with writing any software if you think the number of letters the user sees is a useful value.

UCS-2 from the ground up - a much more reasonable way to do unicode

Read up on "combining characters" before you put your foot in your mouth again. UCS-2 has NO advantages over UTF-8, it's only plausable advantage (fixed-size characters) was obsolete long ago.

I'm not sure why I am dignifying your stuff with a response, but the ignorance here is unbelievable...

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[bmajik]

im running my laptop in case sensitive mode currently. As near as i have experienced, nothing is broken. i can create files with unix vi and open them using wordpad - just like i'd expect.

i dont see why combining $HOMEPATH and $HOMEDRIVE is inherently worse than $HOME. Its more letters I guess. If you want $HOME, why not just use $HOMEDRIVE\$HOMEPATH ?

Incidentally, SFU shells set $HOME for you.

SFU isn't included by default because the default customer doesn't need any of the things it provides (or any of the things you're mentioning). Even so, it IS available. If you choose to try and make your windows machine act like a unix machine, there's a supported way of doing that, and it works quite well. Much better than making a unix machine act like a windows machine :)

hrmm. You must be right - i've never written any software :)

Let me ask you this. suppose im trying to word wrap. Do i care about what strlen tells me, or do i care about the width of the displayed characters ?

Let's say im trying to size a window to some displayed text. Do i care about strlen(), or do i care about something else ?

you're the one claiming various easily done tasks are impossible in windows. I don't see how im being the ignorant one.

have you ever run windows in case-sensitive mode ? have you ever tried to access objects via the object-space names ?

http://www.winntmag.com/Articles/ArticleID/299/pg/ 2/2.html

C is just a symlink created by the IO manager. You're right in the sense that explorer is too dumb to use the native representation, but that doesn't mean you can't write a better explorer that does what you want.

SFU also presents the machine as having a singly rooted file system. for instance, when i type df i show a /dev/fs/C/... mounted volume..

i dont know why you're responding either, being as you're basically incorrect. maybe its to tell me that im ignorant ?

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[theCoder]

drive letters are primarily provided for backwards compat. They're slowly going away.

Really? That must be why you still have a %HOMEDRIVE% environment variable (the $ syntax doesn't work in MS shells).

NT is unix compatible enough that you can clean compile many userland unix things form source...

Yes, that must be why I never have to curse NT when it doesn't do even basic things correctly. I work on a large (10000+ file) software baseline that was written for UNIX but does compile on win32. We have a great many workarounds for Windows oddities (everything from backslashes instead of slashes to threading issues). You're right, it does mostly work, but it's that 10% of the time that basic things are broken that just make me want to scream (one of our unit tests fails because Windows refuses to delete a file, no matter how many times we call unlink() on it).

Please let me know when you find something where NT differs from unix where the unix design is "obviously better to everyone".

• Symlinks. They aren't hard to implement. But Windows doesn't support them (shortcuts don't count because they don't work transparently or at a filesystem level). Cygwin helps with this (fairly well, actually), but only for cygwin applications.
• Spaces in file names. Sure, most unixes support them, but no one really thinks they're that great of an idea. And going out of your way to add spaces to common directories is just rediculous. "Program Files" is redundant -- "Programs" would have sufficed. What else (besides directories, which are in there) am I going to put there? It just makes Windows hard to use from the command line. "My Documents" is another example. Of course they're my documents -- they wouldn't be on my computer if they weren't! Added to that, if I do store someone else's documents, I can't very well put them under "My Documents" and have it appropriate, now can I? And while I'm on the topic, is "home" just too short for MS? Why "Documents and Settings"? /home/theCoder is much easier that /Documents\ and\ Settings/theCoder.
• Backslashes. Everyone else uses forward slashes for directory separators. Can't MS get with the program? Backslashes are used to escape characters. Though here it's not obviously better, just the convention.
• Semicolons as path separators. Semicolons separate statements on the command line -- not paths in your PATH environment variable (colons separate paths). Again, not better or worse as a matter of course, just the convention of every other system!
• Console applications popping up message boxes. I have over 400 automated unit tests in my project at work. If something fails to compile in the development workspace, chances are the unit test isn't going to be able to be run (missing DLL). But when the unit test is run, instead of writing an error to the error stream (and thus to the output file), I get a message box telling me it can't find the DLL. Which is really nice when I come back and find that test 82 can't find the required DLL and testing is stopped. On UNIX, I just get a report of which tests failed (missing libraries can be one of those failures). And if one test fails like this on Windows, chances are more will (missing libraries cause lots of tests to fail). So, I either have to set there pressing return a lot, or lock the screen and leave a stapler on the "Enter" key (which will press return for me). Annoying though.
• Signals are apparently just plain broken on win32. I have yet to figure out the definitive reason why the unit test that deals with signals in our baseline breaks on win32, other than that signals (especially catching signals) are just plain broken on win32.
• How about a /proc filesystem? Granted, not every UNIX is the same here, but 'cat /proc/cpuinfo' or 'cat /proc/meminfo' on

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Spaces in file names. Sure, most unixes support them, but no one really thinks they're that great of an idea.

Unix admins don't like spaces because they've written too damn many buggy Shell Scripts that don't do proper escaping. Virtually every normal user thinks filenames with spaces are a great idea (See their home directories).

. And going out of your way to add spaces to common directories is just rediculous. "Program Files" is redundant

"Program Files" was intentional so that buggy apps broke during the QA cycle, not in production.

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[spitzak]

i dont see why combining $HOMEPATH and $HOMEDRIVE is inherently worse than $HOME

Because there is absolutely no reason for those two variables to be seperate. Can you come up with any possible reason why I would use those two variables seperately? Also your example has a backslash, which does not work in most shells, you have to use forward slash. Also it does not matter if SFU or Cygwin sets $HOME, as no program can assumme it.

Let me ask you this. suppose im trying to word wrap. Do i care about what strlen tells me, or do i care about the width of the displayed characters ?

Obviously you care about the width of the displayed characters. Why you think knowing the number of glyphs makes this easier to calculate is a total mystery to me. Have you ever heard of proportionally spaced fonts, or kerning? And you also seem unable to grasp the fact that a "measure this" function could be made that takes a UTF-8 string.

have you ever run windows in case-sensitive mode ?

No, because 99% of the programs I need cannot read and write files in that mode.

have you ever tried to access objects via the object-space names ?

No, because 99% of the programs I need cannot read and write files with those names.

SFU also presents the machine as having a singly rooted file system. for instance, when i type df i show a /dev/fs/C/... mounted volume..

But when I write open("/dev/fs/C/foo") in my C program it does not work! So this is useless.

Re:Longhorn to be Linux Standards Compliant ?

[jasonwea]

Symlinks. They aren't hard to implement. But Windows doesn't support them (shortcuts don't count because they don't work transparently or at a filesystem level). Cygwin helps with this (fairly well, actually), but only for cygwin applications.

NTFS does infact support symbolic links and also mounting a NTFS partition the same way as you can do with the mount tool.

There is no mention of symlinks in the GUI (they appear as normal directories and there is no UI option to create them). cmd.exe's dir command shows symlinks differently than a directory though.

The Windows 2000 Resource Kit has a few tools that can mount a partition on a mount point. System Internals have also released a utility called junction that can do the equivilant of symbolic links.

Don't use Explorer to remove a junction point though, the naive SHFileOperation function deletes all contained files and directories before deleting the symlink. As with dir, rmdir in cmd.exe works correctly with symbolic links.

All I know is

[BluedemonX]

When I heard that one of Microsoft's top execs was quoted as saying "Think India. Think to yourselves, "what can I outsource today?"" My response is "Linux. Where can I replace Windows with it today?"

Debian!

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on what I see, RH will loose a lot of its (former) users to Debian.

Re:Debian!

[xtronics]

I just switched from Redhat to Debian this week.

I predict that debian will have it's new installer out in 2004 and it will be rock solid.

OpenOffice.org

[pommiekiwifruit]

Perhaps it will be useful when it is capable of performing trivial tasks as assigned in IT intro courses (which my auntie is taking to improve her salary) such as:

1. Open a .doc file. The formatting should look correct.
2. Save a .doc file. Information should not be lost.
3. Copy and paste from an Internet Explorer window that contains selected check boxes and radio buttons. The data should look the same.

Unfortunately somehow the program got installed on her system and "stole" the .doc file extension association (hidden by default of course) causing days of lost time getting her assignments submitted.

Obscure file formats and clipboard formats pay dividends for MS lockout it seems. It's a pity monopolies are allowed to do whatever they want in the USA.

Um

[pommiekiwifruit]

But I heard that when HURD comes out in 2038, it will only support 64K of RAM and reel-to-reel tapes...

Re:Um

[cbreaker]

Yes, but it'll be leet because after 98% of the population and technology is destroyed due to WW3 that's the best system you'll find.

My prediction (and hope):

[Qbertino]

The Munchen (Munich) migration project sets of.
Sideeffect: That SuSE guy I met last year asks me and my team to join and take care of some data migration and we make heavy loads of Euros as subcontractors to SuSE/Novell. :-)

All in all, Linux reaches critical mass in germany. More and more vendors and service providers start to recognize Linux as an OS. More and more PCs come without preinstalled Windows. Perhaps the first mass PCs come with Linux preinstalled.

Negative side effects: We see IT idiots and money-rakers hoping on the Linux bandwagon, trying to make a quick buck, tarnishing everyones image and spoiling the fun. The dickheads that should stay with M$ join Linux/OSS aswell. :-(

nahhh

[extra the woos]

Installing linux is easy. Even installing a hard to install distro such as debian isn't hard. Installing SuSe or Mandrake is easy enough that my MOTHER could do it. It's easier than installing windows. Fuck man, just having to type in the cd-key in a win2k install (and having to retype it a few times b/c you made mistakes) makes installing windows harder. Plus, 99% of the time on a modern computer your gonna hafta go out and get drivers for your video card to get it to display more than 16 colors, get drivers for your sound card (although the chipset may be recognized, in windows sometimes that gives you some pretty bad sound lol, believe me i know).
Installing SuSe on my machine was sooo incredibly easy. All my hardware worked (granted i did not have 3d support built in, but this was a long time ago)...

There's one thing linux needs to play catch up on: installing software after your system is set up. package management (yes, i know, itsn ot hard, but for n00bs its VERY CONFUSING) is a totallly COMPLETELY FOREIGN FRIGGIN CONCEPT to anyone in the windows and mac world...it makes installing software appear to be much harder than it needs to be!

Re:nahhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Installing linux is easy.

Only some distrubtions its easy.

Even installing a hard to install distro such as debian isn't hard.

Which one is it? Is debian hard to install or not hard? You just contradicted yourself in one sentence :) But installing debian is hard. Give me a wizard damnit.

Plus, 99% of the time on a modern computer your gonna hafta go out and get drivers for your video card to get it to display more than 16 colors, get drivers for your sound card (although the chipset may be recognized, in windows sometimes that gives you some pretty bad sound lol, believe me i know).

Well just like linux, if you know ur hardware then u won't have a problem getting the drivers for it if they exist. And besides, its hundreds of times easier on a windows system to install a driver then it is on a linux system I find. That may change this year though Im hoping. It's all done in the gui anyways. Just right click the unknown device which tries to tell you what kind of device it is, click on update driver, go through the wizard to update the driver and select where the driver is, hit finish and that's it. Some drivers even just have their own installation program so that's even better.

There's one thing linux needs to play catch up on: installing software after your system is set up. package management (yes, i know, itsn ot hard, but for n00bs its VERY CONFUSING) is a totallly COMPLETELY FOREIGN FRIGGIN CONCEPT to anyone in the windows and mac world...it makes installing software appear to be much harder than it needs to be!

Oh that is so true lol. I think one reason is because of the sheer amount of packages in a linux system. I say move alot of the main system components into the base system. Get rid of redundant applications and just have one application instead included. Windows did this, just go look at the windows/inf directory. All those are packages that are in the OS but the end user doesn't notice because they're installed automatically when you install windows. Plus when the user goes to install an application, the setup for the application installs all needed files for it and sets up the appropriate shortcuts for it too. And if the user wants to get rid of it, just go to add/remove programs. Most linux applications when you install them don't include the dependancies that they need. Start including them, they're useful damnit and make it easier to install/remove applications. Even visual basic applications from not that long ago needed the user to install the dll's now include them in the vb programs setup instead. Brilliant I say.

Re:nahhh

[Slime-dogg]

The package management / library dependency hell has been handled rather nicely by .NET, of all things. I'm surprised that the OSS community didn't come up with something as simple as a tree that had the ability to manage all versions of a library ever made. Yeah, it might eat up space, but at least it'd be easy to check if you've got the dependency that you need...

It should be like /lib/libpng/1.0, /lib/libpng/1.1, /lib/libpng/1.2, and so on. Then, just search the tree, looking for the appropriate version of libpng that you need, and if it isn't there, just copy it over. I believe that is how .NET handles it. Java doesn't quite have that, since you mostly ship all libraries that you're going to use in jar files... which is another nice way to handle the problem.

Re:nahhh

[oconnorcjo]

There's one thing linux needs to play catch up on: installing software after your system is set up. package management (yes, i know, itsn ot hard, but for n00bs its VERY CONFUSING) is a totallly COMPLETELY FOREIGN FRIGGIN CONCEPT to anyone in the windows and mac world...it makes installing software appear to be much harder than it needs to be!

Actually it is deeper than that:

1. Hardware detection is a kludge (kudzu is a good step forward but it does not configure everything right or detect all hardware properly).
2. Desktop Environment is non-standard (how to get desktop icons onto the desktop, no standard gui toolkit and uncertainty of what to expect in each environment).
3. Package Management is unsophisticated (does too much in the background without user input in the location of various files/programs) and again non-standard (rpm, apt-get, whatever Slackware uses, etc...).

These core issues make Linux significantly behind Microsoft XP. Without drastic changes to the way these things are handled, system modification is going to be sub par to the "home user". The problem is that most of linux software have as a user interface configurion files that are best meant to be edited by a human instead of by another program or auto-detecting. People should NOT be expected to configure ANY of the stuff that is commonly needed in a linux system. Two examples:

1. I added an LCD monitor to my parents RedHat machine for Christmass and the monitor barfed saying resolutions could not be used. Had to edit xf86config (or something like it).
2. I added a cd burner to my linux machine recently and it was not detected as a burner. Had to edit grub.conf to say hdc uses ide-scsi. Could not find documentation of what the syntax of defining that should be used in grub (but plenty for lilo) but managed to get the info from someone who also has a cd-burner in there linux machine.

These are just two of the most recent problems I came across in the last two weeks, but there are hundreds more I could easily list. Some of the most basic ones that users commonly come across are:

I) DVD playing in linux.
II) 3D acceleration support for Video cards.
III) Games, Games, Games
IV) Mozilla detecting java/video/sound in system.
V) rpm packages never ask if you want an icon or menu item of installing program.

I could go on but this post was not supposed to be a rant but to point out that Linux is very far behind Windows as a Desktop OS and I am surprised that Linux even has one percent of the desktop when it is such a pain in the ass to do any upgrading or modification of the system (and I am speaking as a Linux user).

Now I know that all the above can be achieved (and I have done most of them) and I know that Windows is not perfect but when I make modifications to my Windows machine, I know that in most cases, it is LESS than a half hour of my time, but on the linux machine, I am happy when it is only a half hour.

I agree with RedHat when they said Linux is not ready for the desktop. Sure you can use it but it far from optimal.

You forgot one

[robertjw]

Don't forget the three hours on the phone attempting to explain to the service tech, who does not share your native tounge, how this brand new shrink-wrapped copy of XP will not automatically register, even though you did not steal it.

Debian starts using 2.4 kernel by default!

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

And The MOST important change in 2004 is...

[fracex]

In 2004 those (hard working) people over at KDE will change the K, in their name to some other letter. The letter K just comes up with images of crap in my head. ex. K-Car, K-mart (do they still exist anymore, there used to be one in my town but it went out of business) and KDE.

Just kidding, jeez, don't get all upset about it.

Re:Proving Linux

[symbolic]

The halo is off and linux will have to prove itself by the same measures other IT components are judged.

Since Microsoft has set the bar rediculously low in terms of measurable and effective productivity, this won't be much of an issue.

Ximian tools have made Chandler pointless

[Ars-Fartsica]

Evolution's next major upgrade will be very polished and featureful. I doubt any interest in Chandler (which appears to be perenially DOA anyway) will be left once we see the next Evolution release.

Re:Ximian tools have made Chandler pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you, although Evolution is only available for UNIX/Linux. An application that could compete with Outlook and is available on multiple platforms would have an upper hand. Too bad Chandler appears to be vaporware.

Speaking of predictions...

[Anonymous Coward]

whatever happened to William F. Zachmann and his "Famous 13 Predictions"?

Disagree about gestures being a fad

[Illissius]

Think of them as keyboard shortcuts for the mouse. And the fact that 'normal' users haven't heard of it is exactly why it needs to be done. They make life easier.

Re:Disagree about gestures being a fad

[Geek of Tech]

Just make sure the mouse gestures are turned off when I've already got a window active. The last thing I want is to accidentally pull up Mozilla while I'm trying to aim in Quake ][.

The folks over at xpde.org have been doing some really nice work. They seem to be at a standstill at the moment, but that's just for now. It would be nice to see it included as a Window Manager for Linux. It would really help some people migrate.

Re:Disagree about gestures being a fad

[2short]

"Think of them as keyboard shortcuts for the mouse"

But why do you want keyboard shortcuts for the mouse? That's the question that always comes to my mind when people say how much they like gestures. I could see it if you only have one hand. But for me, my left hand is just sitting there on the keyboard the whole time. I don't see the advantage of being able to say, copy, by wiggling the mouse in a particular pattern when I already can hit ctrl-c without concious thought. I guess some people like mouse gestures, but I don't get it besides the "cool because it's different" factor. So I'll have to vote "fad" until I hear any reason gestures with the mouse (which I may or may not have a hand on) are better than gestures with the left side of the keyboard.

"limp" is too soft a word

[peter303]

When the end comes for SCO it will be quick and drastic. Probably the entire management will resign in one day, with a bankruptcy soon following. The evidence is too flimsy and financial arrangements are too leveraged.
I cant predict the actual precipitating event or day, however.

Some major and minor predictions.

[Clockwurk]

I figure I'll throw in my two cents:

1.) Package format becomes a hot topic. Discussion regarding a standard takes center stage. Work begins on a standard package format, a stable version is expected in 2005. Adoption of linux on the desktop continues to be slow.

2.) Resolution and refresh rate changing on the fly (ala Windows since 9x) will finally appear in desktop distros.

3.) NTFS read/write support will be sorted out using the NTFS driver from windows. Microsoft will not issue a patch that breaks compatibility, suprising more zealous MS haters.

4.) Gnome or perhaps Mozilla will have servers compromised. The compromise will be found quickly and dealt with quickly as well. Many will use the compromise to point out that UserLinux should have indeed used KDE.

5.) Not linux, but still a prediction. Apple releases some much hyped product with relatively large mind-share. Product is recalled due to design/manufacturing error. Apple faithful blame someone else; Apple stock and market share dip.

6.) Microsoft releases DirectX 10. Doom 3 is the only major linux-native game released in 2004.

7.) Adobe or Autodesk release linux versions of Photoshop or AutoCAD respectively. The released program is quite successful. Many businesses stop using Wine or switch over to linux for their workstations.

Re:Some major and minor predictions.

[schon]

Congratulations, Mr. Kreskin.

Perhaps you weren't aware, but the word 'prediction' means that you have to say it before it happens.

Reciting a list of stuff that happened last year (items 1,2, and 3) doesn't count.

Re:Some major and minor predictions.

[Anonymous Coward]

6.) Microsoft releases DirectX 10. Doom 3 is the only major linux-native game released in 2004.

Hey not a Postal 2 fan? Watch for it =P

Re:Some major and minor predictions.

[JoeBaldwin]

"Resolution and refresh rate changing on the fly (ala Windows since 9x) will finally appear in desktop distros."

Er, fuck off.

In Fedora Core, I can go Red Hat Menu > Preferences > Screen Resolution and can change both of those instantly.

Blah blah blah

[Ayanami Rei]

You're full of shit. Do you enjoy the roller coaster of karma whoring then trolling? Does it get you a hard on?

I hope you [Ctrl+W] the [Win] on your [|].

Hotkeys. Give me a goddamn break, like that's an issue.

PHOTOSHOP FOR LINUX

[ziggamon]

When, when, when??? and no, don't say gimp, I want PSP7!

Re:PHOTOSHOP FOR LINUX

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm confused, do you want photoshop or paint shop pro?

Re:PHOTOSHOP FOR LINUX

[Anonymous Coward]

Photoshop 7 runs relatively smoothly under Wine... though I agree a native executable would be great.

Best?

[Anonymous Coward]

For Linux to be good, you need to learn from the best!!

I'm sure we can find a better troll/reposter than this one to learn from. He's crap.

ESR predictions?

[Dionysus]

Where are the ESR predictions? The new year isn't the same without ESR proclaiming that Microsoft will fall within six months.

Just die

[Anonymous Coward]

God I hate fucking people like you. Find ONE goddamn article that mentions that:

1. Claim that this version fixes all bugs, works perfectly and logically and will finally seal M$ coffin.
2. Claim that competing product X is dead.
3. Claim that this product is dead, since similar product X is obviously much superior.

Fuckwit

Re:Just die

[GoofyBoy]

Nice reading comprehension.

I said user-written posts will contain these comments. Not the front page slashdot editor's article.

Distasteful ads?

[Tukla]

[SuSE/Novell] will take time to ramp up in the U.S. and they're not helping much with their distasteful ads

Anyone know what he's talking about?

better yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Steve Ballmer sobers up and decides to open source all of Microsoft's products.

Mod's should have Moderator name attached.

[khasim]

+2 insightful for that?

Meanwhile, Linux is being evaluated by cities and governments around the world for use on their desktops?

No references to how Linux fails in "compatibility" or "overall usability".

That's "insightful"?

Re:Mod's should have Moderator name attached.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus, fail? How do you know what his aim is?

People interest in the desktop...About time!

[StarbuckZero]

My Predictions for 2004 is that more companies are going to start porting there software over to Linux. I'm sure there are a lot of people here that read Slashdot would love to walk into Wal-Mart or CompUSA and pick up a box of software that has a little Tux logo on it. I don't see Dell and HP preloading PCs this year, but I'm sure they'll be gearing up for it in 2005. I figured if software companies don't port there software the community will come up or improve a free alternative, so users will benefit from this either way. I also have a feeling that more Linux users are going to buy games for the simple fact we have better video drivers then what we had in the past.

Automation and configuration programs are great and they are in every major distribution of Linux out there. I have friends come over surf the web, listen to music, use AIM and burn CDs which are the same things they do normally when they're at home. I even had a friend that was scared to use my computer just because it was running Linux, but after he got drunk at one of my parties he jumped on my system and started chatting on AIM. He didn't even realize he was using Linux, until I told him. My system is an old duel 400Mhz and I don't have any games on it. I plan on building a new system and I'm still going to run Linux. Why fix something that's not even broken? So when I build my new system I plan on installing Fedora Core 1. I might even install Windows 2K for games, but due to the fact I have a GameCube, Playstation 2 and Xbox I'm sure I could keep myself busy, besides I can only see myself installing Windows for only 1 or 2 games at the most. As for my old system I'll be turning that into a web server. Using Apt-get I'll be able to install and remove items easily. With the way things are going for Linux it's not like I'm looking for the fall of Microsoft more then I'm looking for walking into a store and seeing someone walk out with a system preloaded with Linux.

Re:People interest in the desktop...About time!

[NtroP]

I walked into SAMs Warehouse the other day and saw they were selling a $300 Linux PC right there among the Windows XP boxes. I about had a heart attack! The price-point alone might be enough to get some people to take it home and try it before loading a pirated copy of Win98 or XP on it :-)

I didn't have time to see what distro it had loaded or what productivity apps it had pre-installed, but if I recall it was running on a 1.4 GHz processor with 256 MB RAM - so it should be a decent performer for the "low-end" user. I can hardly build a box for that up here in Alaska. I might just have to pick one up for myself :-)

HOLY SHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

your website is teh crash3d!!!11 good job. dumbass.

Oh yeah, I know!

[Ayanami Rei]

make modules && make install_modules is so incredibly difficult to comprehend it made me tear my eyes out.

And that depmod that the boot script ran by default took a whole FIVE SECONDS! I mean what is this bullshit? I don't have all day to wait!

Awww shit, the demand-based module loader loaded my sound driver without asking when I double clicked my Nelly MP3s. Seriously, before you know it by network driver will be ordering my summer clothes and booking vacations without asking! Is my privacy and control of my computer worth anything anymore???

Re:Oh yeah, I know!

[NtroP]

I think the parent was supposed to be funny.... But, then again, I don't have any mod-points left :-)

Can you think of a good reason why...

[Ayanami Rei]

SYSV would migrate into Win32? I can't.

They already have Unix Services for Windows, which provides any API/shell/command related stuff you're missing.

Where Linux Will Beat MS

[Bilbo]

As I was reading through this article, one statement really jumped out at me:

I think instead of new applications, a significant development will be localization and personalization of Linux distributions for different uses. ...
-Rahul Chopra

I think this is significant because it's one area where Linux and FOSS software has a clear advantage over MS -- one which I don't think they can ever overcome. Microsoft has internationalized their products for a great number of other languages and locales, but as was seen recently in Israel, if the internationalization is difficult (L-to-R scripts), and the market is relatively small, it just doesn't make economic sense for them to do it.

Open Source, on the other hand, works according to another economic model, one which is not limited by profit-loss ratios and ROI. If you have people interested in it, you can create an internationalized version of a package for any audience. Now, there are still complicated technological issues (such as some of the really complex scripting systems in many of the smaller markets like SE Asia), but once we get past some of the difficult hurdles of creating truly flexible font and glyph servers and text rendering systems, we will see Linux and FOSS expanding into places where MS cannot hope to go. True, these won't bring in gobs of cash for Linux developers and ISV's, but I think we will see steady progress made. We will soon see Linux as the foundation for technological, and ultimately economic freedom for the majority of the world's governments and citizens.

Linux needs more than engineering

[Stevyn]

Linux needs more than a room full of engineers reworking the code how they see fit. These large distro companies and other software companies that make programs to linux on the desktop need to find regular people who don't frequent slashdot 17 times a day to get some input and feedback.

If the average users can't figure out how the installer works, they the installer should be rewritten. What makes windows and mac so nice is that installation of good commercial software is generally pretty easy. Everytime I use RPMs I think to myself how few people consider software a package and understand how it is broken into data files and executables. People think of software of something they buy in a box. These specialized distros like Lindows are on the right path for average computer users because they see the importance of making the software intuitive.

Another thing linux needs is marketting. I'm not talking about the regular marketting that kills everything else. Just a little reworking of the names of software. I don't think I'd recommend linux to any regular computer user because I know soon after that I'd get a phone call asking me
"what the hell does this mean?"

And to quell the responses, here is what those phone calls would entail: What the hell does
"apt get" mean? What the hell is an "RPM." What does a kernel version mismatch mean? What is lib.so.... mean and how do I get it? How to I get to the "shell". How do I run a script? Why do I care about the "source"? And "I put the disc in and nothing happened."

Outlook

[Bilbo]

> Now the one thing that stands in the way here is Outlook, love it or hate it it does do calendaring and email, with task lists and that Exchange server is the thing that really stops people moving over.

(*SIGH*) I use Evolution, and while I love it for email, and for personal calendaring, there still isn't a good *group* calendering server that I know of. Yes, I know there is the "Ximian Connector", but that still depends on Exchange, and is supposedly pretty crippled. (I don't have any personal experience on this, so feel free to correct me if you've used the Connector with great success!) I've seen a couple of commercial applications out there, but when you do more than simply scratch the surface, they are still pretty skimpy on features, and often beastly expensive when you start adding up expenses for a large operation.

I keep looking, hoping that the situation will change, but I haven't found anything to plug this hole yet.

Rediscovering the wheel, plagarism

[waferhead]

Great, you just described a source rpm, and very likely an deb source file.

BTW, its been like that... forever (for some sets of "forever")

(Note--This does NOT dis Patrick, quite the opposite, everyone else copied a good idea into their implementations)

Also, someone is plagarizing your posts, have seen a couple of dupes.

(Assuming YOU are a lawyer)

And the detractors will fear any change in their

[Ayanami Rei]

stable little business climate.

If it's irrelevant, why bother posting?

I predict

[ShadowRage]

that linux will get some steam, but will face new legal concerns, IBM and sun will be sued by microsoft for imitating their gui, then gnome and kde will be sued in the whole ordeal, apple turns around and sues microsoft ripping off NexT

might not be that far.

but I predict this year will be the year of tech lawsuits as a new major player gets involved in the market.

I wouldnt be surprised if the GPL got overturned and claimed invalid by a well paid judge.

the shit with SCO last year might prove to be the stone in the pond that started the ripple effect.

I predict...

[FrankieBoy]

SCO will win their court cases and own all Linux and Unix distributions. SCO will decide to sell Unix and Linux to Microsoft who will eventually phase them out. This will bring about the apocalypse and the end of civilization. Bill Gates will return to Hades to join his father Satan, mission accomplished.

OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple will open source the aqua desktop.

Linux is tight

[DaBagel7]

I just got Redhat Linux 9 and that is one of the best Linux's

My predictions

[16K Ram Pack]

(including others that are FOSS related)...

1. Driver support for Linux will grow considerably as manufacturers will see more geeks heading that way.

2. Open Office will grow, but will not make serious inroads. Back office techs will start using it, and I predict a more geeky mate or two will send me a .SXW in the next 12 months.

3. Porting of software to Linux will grow from major business vendors.

4. More companies running Oracle/SQL server will start using MySQL as a database for static data like archive viewing and MIS reporting.

5. A whole lot of Linux distros will fade away. Maybe this is a hope, and people can concentrate on making 4 or 5 excellent.

6. One of my non-geeky relatives will phone me about getting Linux.

7. SCO will lose big in their case against IBM.

8. A major computer player (maybe IBM or HP) will either partner or buy a distro and release it as a consumer Linux on a PC where the hardware and software have been tested to work together.

9. (More of a hope) There will be an Open Source video format (maybe theora) that will kill off the piece of shit that is Real Player.

jesus - Flamebait?

[Ayanami Rei]

It's called sarcasm. Look it up in the, what was it called, oh yeah, DICTIONARY.

If you modded the parent down, you must absolutely JACK SHIT about the kernel. You've ruined a perfectly good joke/retort that apparently you didn't get.

Good job, Mr. Know-it-all.

OpenExchange?

[dolson]

I don't know a lot about it, but doesn't SUSE/Novell have this OpenExchange thing? I'd be curious to know how it compares, in the real world, to Microsoft Exchange.

everybody is missing it: A-U-D-I-O

[Anonymous Coward]

.....it so doesn't take any effort to figure this out.

Linux 2.6 has ALSA. ALSA is a vast improvement over the shitty sound infrastructure that linux users have been hobbled with for the last x years. OSS? ESD? Cast them into the dustbin, spit in their general direction.... or allow them to burn in hell.

I expect a couple of things. One, decent audio players. See linuxaudio for a taste.

Two, more sophisticated audio applications, including the kind of audio-server-and-patches capable with JACK.

Three, serious competition to low-end or infrequently updated commercial software like cakewalk by free, non-commercial variants.

Hopefully, audio that doesn't suck will give a big boost to video editing apps on linux.

Sadly, things this year will not bring to linux:

1) A decent vector image program.

2) A decent page layout program.

3) Any creative apps from Adobe running native.

The Empire Strikes back!

[pcause]

I think one of the results of the rise of Linux and the press for other Open Source software in 2004 will be that it will create a new opportunity for Microsoft! Microsoft can use the developments in Linux / Open Source to argue:

The server market is a separate and distinct market from the desktop market. Microsoft does not have a monopoly position in this market. The rise of Linux demonstrates this. And since the competition is free software, Microsoft may need to create product offering to try to compete. For example, a bundle of Win2k3 server / SQL server. hey will point to the use of Linux/MySQL or Linux/Postgres as the competition and the model they must compete with. Since this bundle benefits the consumer and since MS does not have a monopoly in the market, they may get to do this, legally. This kind of bundle could be devastating to Oracle and IBM in the DB business.

MS may also use the recent events in Israel and China to make moves on the desktop. They may need to go back to the judge and get approval, but they will have a stack of articles by experts and decrees by governments to use to convince the judge that there has been a radical shift in the market and that they should be free to make various technical moves / changes to the desktop OS.

The bottom line is that as Linux grows in 2004 it gives MS the legal basis it needs to counter-attack. More acquisitions. More bundles. Ties of OS and database. There are lots of things you can think of and the Redmond folks have a lot of good business minds to seize this opportunity. The short term impact of an MS counter-attack will likely be on its commercial competitors.

In the end, the market could move to more of a Microsoft / Open Source market, with the other commercial folks getting crushed. let's face it, no software company's business model is safe from open source. Right now some commercial folks see Open Source as a way to rein in MS. But we may also see folks start to team up with MS because and against Open Source because they will see that their own businesses are threatened.

It will start in 2004. 2005 will be the interesting year!

LAMP

[kwoff]

"The LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/PERL/Python) environment will become more recognized as a foundational solution in 2004." -John M. Weathersby

I think PostgreSQL is more likely than MySQL, although I understand that leaves a less cool acronym (though I've seen 'linux apache mod_perl postgres').