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OSDL Announces Desktop Initiative
rhetoric writes "Earlier today at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York, nonprofit Open Source Development Labs announced the creation of a "Desktop Linux Working Group initiative focused on greater use of Linux on desktops throughout the enterprise." A press release is available on OSDL's website, in addition to this Register article." It's all part of their non-secret plan.
The Register article says that the OSDL is setting out to crate a specification for what an enterprise Linux distribution should be made up of. Yet the Register article also implies that the OSDL is not going to receive much direct user input on the spec itself. Is this going to turn out to be another UnitedLinux?
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
I've been using Wintel for over 15 years and have just recently installed Mandrake 9 on an older P2 450. Here are a couple of points I think are worth mentioning (ubergeeks can exclude themselves from the classifications below):
1. Linux is ready for *some* desktops only, namely ones where users won't be constantly tweaking and installing new software and hardware. You want a computer for grandma to browse the web, send email and view a few grandkid photos? Linux is great! You want to roll out corporate desktops where employees don't really need to be able to download and install the latest version of KaZaA? Linux is a godsend (provided the business software you need is supported).
2. Linux is *not* ready for the average user desktop. The average user wants to do everything grandma wants to do, but they also want to be able to install or upgrade software and hardware *easily*. In addition, they want a fully functional GUI, with no *necessity* of dropping to a CLI for everyday tasks. They want to be able to go to a third party software/driver website, follow the 'click here for Linux version' hyperlink, download the file, then double-click to install it.
Needless to say, as long as Linux distributions and desktop managers continue to proliferate, the average user's requirements will never be met. I say this as a *fact* not a *prescription*, so spare me the Linux-strength-in-diversity comments. I just think you can't have your cake (freedom/diversity) and eat it too (Linux on average desktop).
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No, the spirit of free software is that we don't have to use it if it sucks, because we can just build something similar, but better. (Or something completely different, of course)
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Linux : going from competing desktops to competing desktop initiatives...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Sun recently sent me a CD with their Java Desktop on it, which for anyone who doesn't know, is a slickly-packaged Linux distro with a very user friendly interface, Sun's excellent StarOffice suite, Mozilla, etc etc. I've been having a play with it (I use StarOffice on Windows anyway) and I'm quite impressed. It's all nicely integrated with a mostly consistent look and feel, for the end user there's no messing around, anyone who's familiar with Windows and MS Office could pick this up in a day and be productive. As an old-skool Unix user, I'd personally prefer a NeXTSTEP or IRIX desktop, but as a normal Windows user, JDS is impressive.
That's the way to do Linux on the desktop - it has to be as near as possible seamless. Someone who knows what they're doing has to sit down and make it all work. Bundling together a package here and a package there as Red hat does just isn't going to cut it. If the objective is to actually get Linux on the desktop, then OSDN should throw its lot in with Sun. But it looks like this "initiative" is just bandwagoneering.
Linux is ready for the business desktop.
:-D
Until the hardware manufacturers put as much effort into Linux drivers as they do for Windows drivers then home Linux desktop pc's will be restricted to the geek community.
That and the old old topic of gaming support.
Worst
The big problem isn't that Linux is particularly bad or anything, it's that many, many people already have Windows. As bad as Windows might be, it's really annoying and fear-inducing for bosses to imagine taking down all their machines and installing a different O/S on them. The meeting should be on how to get people to switch o/s's, not how to implement linux. Once people aren't scared to switch an o/s, then all will be well.
stuff |
(Mods: this is on topic - bear with me)
So off I went to France. It was beautiful, perfect snow, lovely mountains, perfect pistes. I put on my snowboard and started to learn.
The problem I came across was that I couldn't do anything I wanted to. I could see where I wanted to go (I wanted to hit the slopes dammit!) but I completely lacked the skill required to get there.
After half a day, I'm ashamed to say I gave up. I was only there for 3 days and i'd wasted some of that precious time getting absolutely nowhere. So I put on my ski's, hit the reds and blacks and had a fantastic 2.5 days.
Linux is like that for me. I like it, I want to use it, the problem is that I think of it as a tool to do something else and I just end up getting frustrated because i can't do the boring things really quickly because i'm too ingraned in the Windows way of doing it.
I can change the display resolution quickly in Windows. I have to faff about in Linux. I can install items in Windows with a few point and clicks. Everything i've tried to install under Linux has botched up through my own general incompetance. The very basic of things takes 5 times as long and I get frustrated and eventually switch back to Windows (I still can't dial up under Linux, it refuses to recognise my external Hayes modem and KPPP dies horribly with some error message - the Gnome one hangs on startup).
Whilst Linux on the desktop might not be totally there, it's biggest problem is not that, but of people like me who don't have the patience to learn how to do the things (that they can do really quickly under Windows) differently.
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1. It doesn't catch all of the M$ viruses out there.
2. If it does catch a virus it will only blow away the user's account and not the whole computer.
3. User email accounts can be time limited to only send x messages per minute. This will further retard the proliferation of nasty email attached worms. (IP_TABLES LIMIT)
4. Software that is installed in a user's account runs with limited priviledges and is not going to muck up anything outside of the user's account. (It is also out of the reach of other users)
5. The installation and applications can be custom tailored to an organization so that there is no super-corporation dictating that ALL computers will have Winblows Media Slayer installed.
6. Trivial little things, like having the default search page be an internal corporate server, can be setup in a CD image so that everything is the way the corporation doing the deploying wants it and not the way some license agreement with Redmond mandates.
7. Documents will automatically be protected from other users by being protected in seperate home directories.
8. Usage of company computers would be limited to those people that have accounts on the computers.
9. ... etc. etc. etc.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
We all know how good committees are at deciding things. Compromise usually leads to the lowest common denominator. Do we really want a Linux desktop that's designed by a committee? Isn't that against the whole spirit of free software?
We are talking about industry standards. Outside of the software industry, they work very well. The software industry is still in it's immature stages - like the engineering industry was before there were standard sizes for nuts and bolts - manufacturers actually deliberately made their nuts and bolts incompatible because it gave them lock-in, just as the software industry does now. Incompatible nuts and bolts seems crazy now, closed/incompatible file formats will seem crazy in the future.
Your analogy is dead on, Mr. Silver.
But it's worse:
The vast bulk of the Linux world doesn't even recognize the truth of what you're saying. Whenever someone complains about Linux useability, they are told that "all you need to do is [poorly-documented two hours of time-suck here], and anyway you're just a M$ troll you swine".
The genius of M$ is that they recognize when things are hard to use, and they make 'em easier. Ten years ago they could see that their screen font rendering sucked - so they made them unsuck. I certainly have issues with M$ - sometimes they dumb things down too much, and they often are untruthful. But, let's face facts, even Windows 95 was a far more useable system for 95+% of computer users than is any current Linux distribution that I've tried.
The sad thing is that there's a lot of room for improvement on Windows. Linux can, in theory, win the battle for the desktop. But if folks don't recognize how terribly deficient it is in day-to-day usability, there's not a prayer for it.
We're already moving all of our internal desktop users to Linux over the next two years. There will still be dual boot for those that need it but most corporate desktop users not needing another operatng system will run pure Linux for the daily chores of email and document exchange. All my product support work is done in Java, PERL, and scripting so I can be 100% Linux for all my activities now. The default window manager will be Gnome but you can use others as your taste dictates. Most interprise applications have already been ported and the rest will be. The elephant is not only dancing but leading the parade.
Too lazy to create a sig...
Yes, the engineering world has discovered that it's far more profitable to standardize bolts but proliferate drive types.
The consumer never feels they're locked in, but has to buy mulitple sets of tools, if only to remove the patented head bolt and replace it with a standard one. Very profitable for the patent holder.
The software industry seems to be learning this trick.
Witness XML, a standard for creating standards. You can claim XML compliance and yet extend it in propriatary ways. It is plain text, but the file sizes are truly gargantuan, so you need to compress them, for which you can use your own propriatary compression method. Certain outfits are now even starting to create propriatary XML parsers.
The bolts are all standard, but you still have to buy the tool.
There's one essential difference between file formats and bolt design though. Bolts aren't given extraordinary protection by the DMCA.
KFG
That's just a random subset of things that we need in order to provide a quality desktop that most non-trivial/non-grandma users do. There are a million and one other things we need as well.
In short while a huge amount has been accomplished, there's still a huge pile left to do. Still, it's not as hopeless as it looks - the distance Linux has come since I started using it only 2 years ago is incredible. Beautiful fonts, cleaned up desktops, hugely improved artwork, maturing applications and powerful media players are just a few of the achievements I can think of.
We have to get more home users and more small businesses on, and that means improving the desktop, getting the applications they need built and 'marketing' it to people.
I would argue that focusing on larger business desktops would be a quicker route to the home users. People will buy a home computer to match what they have at work, not the other way around. In an enterprise, computers are chosen carefully for consistency and hardware compliance, so the desktop will run well. With a home user, you have to support every little webcam widget sold at BestBuy or Walmart, or else you lose.
If we get millions of corporate desktops established, hardware manufacturers will start supporting it, and people will start buying Linux for their homes.
And while I don't think we need to standardize on a particular window manager or desktop environment, at a minimum the Gnome/KDE environments should share lots of standards, such as clipboards, stanadard dialogs, themes, etc. I think this is what OSDL is trying to do, which is similar to freedesktop.org. Having multiple GUI toolkits is not necessarily a weakness; the same condition exists on Windows and that hasn't seemed to affect it negatively.