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Linux Going Mainstream
Gossi writes "The BBC is carrying an excellent overview of the growing use of Linux, by many different fields. The article says it all, really, and is probably something you should show your Boss."
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So true. Running on Linux baby!
The Army reading list
I carry a variety of flavors of Linux CDs in my car and use live version to show friends and family what they are missing. Suse 9.0 live-eval works great for showing people what this "linux thing" they have read about is.
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
This ons still makes me slightly cross:
Earlier BBC story
Still, I suppose that the latest story is written by someone who has Clue. I'm told that they exist, even at the BBC.
Yup, this is one thing I will be showing the director of the museum that I volunteer at.
I was hoping that when we get funding to construct the new building that it wont be squanded on things that can be obtained for free... licenses for instance...... If you are gonna have a multimedia kiosk running for instance to show how something works (A large steam pump for instance) Do you really need (or indeed want) to fork out a load of money when you can just sling linux on a resonable machine. Possably use Mozilla or something with a modified chrome, and do something you can walk away from.
All I can say is "Yessssss!"
Nick
Ok, I'm a software developer. I want to port my software, written for windows, to linux so that the average joe will be able to use it. Is it so simple? Well, which distro will I do first? Mandrake? Redhat? Suse? Debian? Then what about those who use *BSD? There are so many choices. I mean its a great kernel, I use different distrobutions for all of my servers. I have no desire to mess with Active Directory or IIS.. But how can it take over the mainstream market when each distro is different.
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
My Mainstream is not always your mainstream.
Government computing is not homebased computing.
To be mainstream, could mean that the software is being embraced by the majority of teenagers using computers, or it could be that the majority of corporate users will start using Linux somewhere in their business this year.
I've seen Linux evolve a lot since I first tried to use it in 1997. I couldn't figure it out then. In 2000 I used Red Hat 6.0 for the first time, and found it easier to understand, but still not useful to me. Now in 2004, I could make it be almost as useful to me as my Windows machine. Do I really think that this year there will be some killer distro that will blow Windows away? No. But it is possible...
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Why was Sun Microsystems even mentioned in this article. Sun is taking a beating from the spread of Linux. Sure, they offer some servers with Linux, but their operating system that they're trying to market is Solaris.
Too, the whole idea of Linux is to have boxes running on commodity chips, namely x86, because of the price. Sun is fighting an upward battle, they got into the market too late, are fighting IBM and HP, and aren't geared towards the lower end server market. Companies finally realized that they don't need to purchase mainframes every month.
And don't tell me that because Sun released Solaris to the public that they're on the bandwagon. Have you even attempted to download it? They check to make sure that your inputed address is valid with the zip code. And this is in stride with the open source movement?
No thanks. The games I like are far better on the PC.
Hah - I call bullshit now. Now for some severe Karma burn.
I've been an armchair Linux fan for a while now - but recently, I've had to experience something outright painful: the Linux desktop machine. Our TA required that we use the math-geek standards of LaTeX and Grace for our reports - and let me tell you, it hurt. Bad. LaTeX was fine - I was a little disappointed that after decades of popularity there was still not even the simplest wysiwyg apps for it, and decent documentation was rare as diamonds, but it was still a very nice system for what it was. The painful truth was this: Excel beats the ever-loving crap out of Kspread.
The problem is interoperability. None of the software works well together - Mozilla and Konq have no idea what software to launch when you download a file. Kspread has no useful bindings to graphing software besides its inadequate internal system. For an OS that is based on using many small apps in the place of a few oversized ones, not nearly enough attention has been paid to interconnectivity - more than just foreign filetype support, but in-app transferral of information. When I click a Grace file on Konq, I expect it to open in Grace, not a text editor. Firebird feels like a dream on Win32, where it feels clunky on windows due to poor haptic feedback to loading and menu navigation. And why do I need to be root to burn a disk? Or to install the simplest apps?
Oh, and all the IM's pale in comparison to Miranda.
Yes, the Linux community has done some spectacular stuff - but it just doesn't hold a candle to what the retail world has done in the same time.
Linux won't catch the imagination of many once it's mainstream. I expect alot of talented linux hackers to move on in the next few years. The question is what's next.....
I'm quite new to Linux (c64/z48/MSX->Atari->Mac->Win->Linux), and I'm working hard to get a deeper understanding of the Linux culture (and development model). Can't say I have a full understanding of the cultural and historical roots of this movement, but still I feel something's sorely missing from the coverage in 'mainstream media'.
The ongoing SCO and copyright shit - most of what I read is from open source people.
This trend of getting Linux "on every desktop" - again, open source advocates are legion.
What about free software? Yes, fanboys all over just love to trash RMS, but most fanboys (to my limited knowledge) have done dick all for the movement.
I don't know enough to say OSS is worse than free software (although I'm leaning towards the latter). But hell, it's starting to look like a lot of people's main goal is to put the "open source" sticker on the whole thing, get the mega corps blessings and declare this land Utopia.
WTF?
From what I'm slowly learning about this movement, there's a lot more to it than just the "open source". And I think it's getting lost in the process.
Aren't many good ideas and a lot of cultural heritage getting thrown aside here? Are we loosing important stuff along the way?
668.5
As with most people in the IT field I get a lot of requests for help from friends and family. It's almost never a hardware problem that they have -- it's always some virus or spyware program or some Windows corruption someplace. I found that I was reinstalling Windows every time I worked on someone's computer. And I was using my copies of Windows because they never had their own.
The first thing I want to know is, just how many people are using pirated copies of Windows? I don't even know one person who is now using a legitimate copy of Windows. Why pay when your pal can get it from work, or now from the net? How does this figure into the estimates of Windows domination and market share? Surely if you only counted legitimate, purchased and properly licensed copies of Windows, the home user market share would be drastically lower. Businesses are more or less forced by threat of litigation, fines, and raids, to be legitimate. That's why the first wave of GNU/Linux migration has been happening in the business sector. No matter how many bullshit Gartner studies "prove" that Windows has a lower TCO, it just doesn't. It costs more to buy, it costs more to maintain, and it costs more to upgrade.
I think the best thing that could happen to GNU/Linux right now is for Microsoft to crack down on home user piracy. Activation schemes are a step in the right direction. With more hassle, increased costs and the apparent (or at least, apparent to those who don't know how to get an activation crack) inability to get a copy from a friend, GNU/Linux will look like a much better choice to home users.
But back to my main point: service. I have continued to refuse to service a Windows machine unless it involves replacing the operating system with a Free alternative. Don't like it? Find someone else to do the work... but it'll cost more. I think if more people refused to work on Windows for friends and family, the death of Windows as a dominant desktop platform would be much more speedy.
-JemI'd been a happy Linux user for years, and used it for everything, from works (scientific research) and my own entertainment (music, movies, etc).
However, things changed a big bit for me a year ago: I've got a girlfriend. Being a typical person who can uses computer to a level (M$ Word, IE, WinAmp, etc), making her use Linux was difficult. It was just simply too difficult for her. So I had no choice but to installed Windows for her. Even that, I tried to make her use Mozilla or Firebird for web browsing. That failed, too. She simply use IE whenever possible. So, forget about OpenOffice.org, etc. There are people who refuse to use any other word processors because "it's not Word", and any other browsers because "it's not IE"... (the list goes on).
That's fine with me, whatever, I can still use Linux in another partition.
But, there was a problem: I usally run process as backgrounds and I want to do that when she's using Word or we both watching movies. And having all my works in Linux partition wouldn't allow me to do this!
So, I decided to get a Mac. OS X seems to provide me a reasonably good solution. First, it is a nice and very user freindly Desktop OS, one of the most friendly out there. Learning to use anything in OS X was painless, even for my girlfriend. Second, if she insists on using Word, then there's Office v. X for Mac (even though there're some compatibility problems). Third, it's UNIX with X11 so I can recompile most of things I need to do my works.
So, while I hope that Linux will eventually become more favorable for Home Users, I don't expect it anytime soon. This is simply because, more than anything else, convincing people who don't really know anything but stick with "name" of programs is very difficult. (Ex. There are people who won't buy anything but a computer wih Pentium-brand CPU, regardless of what he/she's doing with it.)
Yes, the Linux community has done some spectacular stuff - but it just doesn't hold a candle to what the retail world has done in the same time.
hmm, not quite true, Linux started in 1991 and microsoft started in 1984 (at least that is when their copyrights date from)
Actually, one handy side effect of Linux taking over the server market is that game developers are more likely to create and distribute Linux-server versions. And once you've got a game working on a Linux server, porting the rest of the game is relatively simple. If the gaming community can build momentum from the server market, then Linux as a gaming platform isn't much of a stretch. Personally i'd like to see it happen, because as a gamer i'm practically chained to WinXP. I'd like to try Linux, but right now it just doesn't seem like a sweet enough deal. I'd be giving up a lot of past, present, and future games. Oh, and I don't really feel like having to re-learn how to use a computer either, or go back to mucking with command lines and such... but thats just me being lazy.
For those new to Plan 9, it's a continuation of some core UNIX ideas like everything is a file, most services can be handled by fileservers, anything can be accomplished with a few simple operations (read, write, open, close, fork, exec). Nore notable concepts in Plan 9 are individual process namespaces and no root user per se.
Fortunately, KDE auto-loads a lot of programs not made by them like Emacs, Gaim, Mozilla, GIMP, et c. This is the beauty of Open Source; KDE doesn't have to be great at applications (and IMO it's horrid) since it can just borrow other open-source applications and just provide the best base GUI.
Quote from the article: "Because Linux is open source, it can be obtained for free, although most companies pay software developers for a package of Linux-based applications, including e-mail and word processing." That is so wrong wrong wrong on many levels. This just adds to the FUD around Linux. I'm amazed that such a blatant falsehood has made it to the pages of the BBC. Sloppy journalism IMHO. ( Maybe someone in authority from KDE, Gnome or OpenOffice could care to inform the BBC of their inaccuracy? (and no - i really do think that the Hutton report is a whitewash and that the BBC WERE right. But thats a different story and off topic)
There will be inertia unfortunately. The people who use there computers for gaming will stick with windows because it has the games and the games come out first on that platform even if they do come out later on mac or linux. Sure you can dual-boot, but that by its nature increases the complexity of installation of linux significantly.
There are two distinct home computer markets, gamers and people using computers to; surf the web, check email, do accounting of there personal finances, and write letters and documents. The second group of people can easily switch as all those functions are available in Linux, and if they use a particular commercial piece of software, as Linux becomes more popular no doubt it will be ported. But for gamers there are literally hundreds if not thousands of these killer apps (games) that will need porting.
My conclusion is that it may be easier to get business and the non-gamer PC user to switch before hardcore gamers. Kind of like the inertia of changing from DOS to windows for games, which was a combination of poor support for games in windows 3.1 and early 95, game companies not wanting to learn how to write games for windows, and gamers already quite happy using and tweaking DOS for their games as well as the ability to play their back catalog. Wanting to run windows on the same machine complicated things, with a need to setup different booting options for either gaming in DOS or working in windows, akin to dual booting Linux/Windows.
But my point is that the target market is *not* necessarily home-user desktop computing! Linux is certainly mainstream at my campus, where all engineers have at least a basic intro to UNIX, and where many of the CS classes are taught on Linux. Linux is certainly mainstream (if not dominant) in the graphics workstation market where major movie studios like ILM use it for their artists. Linux is certainly mainstream in the embedded market, where many embedded products use Linux. And Linux is on the verge of becoming mainstream in the corporate desktop market.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You're expecting everyone that uses a computer, including your grandma, to know what mime types are and how they work and how to drill down the preferences in Mozilla to set them. That's exactly like telling your grandma that if she wants to drive her car, she'll need to learn how to replace the spark plugs.
Desktop systems need to be fully usable by a person who knows absolutely nothing about the internals of the programs or the operating system. I think the KDE people have an idea about this, and I think that Sun does also, but many Linux programmers obviously do not. They need to learn this truth and apply it.