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Dan Gillmor Reconsiders Linux on the Desktop
Cyrus writes "Influential San Jose Mercury News tech columnist Dan Gillmore has reconsidered his stance against Linux. He now says it's rapidly converging to a viable desktop OS
for the masses. "While I wasn't paying sufficient attention, the proverbial tortoise has been playing some serious catch-up.""
While this is probably being heralded as good news (i.e. prominent "news" figure endorses Linux), isn't this really just jumping on the bandwagon while he still can?
Too much attention has been given to linux on the desktop. In the battle against software oppresion, the first front is destroying the onld UNIX systems. Linux hurts the Windows monopoly more by having people who are switching from UNIX to Linux that from UNIX to the Win NT family. Thats where most of the effort should be applied (because thats where technology can actually be compared).
Winning the desktop has nothing to do with who has the best technology of user interface. It has all to do with leveraging corporate power. Once many corporations are united with Linux on the server side, their corporate power will allow linux to take over the deskop, regardless of how good the software is. Apple has shown that it doesn't require a Herculian effort to make a usable desktop on a UNIX variant. Why are we wasting our resources?
Recompiling the kernal is not
I'm sorry, but common day folk will never be able to use linux which was made for porgrammers by programmers
(and we'll probably have to keep saying it for another three years)
The innovators have spoken, and they like what they saw.
Now the volume will pick up, as more people take notice, and the ease-of-learning continues to grow in leaps and bounds. As businesses start deploying Linux on the workstation for cost competitive advantage and security competitive advantage, there will be more demand of open-source integration - and more open-source programming jobs.
Then come the hordes that are the mainstream users and late adopters. Oh how I hope the Linux community is actually ready for this.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
Trying is believing. I had been approaching Linux as a curiousity, a sort of hobbyist tinkering OS for people who had a lot of time to invest in learning and deploying the systems. And then I got charged with building a mail server. One Gentoo server later (complete with all the goodies needed to make Horde work properly), I've seen the light, that it's NOT hard to use, and that it's very simple to learn. The level of documentation is also far and away the best of any OS I've experienced. (I did find that it takes a little while to learn how to find and read documentation.) It is a far cry from my first attempt at Linux on a 486 almost 8 years ago.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I've been looking at different Linux desktops lately, and I've come to the conclusion that there is only *one* viable GNOME desktop out there. When I considered which Linux to install, I realized that my current choices were thus:
RedHat Fedora
Mandrake
Suse
Java Desktop System
I actually tried the most recent Fedora and found it to be useless. They refuse to ship NTFS support, MP3 support, or NVidia support. On top of that, my MS Intellimouse keeps locking up. That problem has been there since RedHat 8! What have these people been up to?
That leaves Mandrake, Suse and JDS. Of those three, only JDS is GNOME based (actually quite nicely GNOME based). Thus KDE seems to have won the day.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Star Office 7.0, the latest and most impressive version of Sun Microsystems' low cost alternative to Microsoft Office.
Okay. I'll believe that things have gradually gotten better and better on the Linux desktop.
So, then, now, how much incentive does Sun have now to push OO.o and Star Office further into this key part of Microsoft's bread and butter business?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I know that I, for one, will be switching in May from RH9 to SuSE 9.1 Pro, and will be recommending it to others in place of the other major contenders (RHEL, Fedora, Mandrake, "Java" desktop, etc.)
--
Power to the Peaceful
Fedora Core 2 test 2 works fine will my USB mice, and I've found it overall the easiest to install of the RPM-based systems. (I'm using Fedora Core 2 before its release because I need kernel 2.6.) I had many more problems with Mandrake 10, but I haven't tried the current release of Suse yet.
I think Linux has come a long way.
When I bought my home computer (about 3 years ago), I tried to get into Linux on the advice of my friend. I bought the $45 book-and-CD with the Penguin on the cover, but it was just too overwhelming (command-line what?!?) and I never gave it a fair shot.
Fast-forward 3 years: While trying to get an old (12MB-hard-drive old) laptop going, I heard that Linux was good for older hardware and went to the local LUG meeting where somebody gave me a copy of Knoppix (Psst... over here...Yeah, you... Try it, you'll like it!...The first one's free... all the cool kids are doing it...You wanna be cool, don't you?!?!). Less than six-months later, I use Linux almost exclusively at home.
Critical factors for the Linux switch made by my non-technical ass:
That's my experience. Every day Linux becomes not only a truly viable option for more people, but also a truly attractive option for more people.
The Dalai Llama
keep your damn command line - I want pretty colors, lots of nifty boxes, and everthing should be accessed through pretty little buttons that look like shiny pieces of candy...
My sig could be your sig!
Personally, I'm sick of these "Linux is too hard to use comments". People keep saying Linux won't be ready for the desktop until it is as easy to use as Windows. Do you even know any "Joe Users"? I'll tell ya this, my parents can't install new hardware or fix what I would call simple issues in WinXP. If a program is acting funny, they're lost. They have to call me or the PC manufactuer for help. Want to know how proficient the "average" or "slightly geeky" user is? Watch Screen Savers or Call for Help on TechTV. Most people can't figure out the simplest of issues. Whenever someone writes a "Linux still isn't there" article they assume that the average user is an expert in all things Windows. The truth is , they're not. So what makes Linux so much harder to learn/use than Windows?
Here's what I think about linux:
1. Installing a program isn't any harder. Windows install.. insert CD, click OK and Next a bunch of times and it's done. Linux install.. do an emerge, apt-get, swaret, etc, sit back and wait. Yeah, Linux is hard. One command to me is easier than navigating to a webpage, filling in some stupid personal info questions, downloading an executable, navigating to that executable then double clicking.
2. Something doesn't work right? Windows way... call your manufacturer or a geeky friend to help out. Linux way.. search on linuxquestions.org or your distro's forums. 99% of the time your answer is already in those forums. Some program throwing out some weird error? Search online, you'll find a ton of fixes. Yeah, Linux is hard.
3. Recompiling a kernel? It's really not that hard. There are a ton of walkthroughs on the internet.
4. Hardware support. Windows has plug and play which is really great... when it works. How many times have you tried to install a piece of hardware where Windows didn't correctly recognize it, or didn't recognize it at all? Me, probably at least a dozen times. In Linux every stock kernel I've seen a distro supply has just about everything compiled as a module. The only reason I've ever had hardware not be autodetected and set up is when that manufacturer explicitly wouldn't allow for OSS support (D-Link + series wireless cards with the TI chip).
So in summation, stop with the whiny articles about Linux isn't ready for the desktop. It is. Many people use it for both home and production machines. If it's not ready for people to use then why are there 78,919 projects hosted on sourceforge.net? That's an awful lot of software for such an unusable OS. If you want to complain that Linux isn't ready for the mass desktop to be used by Joe Doesn't_know_jack_about_PCs_user then I say neither is Windows.
Funny you mention that. I have an Intellinet wireless card that Win98/2k couldn't recoginize for love or money (or drivers). So just for shits and giggles, I throw knoppix in the box. Boots up with an ip address, web access, the works.
There are other areas to work on imo like sound support etc.
Though I haven't been running Linux since last summer, but will as soon as school is over and have some time to tinker with my windows box.
--Joey
APT does not require that you install packages from the Internet or over the network at all; a CD can be an APT source.
If you have your Debian on CD and the application is in the Debian archive you don't need to download anything. That's the point of Debian - to package up Free Software and make it easy to install (plus do it properly).
Also, you say "you can't have everyone adding their apps to apt, since it is an online service.". These facts are not connected. The reason you can't have everyone adding their apps to Debian is that Debian expects a level of competence and trustworthiness from package maintainers. Anyone who exhibits those features can add their app to Debian.
So if what you want is a system where it's very easy to install a vast range of quality Free software, whether online or off, the Debian is the answer. If what you'd prefer is a system where it's quite easy to install all kinds of software including viruses, spyware and non-Free junk, then Windows is the answer.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Lets hope so, having only just started playing with wireless i am very pleased (altho its all windows here at the mo) no name hardware went straight in and worked. 30 minutes for 4 machines is sweet enough for me.... for now
Home
Go read Clayton Christensens book Innovators Dilemma about disruptive Technologies and you will realize that the Improvement trajectory of Linux is much steeper than Windows.
As a matter of fact this is the crux of the problem for Microsoft.
They WILL loose even on the desktop as they are can only move up but at a slow rate. Linux and their MS' predatory practices has foiled them on the lower end, like Handheld and Mobile phones. Sony has then checked on the Entertainment / Game avenue. They have nowhere to go
Help fight continental drift.
From the article...
I could have installed Windows XP, the current (and, I will acknowledge, far and away the best) Windows operating system to date, plus new applications. But that would be expensive.
This more expensive claim is bogus. Dan says he installed Xandros Desktop OS Version 2 - Deluxe Edition which costs $89, the same price that Windows XP Home Upgrade costs.
The recommended system requirements for Xandros and XP are almost identical.
So why hassle with Xandros when he could have just upgraded to XP and he would not have had to reinstall any applications, plus Star Office (not free) runs on XP. He could have avoided the hardware problems too.
Of course this would not have made for such an interesting article and this is must be Dan's true motivation...
Besides, it would feed a beast I'd rather not make any bulkier.
Just today, I was bashing my head against the wall, trying to make Linux do what I want, and I am a technical person. I was using a home computer at work for a few weeks, and had installed RedHat 9 on it. It worked beautifully and with no problems. A couple of weeks ago the computer came back home, and I've only used the Windows partition to play games, and install a wireless network card.
/mnt/floppy" command, so I could at least write them to disk.
This morning, I needed some files off the Linux partition, so I booted to Linux. Only, when gdm attempts to start X on the box, my LCD display at home can't handle it (the settings weren't right for it). Is there a way to correct this? Does it drop down to the lowest common denominator so I can fix the problem? Nope! Being a geek, I fortunately KNOW that Ctrl-Alt-F1 will switch me to a console... I'd hate to think what Grandma would do.
I tried modifying XF86Config (being the geek I am) to put in more reasonable sync values. This didn't seem to work though. Redhat also conveniently got rid of xf86config, and the data file containing sync settings for most monitors.
All this, so I could go in and use the GUI to set up my new wireless network card (sorry, I never learned the command-line commands and files to edit to set this up manually).
I never did get that to work. Fortunately, I know the "mount
And this system is supposed to replace Windows and OS X for the masses? Don't get me started on setting up dual-headed displays under Linux at work...
I love Linux, especially developing under it. However, it is NOT ready as a Windows replacement. Gnome and KDE are fine, but some of the lower-levels such as X are still an issue.
John
Besides, a few distros exist for the explicit purpose of shipping entirely Free systems; Debian is the largest, and Fedora seems to be one as well. If you don't agree with their policies, then don't install them, but don't criticize them for sticking with the rules that they set for themselves.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
yeah, i've run into that problem before. I was working on my computer on a good 17" monitor that could do some high resolutions. Then i brought my computer up to the office for a bit and completely forgot about the desktop res being set so high. Well I hooked it up to an older 15" I had at the office and whaaaam crazy lines every where. Forunate enough for me Remote Desktop saved my ass. This was an XP box BTW
See Sig! See Sig Zig! Zig Sig Zig!!!!!