Friedman on Linux Desktop Expectations

An anonymous reader writes "SearchEnterpriseLinux.com is featuring an interview with Novell/Ximian's Nat Friedman on the increasing interest about the Linux desktop. Quote from the interview - "A day doesn't go by when I don't talk to a Fortune 1000 customer from the financial services market, automotives or others that are not looking at dipping their feet into the Linux desktop." And by the way, both Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza's April 12th blog entry have a picture of Miguel and Nat dancing with David Vaskevitch, CTO of Microsoft. Now that's something you don't get to see everyday!"

Comments

OOoo, first post!

[Trogre]

"A day doesn't go by when I don't talk to a Fortune 1000 customer from the financial services market, automotives or others that are not looking at dipping their feet into the Linux desktop"

No no, not more triple negatives!

Re:OOoo, first post!

[Esion Modnar]

...dipping their feet into the Linux desktop

You would probably get electrocuted doing that. Licensed metaphor mixologist.

Seriously though, the Linux desktop will be ready when the average user never has to know all the gritty details of the mount command.

Re:OOoo, first post!

[Hallow]

Obviously he's got a thing for feet. Look at the gnome logo. :)

David who?

[Anonymous Coward]

a picture of Miguel and Nat dancing with David Vaskevitch, CTO of Microsoft.

What? Was Steve Ballmer unavailable? Just wait until he hears about this. He's gonna flip. (literally)

Re:David who?

[dipipanone]

Was Steve Ballmer unavailable? Just wait until he hears about this.

"There's only room for ONE dancing monkeyboy in this company!"

We need a new toolkit...

[kcbrown]

I sent this in response to this, but I think it's quite relevant here, too, because it addresses the problem of desktop consistency:

Btw, if you have been following my posts on my blog and on the desktop-devel-list, you will know that my feeling is that all of the existing toolkits today (Gtk, Qt, XUL and VCL) will become obsolete and we need to start looking at the next generation toolkit system.

If you're going to do a next generation toolkit system, then do it right: start by creating a network protocol for it.

You heard me right. The right way to do a toolkit is to make it networkable in a client/server fashion. There are a few reasons for doing so:

1. Speed over the network. Instead of having to transmit low-level graphics primitives, you now only have to transmit higher-level widget information. This should represent an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of network traffic required. It also means the bandwidth between the code that draws the widget and the code that renders it will likely be as high as possible (a local socket or some such).

2. Consistency. With a client/server widget architecture, all applications running anywhere will have the same look and feel when they're displaying through your widget server. Additionally, changing the theme in use will change the look and feel of all the applications using the widget server (which, ideally, should be all of them).

3. Abstraction. Because the widgets are implemented on top of a protocol, widget libraries simply have to all talk the same protocol. This means that it doesn't matter what the widget library itself looks like, what language it's implemented in, what object paradigm it uses, or anything else: the look and feel will still be the same. This is markedly different from the current situation with GTK, QT, and all other Unix widget sets, each of which implements its own look and feel. A client/server architecture can, and should, abstract out the look and feel of the widget set.

Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[Jameth]

I quite agree. However, there is an unfortunate problem with making a new toolkit: Cross-Platform.

Qt is great because it is cross-platform. GTK has that too. The amount of things that will run native cross-platform are fewer than those that will run on a single platform.

Also, you are arguing for a widget server, which will work best when it is the dominant/only widget set. Windows can do this. Linux is still too diverse.

Still, I think you're right. Completely right. I just was noting a few things.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[phok]

If you're going to do a next generation toolkit system, then do it right: start by creating a network protocol for it.

*cough*Y-Windows*cough*

They seem to be working on a widget set to go with their protocol. I agree that this is the way to go. Someone will hack $WIDGET_LIBRARY to use the protocol, and we can unify the look and feel. This is a lot more elegant than hacks like GTK-QT because they must all interface to the one widget set to rule them all.

Abstraction. Because the widgets are implemented on top of a protocol, widget libraries simply have to all talk the same protocol. This means that it doesn't matter what the widget library itself looks like, what language it's implemented in, what object paradigm it uses, or anything else: the look and feel will still be the same. This is markedly different from the current situation with GTK, QT, and all other Unix widget sets, each of which implements its own look and feel. A client/server architecture can, and should, abstract out the look and feel of the widget set.

You're right, it is a significantly different approach, but as I said above, this is not completely incompatible with current widgets.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[Tyler Eaves]

I agree, but here's what I want:

EASE OF PROGRAMMING.

All the existing toolkits have APIs that are daunting to say the least.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[be-fan]

Windows cannot do this. It is way to diverse as well. Hell, Microsoft itself uses 3 different toolkits for its major app lines!

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[demachina]

"Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits."

Actually, I think you will just pile another GUI toolkit on to an already large pile, and create a new set of applications with a whole new look and feel. In particular you seem to be understating the major effort you are proposing either intentionally or unintentionally.

First off it takes a lot of work to develop a complete GUI toolkit from scratch. Once you do it then you have to migrate a large body of applications to it which is probably a larger effort than developing the toolkit in the first place. Are you planning to rewrite all the applications in GNOME and/or KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla etc. How long do you figure that will take. It would take a long time and it would be time spent not developing the capabilities of the applications. In many respects it would be hitting a master reset on the Linux desktop and starting over, which isn't likely to lead to world domination for at least a few years.

Chances are you wont even get a majority of the developers on some of these major projects to buy in to your new toolkit, though some probably will so you will probably end up with a bunch of new splinters.

I'm just not sure what it is about GUI toolkits and window managers that exert this constant allure on geeks, compelling them to constantly develop new ones, the vast majority of which never develop critical mass.

But hey, maybe through superior uber geekness you will develop a new superior uber geek toolkit and you will be able to migrate a complete set of applications to it, and all others will be abandoned in the face of its superiority. Its just seems like something of a long shot. One thing positive I can say about this plan is it might be the only way to end the death match between GNOME and KDE.

Exactly how much time were you estimating to achieve this grand unified GUI?

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[LMCBoy]

Really, have you tried Qt? It's a pretty fun toolkit in which to code. A beautiful API, IMO.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[killjoe]

Amen. Something like VB but using python!

Yes I know there are Python gui builders out there but nothing like VB. I want databound controls and lots of whiz bang eye candy widgets I can drag and drop.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[cubicledrone]

f you're going to do a next generation toolkit system, then do it right: start by creating a network protocol for it.

Linux will never make any progress unless programmers stop inventing new "GUI toolkits" and start fixing the bugs in the current system.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[Master of Transhuman]

As I've said before, you're absolutely right.

If the document is readable, the font is fine.

GUIs are NEVER intuitive, that's a fantasy for Geek Morons. But if a few widgets can make things work easier, fine.

Whether a box is beveled or not, who cares?

The only issues of important in software is:
1) DOES IT WORK RIGHT? (i.e., does not crash, does what it is supposed to do?)

2) For the developer or company IT department: Is it maintainable at a reasonable cost?

Everything else is eye candy and irrelevant.

Geeks twiddle widgets for the same reason font makers twiddle fonts and assembler programmers twiddle bits.

i.e., they have no other purpose in life.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[kcbrown]

I quite agree. However, there is an unfortunate problem with making a new toolkit: Cross-Platform.

But the beauty of separating out the look and feel of the toolkit from the implementation of the toolkit via a network protocol is that porting the widget set to a new platform is now much more straightforward: you simply have to write a widget server on the target platform, which will take widget requests and display them through the native widget set.

Where you'll have to write some code is when the native widget set is missing a widget type defined by the protocol. In that event you have a couple of options: reject the protocol request, or implement the look and feel of the widget in software (using as much of the native widget set as possible, of course). You can always do the latter -- how else do you think new widget types are created on a platform such as Windows?

Also, you are arguing for a widget server, which will work best when it is the dominant/only widget set. Windows can do this. Linux is still too diverse.

No, this isn't the problem. The problem is that right now the existing widget sets under Linux all implement their own look and feel. They've duplicated a lot of effort as a result.

With a widget protocol, you implement GTK or QT the same way as before, except that whenever possible you make widget protocol calls instead of doing direct drawing, mouse handling, etc. For cases when the widget protocol doesn't supply the kind of widget you want, you'll have to implement the look/feel in terms of more primitive graphics calls (and thus the widget protocol will have to support the ability to do direct graphics, including 3D graphics) -- but even that should be done on top of existing widgets whenever possible.

There might be other ways to approach the problem of extensibility, e.g. by making it possible to dynamically define to the widget server the properties of a widget: the inputs it expects, the areas that have to be drawn on, etc. But I haven't thought any of that through.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[pdamoc]

we don't need another hero (toolkit)!
It is not the toolkit that is needed but a shift in programmers mentality. We should stop wasting time and use the wisdom of people whom are way better than us at this. We should use PATTERNS. Like MVC for example. When applications will have all the code separated in Models, Views and Controllers toolkits will become irrelevant because as long as you can access the model you can create your own Views and Controllers. The use of higher level languages should be encouraged. The higher the language the easier is to understand the program and so more people can get involved. The cross-platform issue will fade due to the fact that there are already a lot of great cross-platform toolkits in which the View-Controller part can be implemented (scripted.
The separation of the Model will have yet another benefit, no more reinvention of the wheel, at least in some parts. It could be highly optimized due to the fact that such an approach will encourage only one instance of the model per functionality. No more complex compiling schemes: script the interface (View-Controller) in python and compile only the model or provide it as a binary: .so, .dll, whatever.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[stor]

Yes I must admit I've been thinking along similar lines.

What I do in certain situations, rather than X11 Forwarding, is set up an SSH tunnel between myself and the remote machine, with the service's port number as the remote port (and sometimes the local port too).

Example:

ssh username@gateway.example.com -L 80:intranetwebserver.example.com:80

This ssh's into a machine I have ssh access to (e.g. a gateway or some machine on the network border) and sets up a port forward to the intranet webserver.

Then I simply point my browser at 127.0.0.1:80 and voila! I'm on the target intranet. Adding their intranet hostname to /etc/hosts with ip 127.0.0.1 can be useful too.

You can use this method with any tcp service such as web and ldap AFAIK. Because you are simply transmitting the data of the service rather than forwarding graphics it's extremely quick.

And you get encryption and compression for free! woot.

Cheers
Stor

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[golgotha007]

M. O. O. N.

that spells toolkit! /me ducks!

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[evvk]

We don't need yet another new WIMP toolkit. We need to totally abstract the UI to give the user more freedom, and to separate UI from functionality. See e.g. http://iki.fi/tuomov/vis/ for some ideas.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[Muggins the Mad]

> I'm just not sure what it is about GUI toolkits and window
> managers that exert this constant allure on geeks, compelling them to constantly develop
> new ones, the vast majority of which never develop critical mass.

Personally I'm glad they do.

Otherwise we'd be stuck with the visual appeal of Athena and the efficiency of Motif.

Today's QT is yesterdays Tk.

Yes the cost of rapid improvement seems to be UI inconsistency. To me that's worth the price.

- MugginsM

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[kcbrown]

Then I simply point my browser at 127.0.0.1:80 and voila! I'm on the target intranet. Adding their intranet hostname to /etc/hosts with ip 127.0.0.1 can be useful too.

Then you'll love the -D option: it sets up a socks proxy on the remote end and lets you connect to it via a local port. So you use -D , then set up your browser to use a socks proxy on localhost: and suddenly it's as if your web browser is running on the remote. The only downside is that name resolution happens on the local side.

If you combine this with a program called "connect", which will establish connections via a socks proxy, then you can use ssh to get into other systems that are accessible only from the remote end. Just put an entry into your .ssh/config file like so:

Host *.remote.com
ProxyCommand /usr/bin/connect -4 -S localhost:5364 %h %p

Works like a charm.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[stor]

Hey thanks! I usually don't futz with socks proxies but your advice is interesting. ssh is da bomb in so many ways.

There was a point to my original post that I left out :) In some situations it will be a *lot* more efficient to simply run a client on the local desktop and a service on the server and just transfer the data. Forget widgets, window positions, etc. This may not be useful in all cases but in some it will be a lot more efficient.

I know, it's a bit Captain Obvious but it's useful to acknowledge: It's a good idea to think in terms of "what data do I *really* need to tranfer over this link?"

I'm a bit biased though: I have to admin a bunch of remote machines. X11 (especially over ssh) across high-latency links is a bit painful at times (not as painful as VNC though).

Side-note: if you ssh into a remote machine, fire up some xterms on that machine and run some processes that send a lot of text to STDOUT, you'll notice the operations are serialised between the xterms. This is because ssh is multiplexing them over the same tunnel. To solve this you perform multiple ssh connections to the remote machine. I'm sure most people here (including yourself) would know all this but I thought it worth mentioning.

Cheers
Stor

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[Arker]

I agree, but here's what I want:

EASE OF PROGRAMMING.

All the existing toolkits have APIs that are daunting to say the least.

*cough*GNUstep*cough*

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[davidle]

This is just bollocks I'm afraid. The toolkits in existence today cannot just be dropped, and there is absolutely nothing that Microsoft are doing, in Avalon or anywhere else, that cannot be done with existing tollkits and tools. What we need is just more unity, and I think we're going to get that. Qt is a commercial toolkit that companies are actually using - no one is going to obsolete this.

I'm suspicious when people say that GTK and Qt will become obsolete - this may be related to some political bollocks going on at Novell. Whatever, it is no excuse to tell everyone that you are inventing something new for the sake of it.

You heard me right. The right way to do a toolkit is to make it networkable in a client/server fashion. There are a few reasons for doing so:

I've seen Qt apps go over a network, and they look great.

This is markedly different from the current situation with GTK, QT, and all other Unix widget sets, each of which implements its own look and feel. A client/server architecture can, and should, abstract out the look and feel of the widget set.

What is required is some low-level commonality, not an entire over-arching new toolkit, otherwise you will simply get the forking situation we have today. We need to bring GTK, Qt, Java and others together in a decent common way that does not impact on the diversity of those toolkits and environments.

Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits.

This is Microsoft talking. You are not going to get one, Mono anything :). We need some common standards and implementions to bring all of the great existing technology together. If you go for one toolkit everywhere then you will literally doom free desktops to failure before they've even started. Linux/free desktops are not like bloody Windows, there is going to be diversity, and I just wish people, partiularly at Ximian, would get it through their heads.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[N1KO]

I understand the concerns about toolkits, but what could be wrong about having many window managers? Nobody is forced to use more than one at a time, nobody is forced to use something other than what was installed by default and those who don't like the default can install a different window manager.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[chewmanfoo]

I've been coding in Qt about as long as I've been coding in Java. If you think Qt is a beautiful API, you really gotta get out more.
Java from Sun is much better.

Try netbeans!

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[Britz]

Ever heard that competition is good?

Right! Exactly! Competition is what markets thrieve upon. This is what gets value to the customer and the lack of it is what makes Microsoft.

Microsoft already suffers from the many problems that the lack of competition means for a company. Everyone needs some competition. Otherwise they will go bad.

OS/2 was the last competition Microsoft ever had. That was when they came out with Windows 95. There has not been any innovation on the desktop OS since Windows 95.

What is the difference between 95 and XP to the User? Sure there are some things here and there, also XP supports newer hardware, but other than that? Nothing! So Microsoft will eventually go down the way the railroad tycoons went down in the US a couple decades ago. You will see.

Apart from that the Gnome vs. KDE competition is great! It drives innovation. It keeps people going, comparing, making things better.

I am not all for markets, but here we see a clear example where competition works!

quite simply ...

[Neuropol]

people will expect things to 'just work'. email, spreadsheet, document editing, and other office functions are all well covered on the desktop.

it's the little things that will get people turned off fast: like browser plugin integration, javascript issues, etc. even though MozillaFirebird(rip), and the like, are great for allowing instant plugin installation, there is yet a large hole for media plugin usage considering all of the formats that microsoft and mac have floating around. this is a current limitation, imo. not necessarily a negative on the linux part, but an obstacle created by microsoft and other companies that continues get in the way of total success. that's potentially a major issue and a lot to overcome. i think it's possible to break the stigma regarding linux on teh desktop. it's come miles in the last few years. on the path it follows now, it will over come the general fear that it just doesn't do what windows can. because it can. time has brough a lot of things closer to completion. hardware compatibilty is no longer an issue if you are running current distributions and licensing is an age old argument but if you're in to function for a small fee then why not?

personally, i'm waiting for the linux desktop that comes loaded with enlightenment (absolutely manadatory!), and all things audio editing, and every funky/odd thing that was available in the rh7.3 stage of development. then i will be satisfied.

Re:quite simply ...

[dbIII]

it's the little things that will get people turned off fast: like browser plugin integration, javascript issues, etc. even though MozillaFirebird(rip), and the like, are great for allowing instant plugin installation, there is yet a large hole for media plugin usage considering all of the formats that microsoft and mac have floating around.

Win4lin still has a place. All those old win98 licences are now worth something for all those little things that linux and breeds of NT will not run.

personally, i'm waiting for the linux desktop that comes loaded with enlightenment

Mandrake.

and all things audio editing

Snd has been around for many years, while ecasound is there if you want to do complicated mixing or filtering in batches.

and every funky/odd thing that was available in the rh7.3 stage of development

The code is still out there, even if the projects are not in development. If they won't run or compile on your current setup there are relatively simple ways to install the old libraries they depend upon - linux does not suffer from DLL hell, you can have a few versions of the same library on the same system, since they are named by version number.

Re:quite simply ...

[Doppler00]

I would be happy enough if most linux distros would do a good job of installing drivers correctly.

I install mandrake, try to do something with OpenGL, it starts using software drivers. The amount of time I've already spent trying to fix it amounts to about 2 hours. I'm guessing most people won't have the patiences to even get to the point where I am now.

Why isn't there something like an OpenUsability group that does nothing but focus on the usability of GNU software? Where aren't there any open yet CONSISTENT standards for GUI design. Linux still has a long way to go before I would recommend it for casual use.

Re:quite simply ...

[HangingChad]

I hear what you're saying and agree for the most part. There's only one observation I'd add. Around here if the browser didn't play and support every video, graphics widget and audio stream, management would see that as a bonus. They're spending a lot of time and effort locking down the desktops so people can't access all that and install spyware gadgets like weather bug. If Linux desktop didn't support any of that, they'd be delighted.

It's sometimes easy to confuse what you want in a home PC with what you need at the office.

triple negative

[mattdm]

"A day doesn't go by when I don't talk to a Fortune 1000 customer from the financial services market, automotives or others that are not looking at dipping their feet into the Linux desktop."

So, to rephrase with the first part in the positive: "Every day, I talk to a Fortune 1000 customer who has no interest at all in Linux."

Is that really what he meant to say? It may be true, but y'know, I talk to people who have no interest in various things all the time....

Re:triple negative

[Swamii]

"Erkie gee whizzle guys that's a triple-negative!", shouted the nerdy-looking young fellow. Just then, a pig-skinned covered ball sailed through the air, breaking the glasses of the poor, grammatically-correct soul.

Re:triple negative

[bersl2]

That cannot be what he meant to say. It contradicts what was said in the summary.

Of course, maybe if I just RTFA...

Re:triple negative

[donnz]

The golden rule -

In English a double negative makes a positive. This is not the case in all languages.

However, there is no language in which a double positive makes a negative.

YEAH, RIGHT....

Re:triple negative

[mjm1231]

It hasn't even always been the case in English.

I'm not sure when the change occurred (I'm thinking around Shakespeare's time) but I know in Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) double (and triple, quadruple, etc.) negatives are used for emphasis. For example, "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde" (He never yet no rudeness not said).

This usage has not disappeared entirely. Is anyone confused by the double negative in "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more"?

It's pretty obvious language does "not not never" follow the rules of math. Try applying commutative or associative principles to grammar!

(P.S.- there's a preposition missing from your question.)

Young

[agm]

Is it just me or is the world of developers getting younger? No offense to Nat but it looks like he'd have trouble getting into an R16 movie.

Re:Young

[LordK3nn3th]

That's exactly what I noticed. I tried to post something similar but the database was being maintained...

Re:Young

[gbulmash]

Think about it, if God just showed up one afternoon, made a 30 second speech, this shit would be all over.

Maybe he has and nobody listened.

Even if he gave a worldwide broadcast you couldn't ignore, anyone who disagreed with what he said would argue that it wasn't really God. It was a trick by Satan or the Jews or the Freemasons or the guys who faked the moon landing. And they'll say it was done to push an agenda that all "true believers" cannot, in good conscience, support. Thus the battles will rage on.

There are a gazillion chatrooms and bulletin boards expressly for debate and discussion of religious topics. The reason you get modded down is because when you debate religion here, you're like a smoker in an elevator. There are places to smoke and there are places for arguing religion. If I want to do either, I'll go to those places.

Until such time as I go to those places, I'll thank you not to inflict upon me either your second-hand smoke or your second-hand philosophy.

Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on any

[zymurgyboy]

Friedman: The No. 1 misconception is that usability is a major barrier to adoption and that's not true. It used to be. There was a study done recently with a group of 20 users who had never used a computer before. Ten were put at a Windows PC, 10 at a Linux PC and they were given a list of simple tasks like sending an e-mail, surfing to a Web page and the usability results were pretty much the same.

Yes! This is so true. A lot of users I've had to support over the years have trouble doing the very basic tasks Mr. Friedman describes. Why would it make any difference which desktop OS they get minimal training on to do these tasks with?

If serious inroads are ever made in the US the argument for staying with Windows for compatibilty with clients or customers would fade pretty quick, weather this happens with Linux- or OS X- or whatever-on-the-desktop.

Even more likely to take off if more people start using Apple's at home. They're less afraid of this when things they make with their computer are as useful at work as they are in their livingrooms.

No mention of Mono

[GnuVince]

He doesn't talk about how Fortune 1000 see the Mono initiative, that would be interesting.

Ximian Bails Out

[geomon]

"A day doesn't go by when I don't talk to a Fortune 1000 customer..."

Not *exactly* true.

We had Nat scheduled to show up and he blew us off. I was left standing in a conference room for nearly 1/2 hour telling participants that I was sorry that Ximian bailed on us.

I had to apologize for their no-show. Not a great feeling.

Guess a national laboratory isn't the market segment Ximian was interested in.

Re:Ximian Bails Out

[miguel]

I remember that particular case, because I had the
marketing people calling me on the office.

What happened is that someone had scheduled Nat
without letting Nat or his assistant know about
this particular trip, someone forgot to follow
up and Nat was in Boston when that happened.

Miguel.

Re:Ximian Bails Out

[geomon]

"What happened is that someone had scheduled Nat
without letting Nat or his assistant know about
this particular trip,..."

That "someone" was your Northwest Territory Sales Manager.

We worked on a meeting schedule for nearly two months. They bailed *at the last minute*.

"...someone forgot to follow
up and Nat was in Boston when that happened."

Someone forgot to call the customer and let them know Nat wasn't coming. I ended up calling your Northwest Territory Sales Manager when they failed to confirm their arrival the day of the meeting.

Get this: I had to call YOUR company to confirm the meeting.

Your recollection of the events is way off. I have the entire email catalog of the event if you need specifics.

Tip #2 to successful sales: Do not blame poor planning for missed opportunities. Own up to your mistakes and attempt to make it up to the client.

Re:Ximian Bails Out

[geomon]

Just out of curiosity, which national lab? Also, what date was this suppose to take place?

Pacific Northwest National Lab, July 10th, 2003.

Re:Ximian Bails Out

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Sounds like the gnome groupware calender app still has some bugs to work out.

The BIG Migration is coming...soon.

[qualico]

"We're developing a Windows migration program to make it easier to move to the Linux desktop with training and documentation and migration tools that automate tasks"

Migration Tool #1: fdisk - delete Windowz partition.

Sinicism aside, it would expedite things if Linux had an emulation package that supported a greater number of Windowz appz. Wine and Win4Lin just don't seem to cut it.

Novell is being very smart by aligning its business model with Linux.
Although, I hope they don't UnixWare it to SCO this time.

Time for some of the major apps to start porting over.

Adobe and Macromedia Petition for Linux
http://www.petitiononline.com/adMaLin/petit ion-sig n.html
(Take out the space after the dash, Slashdot has a bug sometimes in "Plain Old Text" posting of html items that wrap)

I'm *not* much of an Adobe fan though.
They make bad software IMO, save for the satisfactory Photoshop CS.

Macromedia is good but could be better.
They are supposedly going to begin testing on Linux.
http://news.com.com/2100-7344-5170061.html

Starry Night Pro would be great on Linux.
At least there are some good freebies for now like KStars.

Applications may start to take the Web route also.
Accounting for example.
I'd love to pair up with some geeks on here to start up a company to develop a full web based accounting system in LAMP, seriously lacking in the Linux community.

Also, hardware vendors are going to have to jump on the bandwagon in bigger numbers.
Otherwise, we are going to have to wait for all those legacy scanners, printers cameras and other accessories to expire before typical users take the plunge.

So that just leaves games.
Well DirectX is not something I see on Linux in the near future.
Regardless, businesses thinking to migrate won't shed a tear because Barbie Pet Rescue can't be installed.

In summary, the big migration is coming.
The challenge will be converting those tight ass business folk clinging to win 3.11/95/98/ME because they don't want to move forward or rub two nickels together.
Same problem that plagues Micro$oft to this day.

Re:The BIG Migration is coming...soon.

[ratsnapple tea]

It's spelled "Microsoft." HTH.

Re:The BIG Migration is coming...soon.

[flacco]

Applications may start to take the Web route also. Accounting for example. I'd love to pair up with some geeks on here to start up a company to develop a full web based accounting system in LAMP, seriously lacking in the Linux community.

it's written in perl, but - have a look at sql-ledger... i think a consulting crew who customized SQL-Ledger for businesses could make some bucks. you could partner with general-practice linux consulting companies who need a subcontractor to take care of their clients' accounting migration needs. you could even offer hosted accounting.

Re:The BIG Migration is coming...soon.

[bgog]

Well DirectX is not something I see on Linux in the near future.

While not perfect, WineX is basically DirectX for Linux. You can run several hundred recent windows games on linux.

Re:The BIG Migration is coming...soon.

[dbIII]

Sinicism aside, it would expedite things if Linux had an emulation package that supported a greater number of Windowz appz. Wine and Win4Lin just don't seem to cut it

The problem is, if you just go halfway there you may never get any furthur. People will be confused by the little changes as well anyway, and if you are going to have a linux desktop that behaves exactly like windows you may as well be using windows. There are more advantages than just cost.

Otherwise, we are going to have to wait for all those legacy scanners, printers cameras and other accessories to expire before typical users take the plunge.

Hardware is getting more and more standardised now, there's a lot of cameras out there now that pretend to be a USB drive when you plug them in.

The challenge will be converting those tight ass business folk clinging to win 3.11/95/98/ME

No challenge there - the hardware is not fit to run XP and a lot of the software packages they use would be more likely to run in Win4lin with Win98 than XP anyway - the compatablity settings don't handle a lot of win95 era software. There's a lot of people out there that depend on old crappy software that will not run on anything newer than 98SE.

Re:The BIG Migration is coming...soon.

[qualico]

Dam!

That is EXACTLY what I was searching for.
AND its in my hometown Edmonton.

I've searched for many hours to find what you just gave me in seconds!

SWEET!!!

Not that its any great honor, but your on my friend list. THANKS!

Re:The BIG Migration is coming...soon.

[qualico]

Was not aware of that. Thanks!

Dam the things you learn here on Slashdot.
www.transgaming.com

http://downloads.transgaming.com/files/winex-3.3 .1 _releasenotes.txt
(There's a space in the link after the "1", until Slashdot fixes the "Plain Text" bug)

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthre ad .php?s=&forumid=2&threadid=165294
(Remove space after "showthread")

Re:The BIG Migration is coming...soon.

[qualico]

I agree we don't want Linux turning into Windows.
Hence the emulation is a good compromise.
Just wish it was a better emulator.

Good point on the fact that XP won't run on that older hardware. Although, Mandrake 10 with KDE is better than XP on resources, I still have to question just how well it would run on those boxes. Hmmmm...time to do some testing.

If it runs well with Win4lin, then your right, its an easy sell.

Re:The BIG Migration is coming...soon.

[flacco]

That is EXACTLY what I was searching for

glad to help :-)

I want to dip my feet into linux too..

[nmoog]

..or others that are not looking at dipping their feet into the Linux desktop

I understand their feelings. If I can't get python running on my slackware machine by this afternoon, I am going to dip my foot so hard into the linux desktop it's going to wish Linus never invented it...

Re:I want to dip my feet into linux too..

[PoesRaven]

just install swaret (swaret.org) swaret --update swaret --install python

Re:huh?

[zymurgyboy]

They're trying to use the Linux desktop with their feet??? Maybe that's why it's not working for anyone yet.

What will it take?

[brutus_007]

"A day doesn't go by when I don't talk to a Fortune 1000 customer from the financial services market, automotives or others that are not looking at dipping their feet into the Linux desktop." With all the tools, utilities and applications currently available, why isn't Linux on the desktop happening already, or why aren't they jumping in rather than just "dipping their feet"? Is there something missing? Do we need THE killer app to be created which would run solely on Linux (which would basically require it to be closed source to stay on top, and difficult/involved enough to duplicate it on Windows to wait around for a port/clone)? Is it perhaps that larger companies are contractually obligated to fulfill order quotas for equipment or application licenses (MS Licensing v6 anyone?) that breaching the contract would be too financially devastating to make a conversion worthwhile or financially sound?

Re:What will it take?

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

Why should the head of a large corporation, which is not in the computer industry, get up and change all their computer systems from an OS that seems adequate that has the backing of another major corporation to some OS that is unknown to its employees and unfamiliar to them? I think that most of the reason that Linux hasn't gained widespread acceptance is inertia. Until the "killer apps" leave microsoft and come to Linux, progress will continue to be slow.

Re:What will it take?

[Frit Mock]

Hm ... there is a very old rule with IT ...

1. Never change a running system!
2. ???
3. Profit

Can desktop linux ever be sold?

[LostCluster]

One of the key problems that "desktop Linux" seems to be facing is that it's hard to make money as a distro maker. Unless you build your distro to be tied to your mothership for patches, what other models are there?

- Pay-per-seat? No way, the GPL lets you get undercut by "Free" if you do that.
- Pay-for-support? Double edged sword. Means your user interface has to suck, otherwise they'll keep using it without the needing to pay for the contract.
- Selling-add-ons? That's a risky play, not likely to cash-in.

And without the money... just where is the business-friendly distro going to come from? GPL projects have a bad habit of going programmer-friendly instead of user-friendly when left unpaid...

Re:Can desktop linux ever be sold?

[killjoe]

Novell is unique in that they have excellent add ons. Groupwise and edirectory are peerless in linux.

They can sell you a desktop system with full groupware capability and centralized management. I don't think anybody else (not even IBM) can do that.

Re:Can desktop linux ever be sold?

[_Sprocket_]

One of the key problems that "desktop Linux" seems to be facing is that it's hard to make money as a distro maker. Unless you build your distro to be tied to your mothership for patches, what other models are there?

Oddly enough, you seem to be describing the exact same methods and challenges facing proprietary software. Let's compare....

- Pay-per-seat? No way, the GPL lets you get undercut by "Free" if you do that.

Some elements of proprietary software certainly uses "per-seat" licensing. Niche software producers will certainly see per-seat licensing as its main income. However, those who sell OS' tend to play fast and loose with the value of a seat. Microsoft sells boxes - but the big deals are Enterprise and OEM licenses. Apple sells upgrades but OSX is really more about pushing their hardware. And, of course, companies like IBM and Sun use their OS as a hook to sell hardware.

The per-seat license is certainly common enough in proprietary software. But when it comes to a desktop OS, it isn't the money-maker it might appear to be.

- Pay-for-support? Double edged sword. Means your user interface has to suck, otherwise they'll keep using it without the needing to pay for the contract.

I'm amazed that you discount this so quickly. Every piece of hardware and software I've ever deployed in an enterprise involves support. In some cases, we accept a greater level of support ourselves. However, even as we pick out the most promising technology, anything with a commercial backer has some kind of support attached to the purchase order. Even when it's easy to use.

Microsoft does a fairly brisk business in support contracts. And, of course, the basis of IBM's Linux interest is that they make their money pushing hardware and, to a major extent, selling service.

Another point that you discounted early was the "tied to your mothership for patches" model. That is another support model. Enter RedHat. They aren't selling software, they're selling support. You can get all their software without a fee. However, you will either have to find your own sources for RPM updates or build your own.

- Selling-add-ons? That's a risky play, not likely to cash-in.

Yes, this is a risky model. But it is also very common with proprietary software. There are plenty of products that offer a base at a very reasonable rate, or even without a fee, and additional functionality that can be purchased through modules, other products, etc.

Sure - your overall message is spot on. But it can be applied to any business in the IT industry. It is not all that unique to Linux vendors.

Re:Can desktop linux ever be sold?

[stor]

I'm amazed that you discount this so quickly. Every piece of hardware and software I've ever deployed in an enterprise involves support. In some cases, we accept a greater level of support ourselves. However, even as we pick out the most promising technology, anything with a commercial backer has some kind of support attached to the purchase order. Even when it's easy to use.

I couldn't agree more. Most corporate clients require support, no matter how great your software and interfaces are.

There are still plenty of people for whom a computer is not their primary tool. They need support. We give them that and charge for it. They accept this charge without any hassles because we help them and they appreciate it (yeah no kidding!). OK some don't but there are always the outliers ;) You'll also find that some of your most problematic customers are your largest appraisers: they'll rant on to their friends and business-colleagues about the excellent support you gave.

Sometimes (often? all the time?) the service is more important than the product.

Cheers
Stor

Re:Can desktop linux ever be sold?

[div_2n]

In the enterprise, support is not a hard sell even for rock solid products. Managers that know little or nothing about how each product actually works want to know that there is someone they can call in the event of a complete disaster.

Think a scenario where the entire IT staff was on their way to lunch in a few cars on a bridge that collapsed. The next day, all systems suffered a failure.

Re:Triple negative?

[Anonymous Coward]

You best not don't complan about sthe spalling, grammer and what not here at ./ It always never helps and you usualy don't not get modded in the non negative way which isn't never bad so to speak.

Weeee!

[illumen]

Has massive money from microsoft corrupted certain individuals to pervert a certain OS?

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[QuantumG]

This just shows that Microsoft Windows and Linux .* are as unusable as each other. Put a Mac into the mix and you'll see a dramatic different in usability.

Re:Linux will take-off...

[LostCluster]

... as soon as it is as "easy" and "intuitive" to use as Windows.

Not just use, but also administer. Point-and-click network software deployment is a must at even a relatively small company. Roaming user profiles controled by logons is also something that Windows does well but Linux doesn't do out of the box.

When it comes down to it, Linux has great low-level admin tools, but there doesn't seem to be much out in the "business network management" class.

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[zymurgyboy]

Maybe. The type of luser I was describing would be just as lost in front of a Mac as anything else. Although "Mail" for an app name makes e-mail boneless enough for them even. Simplicity has it's advantages, for certain.

You know what this means, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is going to be The year of the linux desktop!

Re:You know what this means, right?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

If anyone can make this happen it is Novell. They understand the corporate market better than anyone and can deliver corporate desktop solutions that work and have a name that people trust.

Re:You know what this means, right?

[justins]

If anyone can make this happen it is Novell. They understand the corporate market better than anyone

Right. That's why they went from totally owning networking to being a niche player in just a few short years.

Re:You know what this means, right?

[jred]

I'm Netware from back in the 3.x days, and I had really gotten discouraged by the direction the company was taking. I'm starting to get excited again, and I'm glad it's Novell. They've made a lot of mistakes in the past, hopefully they've learned their lessons. I think it's *good* they're just now starting to take some action. I think there's been a lot going on behind the scenes, and they've just been taking it slow to make sure they do it right & don't blow it.

Re:You know what this means, right?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

No they got screwed by MS. Novell put together some great systems on top of MS, but MS eroded their value by making it difficult for Novell technically as well as by releasing competitive product at lower costs etc.

Nobody else in Linuxland has the experience in corporate desktop system deployment that Novell has. Providing a full corporate service is more than just technology.

Re:You know what this means, right?

[justins]

I guess so long as nobody tries to compete with them, er, screw them, they are in good shape. :/

Fortune 500 TRIES anything, uses a few

[MrChuck]

I work at a Fortune 500 corporation.

They have some Linux around. Little utility type functions.

At a company > 10,000 people, there is a difference between "interested" & "using" and in "we are using it for critical systems and rely on it and recommend it and tell our partners to use it."

But then, lots of large fortune 100 wall st companies have had "the future" of desktop unix years ago. They just forget the part where I could fix problems around the world without moving my chair. When admins cost more, but you needed half as many.

Re:Fortune 500 TRIES anything, uses a few

[bgog]

You dolt. It's about 1000 times easier to fix problems around the world with linux than it is with windows.

I'll even admit that there are reasons linux isn't ready for the corporate desktop but remote managability is NOT one of the those reasons.

Re:Fortune 500 TRIES anything, uses a few

[Doppleganger]

Uh.. yeah, that's what he said. Why'd you call him a dolt if you agree with him?

Re:Fortune 500 TRIES anything, uses a few

[bgog]

I retract. My appologies. When I read it the first time, it sure sounded like he was claiming that windows was easier to administer.

I abvoisly need more coffee.

Re:Fortune 500 TRIES anything, uses a few

[MrChuck]

Or more sleep.

In my defense (do I need a defense?), I put NeXTs on the desks of sales/marketing weenies (cause they could figure out that their HOME directory was at the little house) and my REAL users (developers) got the festival of HPUX, SGI, Sun3 & Sparcs and a fat wad of XTerminals. 14 unixes, 60 computers. 1 DOS box (it ran voicemail). Later job was 300 desktops, 4 admins (two early, two late).

20 working computers. No windows computers. (CP/M though. Unhappily, no S100 computers. THAT was the apex of computing).

Now that said, maintaining 400 Linux boxes (or Macs or any laptops) is a bitch. Us crankly old guys still have tricks for "deploy this app to 400 machines" or "change the root password in the /etc/passwd file of all machines, except where it's a machine owned by THIS group."

1 at a time is never an acceptable way to run machines. Windows, *nix, VMS.

Re:No thanks

[flacco]

We had Nat scheduled to show up and he blew us off.

based on his picture, i'd guess your meeting was scheduled past his beddy-bye sleepy-time.

Linux needs name brands.

[huchida]

Linux can and should be known as the web developer's platform, in the same way Apple is known for video, publishing, and graphic design.

Adobe's probably a lost cause, but Macromedia would do well to port its projects over. Dreamweaver, Flash, Freehand, Fireworks...

Re:Linux needs name brands.

[PopCulture]

so you can run visual studio.net on it right? what about MS frontpage? Interdev? what about windows media player format movies? Linux can support Perl, Java, scripting languages... but so can Microsoft.

Microsoft OWNS web development. Sure, apache has the market share on servers, but the development platform for the www is microsoft. You can target your deployment environment and deal with deployment as you feel like it. With Linux, out of the box you are limited.

Re:Linux needs name brands.

[cranos]

Im sorry but FRONTPAGE? That putrid pile of pustulent Lepper shit?

Visual Studio.net is an all purpose IDE, WMV files can easily be generated on Linux(mencoder does it quite well) and Perl and PHP, two of the best web languages are native to Linux as opposed to having to be ported to the MS platform.

Web Development is one area where MS doesn't own the whole barrel. Many developers I know prefer to use a text editor such as Vi or Emacs over the crud that gets put out by the WYSIWIG systems.

Re:Linux needs name brands.

[Master of Transhuman]

> Microsoft OWNS web development

Oh, so that's why Opera crashes a lot.

Thanks, I didn't know.

Owns web development, my ass.

Owns web development by morons, yeah, I'll give you that one, you can have it, have a nice day.

Re:Linux needs name brands.

[JimDabell]

Linux can and should be known as the web developer's platform

That isn't going to happen. Most people use Internet Explorer to surf the web. Internet Explorer contains crucial, website-destroying bugs. Professional web developers need to test in Internet Explorer. Things like WINE by their very nature cannot be used for testing purposes (found a bug? Is it a bug in Internet Explorer, or a bug in WINE?). Virtual machines like VMWare are the only practical solution for web developers who want to use Linux, and as far as I am aware, plex86 and bochs aren't ready for the end-user (and still require Windows!).

X works just fine thank you

[codepunk]

I dont seem to be having much in the way of bandwidth problems running 150 desktops off of a single server. It takes about 150 k sustained bandwidth to suppor that. Now come back when you know what you are talking about.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[buttahead]

I'd like to see some examples of the use on those 150 desktops. In my experience 10kbps is not enough to have a smooth desktop experience. I'd alos like to see the latency you have. Say, at 200ms mozilla takes about 1 minute or more to load, and vnc is just barly usable.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[abigor]

Really? Try running an X app over dial-up, or even DSL. MS's RDP can do it, and do it well. How come X can't? Because X is bandwidth hungry. For a LAN it's okay, I guess. Add to this the other problems the grandparent post mentions, and you'll quickly realise its time has come.

If there are other ways to do the same job better, shouldn't they be explored? Assuming that X is some perfect protocol is just stupid.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[codepunk]

No for dialup and dsl users you pay yes I said pay for a copy of nomachine (go look it up) it makes x efficient even across a modem.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[harikiri]

I agree with the post above. My mum has recently started work as a regional manager of a company based in the US, working from a home office. How does she access her corporate email? Via MS remote desktop.

Due to stupid ISP issues, to get her up and running quickly, we had to get her a pre-paid dialup account. I was seriously worried about whether or not she'd be able to do any work, based on my own experiences running X tunneled over SSH from my work system to my home boxes (and VNC across local networks).

However, I was pleasantly suprised - despite being only on a 33.6k connection, she is able to do all of her correspondence, through outlook, over RDP to a server in the US. Looking back at the latency issues in running X across local networks and over the internet, the Xwindows protocol needs some serious work to be even close to accomplishing the same smoothness.

And all this is coming from a hardened Unix geek like myself. :-P

Re:X works just fine thank you

[codepunk]

Actually I would never deploy straight mozilla we always use firebird for thin client deployments. I cannot say I have been on a even marginal network with 200ms latency. Hell I get better than that off of a cable modem across the internet to nearly any site.

A couple of hints

No screensavers all of them have been removed

No fancy background they have a straight color background to keep refresh rates down.

We currently use kde but are switching to bluecurve because of it's polish.

20 of those clients are wireless and that works
fine as well.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[codepunk]

http://www.nomachine.com/screenshots.php there go check out nx it works better than citrix or terminal server in my opinion.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[codepunk]

And I will give you another hint, use TIGHT VNC works great even over a modem. I know I remote machines in china with it every day.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[idiot900]

In my experience 10kbps is not enough to have a smooth desktop experience.

Of course not. The 150K/s is probably an mean over time of all clients' usage, not a sustained transfer - if it were, Ethernet would been designed to be circuit switched like the PSTN and not packet switched ;) I'd expect any individual client to have spikes of high bandwidth usage separated by long periods of low bandwidth usage, consistent with pointing and clicking. When you combine a bunch of clients, the spikes combine too and even out to the quoted 150K/s.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[buttahead]

Besides the hints, what other apps do you run? How many of those 150 are running real applications, during peak hours, and what kind of response do they have?

200 ms is what I experience during periods of worm attacks/busy virus days from a cable modem. If you have a wide enough network, you are bound to run into these situations. Mainly I'm trying to get away from the 2 ms local network latencies.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[kcbrown]

I dont seem to be having much in the way of bandwidth problems running 150 desktops off of a single server. It takes about 150 k sustained bandwidth to suppor that. Now come back when you know what you are talking about.

Yeah, but the reason you can get away with that is that you almost certainly have a much higher burst rate than just 150k, and even if 150k were your burst rate limit, that's far better than 5k per second, which is what you'll be getting over a modem connection.

X is fine until your client has to send a bunch of pixmaps. Then it gets bandwidth-hungry. Typically this happens during application initialization, so I don't doubt that you're not having trouble with 150k sustained bandwidth. But I'll bet your burst rates peg the interface.

The widget protocol is not intended as a replacement of X -- in fact in the Linux world it would certainly be implemented on top of X. But the bandwidth savings are still there nonetheless.

I've done X over a slow-speed (modem) connection before and while it's not unusable it is slow. Transmitting widget protocol commands would make using a slow-speed modem connection work about as well as X works over a medium-speed (150k/sec or so) connection, because applications would transmit pixmaps only when supplying application-specific graphics. So programs like Photoshop would be slow to load images but would be reasonably fast once the image itself were loaded. The bulk of the graphics traffic that passes between X clients and an X server is composed of UI widget graphics, and that hurts application startup time over a slow link a LOT.

So...come back when you know what you're talking about. :-)

Re:X works just fine thank you

[kcbrown]

No fancy background they have a straight color background to keep refresh rates down.

If you mean that there's no dynamic background, then this makes sense.

If you mean that the background is a single solid color then this might not make as much sense, because you can tell the X server to use backing store for all mapped windows (which I assume applies to the root window as well).

How well that'll work for you depends on how much memory each workstation has (and how much memory the graphics cards have).

You might try experimenting with that option. You might find that it will allow you to be a little less strict in how you manage the operation.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[DrSkwid]

If you really want a network OS why not use one

Re:X works just fine thank you

[Khelder]

I agree that the networking demands of X are often overblown, but I don't understand what you mean by running 150 desktops off a single server. The X server is what runs on the desktop machine; it's what draws the graphics and gets the raw keyboard & mouse events. Do you mean you have 150 desktops running X servers that all use a single server box to run applications (i.e., X clients) on?

(Yeah, the X terminology can be confusing since in X-speak the server runs on the desktop, not in the back room, but we're stuck with it.)

Re:X works just fine thank you

[codepunk]

It can do both a single app or the entire desktop and it is a reasonable price.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[Edulix]

Hey harikiri, I've got a solution for your X problems: NoMachine/NX. You can see their details in their webpage where they explain them very well.

A story about it have already been posted in Slashdot and I've tried it myself with their testdrive, where they allow you to connect to a test NX server.

The core of the app is open source and you can use it freely, but their helper apps are closed source. But this is a problem being solved just now, because KDE is going to ship NX server and client support in the near future. In fact, it seems that they closed their config helper apps because it was a need for them, but they want to develop open source software.

PD: I apologise my bad english.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[MemoryDragon]

Dont get this into the wrong throat, NoMachine is an excellent solution, but compared to RDP on Windows it still is not as good. The problem is really in the X protocol itself which needs a serious overhaul. The basic idea is excellent and much better than what Windows does (windows basically streams the desktop with additional meta data for controls to reduce overhead) Mx does basically the same. The problem in X is the protocol which is to low level and to much reliant on low latency. NoMachine MX reduces those problems to a certain degree but the problem still is that it basically just cures symptoms not the cause. Maybe one day Cairo will solve those problems.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[bhsx]

ltsp.org
Linux Terminal Server Project.
It's pretty well-known, and very useful. Look into it.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[dublin]

Besides the hints, what other apps do you run? How many of those 150 are running real applications, during peak hours, and what kind of response do they have?

200 ms is what I experience during periods of worm attacks/busy virus days from a cable modem. If you have a wide enough network, you are bound to run into these situations. Mainly I'm trying to get away from the 2 ms local network latencies.

You can definitely run *real* application across X if you build your network properly. More than a decade ago, I built an early switched network based on the original Kalpana Etherswitch to do exactly that in Chevron's Houston and New Orleans Data Centers. The applications were primarily heavy-duty seismic processing and visualization - definitely prime time, fast-response-required applications. The data was obviously too big to move or access effectively via NFS at 10 Mb/s, but what worked just fine was to log into the server that happened to have a local copy of the data you wanted to work with, run the application there, and X the display back to whatever workstation or X terminal you were on. This setup supported very serious work (in a very usable manner) for several hundred users, many of whom were using NCD or Tektronix X terminals as their local devices.

Given the improvements of the past ten years in CPUs, graphics engines, one or two orders of improvement in network speed (depending on your budget, 100 or Gig - but 10 Mb was as fast as it got back then), and Ethernet switches (that's how you minimize latency!) that cost only a few dollars per port, anyone who says you can't do real work over X quite simply has their head up and locked, or is proving their incompetence at both network and system configuration.

In reality, about the only thing you can't really do over X is multimedia, but that's just because the X consortium as well as the XFree folks view X as finished, so it has stagnated over the past several years. Too bad - X is far from ideal, but it does have a lot going for it, and it can be easily hidden from the user well enough now that it's no longer really painful. In the real world, few people really need to watch movies on their computers - for general business use, all the apps will run just fine over X. In spite of its usefulness, X is really the Achilles heel of Linux right now, since it's effectively fossilized with no real heir apparent.

BTW: I've done several studies on real TCO for various employers and clients over the past 15 years, and the X-based solution *always* turns out to be the cheapest both to buy and to administer on an ongoing basis. That result is consistent even when the employer or client really wanted another result - the advantage of X-based systems is so compelling that nothing else can really compete. Terminal services could be a contender if MS didn't force you to buy an XP user license for each remote user - that pretty much destroys any economic incentive to eliminate end-user PCs in favor of terminal devices... ;-)

What is so strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

...about Miguel and Nat dancing with a MS CTO? Aren't they MS employees?

Huh?

[soundsop]

A day doesn't go by when I don't talk to a Fortune 1000 customer ... that are not looking at dipping their feet into the Linux desktop.

If only I didn't have a nickel for every time someone didn't tell me the exact same thing, then I would definitely never be not rich, no?

Why the interest?

[bladernr]

Nat Friedman on the increasing interest about the Linux desktop.

In a vacum, this is not impressive. Is the interest in Desktop Linux due to quality of the platform, available technologies, developer friendly environment, ease of integration, or is it simply based on cost.

If its simply cost then, well, where is the pride in that? As a true propeller-head, I find winning on price, well, cheap.

Re:Why the interest?

[LordK3nn3th]

Well, the cost-quality ratio is an important factor.

Linux is low-cost and high-quality.

Re:National lab?

[geomon]

Nat is always very interested in National labs.

Then I guess he's going to have a hard sell to make. After pulling a no-show with nearly 100 participants planned (most of whom are in a position to make purchasing decisions), we are certainly going to be taking any claims regarding customer service with a sizable grain of salt.

Had we given Microsoft's representative a similar opportunity, they would have crawled over broken glass with a killer fever to make the meeting.

Determination to meet the client on their terms and on their time is what makes a sale. Having a superior technology with crappy customer service will not make it.

Re:Linux will take-off...

[imroy]

... as soon as it is as "easy" and "intuitive" to use as Windows.

It's appropriate that you put quote marks around "easy" and "intuitive" because Windows really isn't as easy or intuitive as most people think. It's just that most people haven't used (or even know of) anything else. If anyone has problems, they can usually find someone else that can help them with Windows or can at least sympathize with them (most computer-illiterates will blame themselves rather than MS or Windows). Then you have the business types that reason Microsoft must make better software than everyone else simply because they make the most money.

The nipple is intuitive, everything else is learned

Re:Linux will take-off...

[dj245]

. as soon as it is as "easy" and "intuitive" to use as Windows.

"easy" and "intuitive" is basically a measure of how closely something fits expected behavior. When I buy a car, the volume control better turn anticlockwise for "up", if it is to be consistent with expected behavior. There is not, however, something in human DNA that makes people think that turning a knob clockwise will result in more volume and turning anticlockwise will result in less volume. Most home stereos, in fact are completely opposite. But in a car, it is expected to turn them clockwise, and at home, it is expected to turn them anticlockwise for more volume. That is consistent with expected behavior. There is no intuitive.

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[Jason Earl]

If anything this just goes to show how much the average consumer cares about usability. Most consumers don't really care how usable their software is. Usability and $0.50 will get you a Snickers bar. Don't get me wrong. I think that Apple really does have the edge when it comes to making usable systems. Especially if you don't have to share documents and files with Windows users. However, when push comes to shove, consumers want "usable enough" at the lowest price, and that's not Apple.

Re:Linux will take-off...

[PretzelBat]

Linux will most likely NEVER be as easy to use as Windows for a couple of reasons:

1) As a reader earlier pointed out, without sufficient driving economic incentive, OSS is likely to remain far more programmer-friendly than user-friendly. I can tell you that even as a fairly adept Windows user, compiling software (and my own kernel!) and spending hours on googly trying to figure out which config file to edit (and the exact syntax to insert) is not exactly a cup of tea. These are tasks programmers (and evidently all *nix users) are familiar with. I felt completely lost. Nevertheless, these "features" of Linux are a direct result of its OSS origin.

2) Security. As the system becomes more user-friendly, it must necessarily reduce the number of configuration options a user must deal with. Further, the options it sets must be those that allow all expected functionallity without tweaking. Yes, it is best to have a firewall installed (either hardware or software or both), but it is a pain in the butt for your average home user, and most people aren't willing to deal with it. Yes, it is better to refuse almost all cookies. No, it is not easy or user-friendly to do so, because people want web sites to work without any hassle.

Although it is improving in many ways, I just don't see Linux heading in the direction of one-size fits all and works for everyone without hassle. It would require too many comprimises of the very reasons Linux users use Linux (with the obvious exception of the damage it would do to MS, which seems to be the passion of many here.)

This is NOT a knock on Linux. I think its a great OS--I just don't see it gaining the mainstream acceptance people keep talking about without becoming significantly--and uncomfortablly--more like Microsoft Windows (in a bad way).

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten were put at a Windows PC, 10 at a Linux PC and they were given a list of simple tasks like sending an e-mail, surfing to a Web page and the usability results were pretty much the same.

That doesn't make any sense at all! Sending email and surfing a web page are tasks one does through an application. You don't send an email using Windows or Linux, you send it using Outlook, Mozilla, Eudora, etc. Whoever tries to judge the usability of an entire OS by throwing around test results for unnamed applications is a total moron.

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[QuantumG]

Windows users pull their hair out. Many of them say "damn it, this is just too hard" and go buy a Mac. Many Windows users say "good riddance".

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[zymurgyboy]

It will happen with OS X before it will ever happen with Linux. Why? People who know nothing know what Apple is all about. Dependable, useable, pretty.

Linux has something of an image problem to overcome. Not to say Linux can't be made to be all of these things as well, but it doens't seem that it has this perception about it with anyone I've ever talked to with anti-Linux on the desktop leanings.

Software offerings for certain niche markets are still one of the biggest shortcoming for OS X. Windows software has a lock on the litigation support market, for instance. Why doesn't anyone develop apps for OS X or Linux for a market like this? I'd try 'em if they existed and competed with Windows equivalents, but nothing even attempts to compete. There are a lot of small but high-margin markets waiting for software to be developed such as this. Where's the software?

And no, I'm not writing my own.

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that he's talking about corporate users, and the usual debate on slashdot is about home users (configuring printers, installing programs etc).

"Usability" in the corporate world is defined more on the application level -- how easy is it to access/create/share corporate information. (These are people who got along using Windows 3.1, because it allowed them to run MS Office/Lotus Notes/Netscape/etc.)

There's all too much Start Menu debate on slashdot -- for business desktops, it doesn't really matter. Having StarOffice come up short against MS Office is a far bigger issue.

He sure looks young

[spiritraveller]

Nat Friedman: Part of that question is about our expectations around the next 12 months. Linux on the desktop is in an early, very early stage. I've lived in this world for six or seven years . . .

Yeah, that sounds about right.

No ...

[boarder8925]

And by the way, both Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza's April 12th blog entry have a picture of Miguel and Nat dancing with David Vaskevitch, CTO of Microsoft. Now that's something you don't get to see everyday!

No, it's something I don't want to see every day!

I take that back. It's something I don't want to see at all!

Re:Another osnews.com story

[mabinogi]

Slashdot does not publish news. It links to news on other sites.

By _definition_ this means that someone else has to have already carried it.

And due to the sheer volume of crap that people submit, it's likely to have been on a number of news sites before Slashdot figures that enough people have submitted it for it to be something people are interested in.

Making a company standard desktop

[dbIII]

In a lot of well set up places you have desktops set up to follow guidelines - like everyone has a dozen different icons that launch ssh on a dozen different machines, then the icon to mozilla next to that etc. One place desktops like gnome and KDE could be improved is if there was a simple way to copy the configuration of one user on one machine to another user on another machine. For instance on gnome, if you copy the files over you don't get anything useful, and the documentaion the subject is dismal. The assumption that each user will customise their desktop doesn't hold - they expect something usable the first time they sit in front of their screen. Being able to take the environment the another user with the same tasks has tweaked over months would be a huge advantage. Fvwm could be treated that way, but gnome has weird uncommented configuration files named after the three stooges (look if you don't believe me). Gnome may be intent on replacing the look and feel of MS Windows, but heading towards something as arcane and tempremental as the MS Windows registry is going too far.

Re:Making a company standard desktop

[Master of Transhuman]

While I haven't done it, based on what I do know about Linux, this would be a nearly trivial task for any decent sys admin.

Ever hear of g4u (it means "Ghost 4 Linux")?

Re:Making a company standard desktop

[dbIII]

While I haven't done it, based on what I do know about Linux, this would be a nearly trivial task for any decent sys admin.

As I said above, copying the configuration files does not work - there is some weird thing going on with where it generates unique configuration file names.

Ever hear of g4u (it means "Ghost 4 Linux")?

That or dd will not work if the gnome configuration relys on some odd system of non-portable unique configuration file names.

Re:Making a company standard desktop

[Mimir]

As I said above, copying the configuration files does not work - there is some weird thing going on with where it generates unique configuration file names.

Yes, it works. But you don't "copy files" from one machine to another in a corporate setting -- that is home user thinking. You give users home directories on a central server and mount it from there. In a standard unix configuration it wouldn't matter much which machine you logged into. All settings and configuration files are stored in your home directory.

Re:Making a company standard desktop

[dbIII]

Yes, it works.

I suspect you misunderstand me, or don't know anything at all about the gnome panel, but I really would like to be proved wrong, I really would like to see it work.

The configuration of the gnome panel is such that it appears to generate unique filenames per user which prevents copying the configation from one user to another.

You give users home directories on a central server and mount it from there.

The article is talking about the graphical desktop environment, for instance gnome or KDE - where the files are doesn't matter, the window manager and panel doesn't care if it gets them over NFS or if it is local, they are just files to it.

If you are going to make the assertion that the gnome panel configuration can be easily exported please back it up with some form of evidence, since there is plenty to the contrary - the whole unix philosopy of having things in simple portable configuration files has been thrown out by people who wish to copy MS windows and do not see that only allowing configuration with GUI tools is a drawback.

Interest or hope?

[LenE]

With ever increasing Windows problems, it may be more of a hope for Linux Desktops to finally be useable enough for enterprise users, rather than genuine interest. How many non-geeks even know what the various linux desktop systems are, besides not Windows. Linux geeks know that Linux is the kernel, and nothing more, so what desktop is the Linux Desktop?

Today's Linux desktops fall over themselves trying to act similar to Windows, while having the unfortunate problem of not being even as consistent as Windows. This problem is rooted in the whole X11+Gnome+GTK+KDE+Qt+Ximian+Lestif+kitchen sink quagmire that is required to supply the pieces of this quite disjointed user experience.

In my not so humble opinion, the interest for the Linux desktop is the hope of Microsoft liberation, without scrapping existing hardware. This is quite silly, as the cost of the disruption in retraining all of the users, will far outweigh the cost of either switching to a useable, coherent UNIX desktop like Mac OS X, or staying on the MS Treadmill. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix here, as the bazaar is not willing to collaborate on a unified, coherent Linux Desktop.

-- Len

Re:Interest or hope?

[codepunk]

Ya ya same ole argument, I can show you some fairly large linux desktop installations and the users are just tripping all over them selves trying to figure it out. Clicking on a desktop icon takes a butt load of training now doesn't it. Hell I even know one city govt running it and the users never even mention a computer it is finally just something they use to get work done. Choice of desktop is the key thing, I made the mistake of deploying kde and we had to go back and change it. We no only user redhat something with a bluecurve desktop since it is the best all around polished.

Re:Interest or hope?

[Master of Transhuman]

Garbage post. Mod seriously down, troll, flamebait, utter drivel.

> what desktop is the Linux Desktop?

The one the IT department installed on your box - the one you get to live with, just like the Windows XP they stuck on before to replace the Windows 2000 they stuck on before to replace the Windows 98 they stuck on before to replace the Windows 3.1 they stuck on before to replace the DOS - or maybe the CP/M - you had when you started working there.

> he cost of the disruption in retraining all of
> the users, will far outweigh the cost of either
> switching to a useable, coherent UNIX desktop
> like Mac OS X, or staying on the MS Treadmill

Bullcrap. The cost of the MS Treadmill is ever increasing. If your organization does the usual stupid incompetent "corporate training", then you might be right - that's not Linux's fault. In fact, however, numerous stories exist of organizations switching to Linux and discovering that it is sufficiently similar to Windows that most of their users pick it up in a few days or weeks with minimal lost productivity.

I just used Open Office for the first time to design a flyer. Since I had a LITTLE Microsoft Office experience, I was able to do the job easily. Any "power user" of Office can handle Open Office the first day. The training bugaboo is horseshit.

As for Mac OS X, there's no way it will evolve as fast as either KDE or GNOME - Apple doesn't have the developers. And it's not going to be any cheaper to retrain someone on the Mac than it is to retrain them on ONE Linux desktop - KDE or GNOME.

Re:Interest or hope?

[AbbyNormal]

Bing! Right on the mark. I've been playing with Linux (hobby) for over four years now, dabbling with Mandrake, various versions of Red Hat,FreeBSD, and Morphix. Why is it that the only flavor of linux that I have found, just to do the Office Basics (Word/Spreadsheets/Email/Web Browse/Chat/IM) came out of a very obscure Morphix package (Light Gui Module). I think if someone where to grab this package, create a very simple install process, add a few simple admin tools for file sharing, and create a VERY VERY easy to use update client, and market the hell out of this as a business ready version, Linux would overtake the desktop in a matter of a year or so. I understand that most distributions don't care what most PHB's think and in most cases, it is not their problem.

In order for Linux to succeed on the desktop, someone will have to make it their problem. Most businesses don't have the time or resources to have to fiddle around with config files, when they add a new hardware device to their system. The old adage still applies to Desktop Linux: "So close, yet so far away".

Re:Interest or hope?

[beforewisdom]

In my not so humble opinion, the interest for the Linux desktop is the hope of Microsoft liberation, without scrapping existing hardware. This is quite silly, as the cost of the disruption in retraining all of the users, will far outweigh the cost of either switching to a useable, coherent UNIX desktop like Mac OS X, or staying on the MS Treadmill. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix here, as the bazaar is not willing to collaborate on a unified, coherent Linux Desktop.

In a lot of arena's you see alternative apps ignored when there is something CLEARLY easier to use and better functioning

The various desktop factions will not unite.

The way to achieve unity in the gnu/linux community's desktop civil war is for a new desktop to be created ( or an existing one seriously beefed up ) that will be SO FAR AHEAD of all of the other choices that most people and distros will lose interest in the other choices.

Easier said then done, I know.

Seems like a job for a company with some money to spend.....like Novell or IBM.

Steve

Re:Interest or hope?

[LenE]

Garbage post. Mod seriously down, troll, flamebait, utter drivel.

Wow! I must have placed a shot too close to the bow to elicit a response like that. I assure you I am not trolling, so it would behoove you to be more introspective of the state of Desktop Linux, than defensive.

I know that the cost of the MS Treadmill is increasing, but that wasn't my point. Also, I know that there are problems in enterprises with upgrading in the MS family, which I've witnessed first hand, time and again. That isn't the point either.

My point was that Linux still is not to the point where it would be as minor of a disruption as upgrading Windows, or Windows programs, within an enterprise. The enterprise is filled with people that have problems with minor disruptions. Geeks, on the other hand, tend to look at software usability differences as a minor challenge to overcome, on the way to some new feature. Normal enterprise workers tend to respond with "Who moved MY cheese!"

My example of Mac OS X was to illustrate that there is already a good, very useable UNIX that is ready for the enterprise desktop. No, it won't "evolve" as fast as KDE or Gnome, but it doesn't need to. It already has a consistent, coherent interface, with an existing MS Office implementation, in existence. Linux, even within single distributions, does not have a consistent or coherent interface. Also, none of the Linux office suites have the necessary capabilities to displace MS Office. Until both of those conditions are satisfied, my assertion stands that this is more hope than general interest.

-- Len

Re:Interest or hope?

[Master of Transhuman]

You still don't get it.

MY point is that ANY disruption - and the disruption in my opinion depends far more on how the corporation does it than on any technical or usability issues - is better than staying on the MS treadmill.

And as for the Mac, while it may indeed be a very good UNIX and suitable for deployment TODAY in corporations, and may even be better than Linux in that regard TODAY, will not evolve as fast Linux in both power and usability and therefore will be a liability to corporations in the future when Linux is superior. And Linux WILL be superior.

In any event, the point is moot. Linux is getting on more desktops than Apple and will continue to do so.

Open Office does indeed have enough capability to displace Microsoft Office. Most of the features of MS Office aren't even used by most users and the ones that do use them probably don't need to.

And again, the "consistent interface problem" is horseshit. If you use one desktop, and you use standard apps, there is little inconsistency. And there is plenty of inconsistency in Windows apps if you look for it. The average corporate user would be completely unaffected by any of this.

The disruption issue is garbage - a red herring. It has nothing whatever to do with Linux usability or any other technical issue. It's a political issue for lame CIOs and Windows trolls. It's "Not Invented Here Syndrome", fear of change, fear of taking responsibility for your actions, nothing more.

Re:Interest or hope?

[dublin]

The way to achieve unity in the gnu/linux community's desktop civil war is for a new desktop to be created ( or an existing one seriously beefed up ) that will be SO FAR AHEAD of all of the other choices that most people and distros will lose interest in the other choices.

Easier said then done, I know.

Seems like a job for a company with some money to spend.....like Novell or IBM.

The very interesting (but dead-on accurate) implication of your assertion is that the bazaar is completely incapable of doing this on its own. I would love to see OSS *really* innovate (in the "SO FAR AHEAD" sense), but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm not holding my breath. Almost all OSS "successes" are copies (sometimes quite superior copies, granted) of existing programs and ideas: GIMP/Photoshop, OpenOffice/MSOffice, Apache/NCSA-HTTPD, Evolution/Outlook, Samba/LanMan(yuk!), Mono/.Net and so on. Revolutionary (as opposed to "evolutionary") developments are distressingly absent in the community.

Re:Interest or hope?

[LenE]

Oh, I assure you that I get it, and to some extent I agree with you that any disruption to the typical user is a problem. We just disagree on the extent to which Linux is up to the task of replacing Windows in the enterprise.

I've dealt with successful implementation of UNIX desktops in the past, with OpenWindows and CDE on Solaris and HP/UX respectively. The key here, was that the users did not have any pre-attachment to Windows or Windows programs. They had what they needed to use, and nothing more. I know that Linux can do the job, but I also know that it can't easily fill a void left by an existing MS windows user's desktop, which is often crammed with non-essentials that users get attached to. Worse yet, there are some essentials (Exchange compatibility) that Linux work-alikes, just aren't good enough to replace yet. An enterprise that is not already MS-centric, will have a much easier time transitioning away than the majority that are stuck in Microsoft's web.

The problem in effect is managing user expectations on what they can and cannot do, and what it takes for them to do what they do. I've had problems moving people from Outlook Express to full Outlook. For the most part, they look and act the same, but they are different enough to cause problems for many users. Switching entirely to another platform, no matter how good it may be, has even more problems.

My father-in-law had a problem when I moved him from MS-Outlook to Mac OS X Mail, because the button for a new e-mail had changed shape, and said "compose" instead of "new". This wasn't just a problem for him, many other users had the same mental block. Apple rectified this problem by going against their own noun-verb guidelines, and changed this back to "new" for Panther.

I know that Linux is finding its way on more x86 desktops than Mac OS X, but that's only because OS X doesn't run on x86. In the larger picture, Mac OS X is the largest installed base of desktop UNIX, period. None of the assorted Linux desktops are growing at the same rate of adoption as Mac OS X, so they still have a lot to do to catch-up mindshare and marketshare wise, to match an arguable also-ran. Again, Linux desktops need to evolve and improve much more than Apple needs to, because Apple is already there.

The consistent interface issue is definitely not horseshit, as you put it. People, in general, have a problem with change, and Linux desktops are a definite change from what they are currently used to. That goes for minor changes between program versions, all the way to platform switches. There isn't any magic bullet here.

-- Len

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[zymurgyboy]

Just as many of them can't when the descision is out of their hands. I wish Apple would get into a niche market besides music management and graphic design.

Until Linux has some credibility in the desktop arena it's hard to wish for that even.

I'll take things you don't see everyday for $100

[kfg]

What is, "You say that like it's a bad thing?"?

KFG

Negatives?

[leonbrooks]

Contrast this with the stencil on the window of Nat's hotel room in Toronto: "Please do not throw objects from the room".

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[zymurgyboy]

Now OS X has good development tools. Why not try again? There are so many other advantages to using it like useability, and even more important, stability.

Trial presentation systems on OS X or Linux. Sounds good to me. In pressure situations where a complicated presentation has to work and not crumble around you while your trying to give, it'd be nice to not worry about your OS flaking on you. Apple and Linux both have rock solid reps there, but Windows is catching up fast. It may already be too late for non-Windows platforms to claim much of an advantage there anymore.

Ewwwww !

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza's April 12th blog entry have a picture of Miguel and Nat dancing with David Vaskevitch, CTO of Microsoft. Now that's something you don't get to see everyday!"

...visions of Caligula danced through my head.

Re:No thanks

[justins]

Hey man, it was a school night!

I guess you've never used Mandrake Linux, then?

[leonbrooks]

Neither my wife nor my SIL know how to mount stuff, wife would be aghast at the thought of having to type unrepresentative mumbo-jumbo into an unresponsive black window (or, heaven help us, a text screen - which she calls "dos"). It Just Works(tm). The coloured bar graph in K3B is a lifesaver when SWMBO is building CDs to go, the raw numbers would only be confusing. As an artist or musician, she excels, but sit her in front of a command prompt and terror reigns supreme.

Re:I guess you've never used Mandrake Linux, then?

[Master of Transhuman]

K3B is a CD burner program.

The other has me stumped, too.

It would be nice - but boring, too - if OSS used some sort of rational, boring, corporate software names instead of hacker handles to name software.

Although not everyone gets "Nero Burning ROM" either, you know.

Re:I guess you've never used Mandrake Linux, then?

[jsprat]

SWMBO is "She Who Must Be Obeyed"

You must not be married ;)

Re:I guess you've never used Mandrake Linux, then?

[spacecowboy420]

Oh! Here in the city it is: BBHMM

For:
Bitch Better Have My Money

It's a joke mods

Re:I guess you've never used Mandrake Linux, then?

[Master of Transhuman]

Ah, yes, I thought it had to be a reference to the wife.

As for being married, oh HELL NO! (At least, in the conventional sense - I view consortship as a superior form of bonding.)

Re:I guess you've never used Mandrake Linux, then?

[dipipanone]

And fewer still are old enough to remember the works of H. Rider Haggard (which is where Rumpole's author, John Mortimer originally appropriated it from.)

Re:I guess you've never used Mandrake Linux, then?

[smittyoneeach]

K3B is also the only application I've seen that can burn a DVD .iso when it's time for the big fat backup.
Others may exist as well, but K3B made the full-day Gentoo compile worth it, and spared me from booting Doze just to do backups.
w00t!

Re:I guess you've never used Mandrake Linux, then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither my wife nor my SIL know how to mount stuff

No offspring, I assume?

Re:I guess you've never used Mandrake Linux, then?

[TilJ]

SWMBO: She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Try lurking on a.s.r. soemtime, it's good for the place where you soul used to be ;-)

(That's an a.s.r. style joke, BTW. Sigh. Nevermind.)

-T

In other breaking news...

[njcoder]

My butcher announced that not a day goes buy that someone doesn't ask him about porter house.

Can someone remind me

[bigberk]

Please remind me, what major benefit does it bring us (the Linux community) if there are big companies involved with Linux? Seems to me we did a pretty good job with hobby programmers and academics for a long time... of course IBM did help, oops but then there's that SCO crap... but what I'm getting at is, why do we need to impress anyone?

Re:Can someone remind me

[da cog]

Two words: network effect. One of the main reasons that most people use Windows is because most people use Windows, since as a result most (Desktop) hardware and software is made for Windows machines, with Linux etc. maybe, maybe supported as an after-thought.

It would be really nice if I could just get rid of the copy of Windows I have on my hard drive, but the fact is that I cannot because there are many programs and some pieces of hardware I have that will only work in Windows. The only way to escape this is for software and hardware makers to have motivation to make sure that Linux is supported, and the only way this will happen is if they will lose significant sales if they do not support Linux.

Thus, the reason we want big companies to support Linux is because it encourages others to make sure that their hardware/software supports Linux, which in turn makes Linux attractive to more people, which in turn gets us better hardware/software support, etc. In other words, maybe we could finally get the network effect working in our favor.

Re:Can someone remind me

[_Sprocket_]

Please remind me, what major benefit does it bring us (the Linux community) if there are big companies involved with Linux?

Today I came home from work and relaxed with a bit of Neverwinter Nights and Enemy Territory. Sometimes I'll play Unreal Tournament 2004 but I cut my goofing-off short. I connected to my work's employee VPN server, downloaded some documents I've been working on, and began hashing out some work that's been sneaking up on me this week. Did some system configuration at work. Uploaded my modifications. Called it a night.

This all from my Linux-only home workstation.

I would not have been able to do all this if there wasn't corporate interest in Linux.

I really agree with this guy

[Stevyn]

His main point being that if an application doesn't exist on linux, a company can't switch over. This guy should get a +5 Insightful.

Please don't mod me down, I'm not being sarcastic

Re:I really agree with this guy

[Master of Transhuman]

This is supposedly a valid point, but in fact it's another red herring.

Very few companies are seriously tied to any piece of software (unless it was developed in house twenty years ago and no one working there today knows how it works.)

If their software supplier goes out of business, where are they? Out of business? Maybe, depending on their cash flow situation, but usually they will simply switch over to a new system. Companies and organizations do that all the time. It can and usually is painful but it can and usually must be done.

The library at City College of San Francisco has been using one vendor for fourteen years - now they're looking to switch because the current vendor can't tie in to the college management information system effectively. Unfortunately, only a couple vendors of integrated library systems can - or so they claim. We'll see how it works out. I told them they should consider open source so they can spend the money they would give a vendor on having someone tweak the product so it can do what they want rather than what the vendor wants.

Any application - no matter how mission critical - can be replaced by an equivalent one. The only question is cost/benefit analysis - and that's only because many companies insist on migrating on a "schedule" (usually because they're in some sort of crisis situation because of past bad decisions) instead of doing so in a controlled, proactive manner.

Betting your company on software created by a third party is risky on the face of it. Open source at least mitigates that risk to some degree by providing source code.

A company needs to look at the "Big Picture" when deciding on whether to migrate from Windows to Linux. And the "Big Picture" says Linux is cheaper in the long run, regardless of whether you have to port some mission-critical apps.

And in many cases, you can just run those Windows apps on Windows machines - and everything else on Linux. Rarely does a company have to run a mission-critical app on every desktop from the CEO and his secretary down to Production.

Dancing with the Enemy

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

That picture of the three doing an impression of a vegas show together gives me the willies. It is just too reminiscent of Daryl coming out and "hangin' wit da boyz" picketing SCO -- that almost a year ago too.

2d effects

[qqqqarl]

as a visual effects developer, i'd like to point out that there are some very nice (better?) effects that can be achieved with 2d effects. eye candy that would make you drool.

check out my burning dialog box movie.

K.

Re:2d effects

[mikec14606]

That was freaking cool.

Taboo on /.

[vwjeff]

I am about to say something that has never been said on /.

(Getting in bunker for fallout)

Linus runs Windows.

On a serious note, the only way that Fortune 1000 companies will adopt Linux on the desktop is if a respected company is actively supporting Linux. We are seeing the beginnings of this with IBM and Novell. I am glad to see IBM and Novell investing so much into Linux.

On package management

[harikiri]

I had a workmate come up today and start explaining what his issues were with Linux. This guy is a network engineer, who recognises the usefulness of having a free unix system to use on his spare pc's.

His beef was that he had installed Mandrake 9.2 on his system, and went to setup NTP. NTP was not installed. So he started looking for an RPM (he knew what they were!) for NTP for Mandrake. He said that he found one (probably from rpmsearch), but that when he downloaded it - it had additional dependencies that he couldn't find.

Now if it was me, I would've first tried rpmdrake (the distribution's own package management tool), and failing that, built it from source. But this guy was looking at Linux like a tool to be used. He wanted to do something simple (setup NTP), and the software wasn't installed. He found the software package for NTP online. This however required additional packages that were not immediately available. In the end he threw up his hands in disgust and stopped working on his new Linux box.

I ended up showing him a freebsd box I had here, and the ports mechanism for software installation. I then also discussed apt and the problem of too many ways of managing software installations, and none (that he could find) that accomplished the job for him.

So I'm going to bring in a copy of Mandrake 10 community edition for him to try out. In the meantime, I'm waiting for him to wander over one day and say "gosh Linux is great, I installed it and setup NTP in a few button clicks..."

Re:On package management

[codepunk]

Fedora

click on the clock on the lower right corner of the desktop and select a ntp server from the dropdown list....done deal

Re:On package management

[texroot]

Yep, as the post by codepunk comments, Fedora is easy.

So is Mandrake 10, at least based on the Commnunity download that I've been running for a few days.

Right click the clock -> Adjust Date and Time, enter root passwd.

Check "Enable Network Time Protocol" and pick a timeserver, then save the changes.

Re:On package management

[Master of Transhuman]

> In the end he threw up his hands in disgust and
> stopped working on his new Linux box.

I've done that too several times on my Red Hat 7.3 system. Tried installing K3b because the version of KonCD on 7.3 was crap. Couldn't install K3b due to various issues.

Well, I can easily upgrade to a more recent distro - I HAVE Mandrake 9.2, Fedora Core I, etc. But I want to upgrade my 7.3 slowly to current so I get the experience doing it.

So while I was booting one of my various live CD's the other day, I used the fully installed K3b on the CD to backup my system - neat as a pin.

Old Linux is crap. Windows is crap. New Linux is crap - just less crap.

More important, Linux is FREE crap - so I'm not getting reamed financially as well as spiritually dealing with this crap.

There is NO software that "just works" - no matter what Mac people claim. We just have to deal with it until there is.

I spent the day trying to compile an Oracle Forms app - the stupid product would compile it, tell me it was compiled, THEN NOT SAVE IT ANYWHERE THAT I COULD FIND IT! And not only that, NOWHERE in the product can you set a path for the destination of the compiled app! Fucking unbelievable!

Oracle Forms has a couple 500-page books to explain it - and NOWHERE does it tell you where the compiled app goes. It SHOULD logically go in the same directory where the source form is - well, it didn't.

Tell me Windows software is easier to use. Go on, tell me.

Hardware is crap. Software is crap. In the immortal words of the Twentieth Century's greatest philosopher, Woody Allen, who summed up the human condition in five words: "Nothing works and nobody cares."

Complaining about Linux usability is truly laughable.

NONE OF IT IS USABLE. Ted Nelson said at a West Coast Computer Faire many years ago that there was NO acceptable software on the market. He meant it dead seriously and he was totally right. And he is still right today.

But again, at least Linux is cheap or free.

How a corporation can suggest that it would be more expensive to use Linux crap than Windows crap is just laughable.

If that corporation is worried about training costs outweighing license savings, I submit they should be worrying about stupid corporate practices outweighing both of them.

But then, I suppose stupid corporate practices has to be taken as an environmental given, not subject to change or improvement.

In which case, why bother whether Linux is ever taken up by them? It simply won't be no matter what the OSS community does. Even if we develop Hal 9000 in OSS, the corps still won't get it.

Let them eat Windows - and choke on it.

Re:On package management

[dublin]

But this guy was looking at Linux like a tool to be used.

Oh, the Horror! Sorry, but Linux *should* be looked at as a tool to be used - that's what it *is*, to those of us who aren't so silly as to think it's a religion.

As Ted Nelson has said, "Using a computer should always be easier than not using a computer." That's a pretty safe assertion for any tool...

conspiracy theorist, start your engines!

[markan18]

Hmmm, 2 open source guys dancing with the microsoft cto, am i the only one afraid? IIRC, they are the ones working on the mono project, i won't be surprised if microsoft crushes them if they finally catch up.

Please, prove me pessemistic

Re:conspiracy theorist, start your engines!

[markan18]

I'm afraid microsoft can threaten mono development using software patents just like they do with samba. We all know that the USTPO is more or less like a patent vending machine, just pay and get your patent granted. But, like Nat said, if we should worry about patents, we won't write any code.

The day I can simply buy a printer

[Chuck Chunder]

plug it in and just have the motherfucker work will be a great one and it will be due to corporate involvement with Linux.

Re:I laughed...

[Entropius]

Somebody hit him in the face with a football.

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[cubicledrone]

Apple has the image problem of being expensive, proprietary, and incompatible.

eMacs are $799, OS X runs on a UNIX kernel and most Macs can talk to just about anything. OS X is everything that Linux will probably become: it's got the best-looking and easiest to use desktop on the market, it has both Open Source and commercial application support and it runs on fast machines.

There is also the fact that Macs work and they look nice at the same time, something that's unlikely on Linux or Windows (although Linux does work more often than Windows).

Re:National lab?

[andalay]

Their stupid Exchange connector broke down and he didn't get the pop-up for the meeting from Evolution. Should have used Outlook

Bill Gates

compatibility / applications / installation

[Neo-Rio-101]

Thee big-uns which threaten the linux desktop include:

*Compatibility - I'm talking compatibility with MS stuff here, and I don't mean just file formats or applications. Some hardware goes unsupported in Linux. I currently have a winputer at home. Linux won't work on it (yet) satisfactory enough to use as a server (the network card goes undetected). Not to mention that the VGA chipset and sound is not found either.

* Applications - we need more of them for business purposes. At the moemnt, we have a bazillion geek tools and standard office apps... but how about custom payroll software and other stuff like that? Where are they to be found?
Who is writing that software?

* Installations. Linux has dependancy hell, and doing the config,make,make install dance is harder than it has to be. It's hard enough trying to explain the *concept* of a software program to grandma, let alone asking her to install a package or program from source with the command line. If the clusers can't use the PC like a telephone - they give up.

Re:compatibility / applications / installation

[Gordonjcp]

Users never need to install software in large desktop rollouts, though. In fact, in general you try to make it as hard as possible for them to install shite like Comet Cursor, Bonzi Buddy, and so on.

In any case, your argument doesn't hold water. My mother is extremely non-technical (she has only recently started to change lightbulbs by herself) but can understand the fairly simple processes of "open a terminal, go root, type apt-get install ", close terminal when it's done". Not that she's had to do that for a long time, because once a thing is set up in Linux, it tends to stay set up.

Re:compatibility / applications / installation

[Master of Transhuman]

Network cards cost $10 - dump the piece of shit and replace it with something that works with Linux.

By the way, when I installed Windows 2000 on my year-old machine, it didn't find anything either. Not being found does not equal not usable. Go look for the fucking drivers. And yes, you have to do that with Windows, too - although usually when you buy hardware, a Windows driver is included so it's slightly easier to find it on a CD than it is on the Net.

Nonetheless, when I installed Windows XP on my machine, I was surprised to discover that the Efficient Systems Enternet 300 DSL client that powers my Windows DSL connection is NOT SUPPORTED on XP - unless you fork over bucks. Fortunately, one can use the built-in PPPoE client in XP to connect to SBC. Did I throw Windows XP in the street (well, slightly, I use 2000 more on my triple-boot machine).

Who is writing custom payroll software? The same consultants writing it for Windows, presumably. By definition, custom mean you pay someone to create or modify something. I'm sure there are plenty of Linux geeks around with payroll experience who can roll one in Linux if someone pays them. Payroll software after all is not really a geek enthusiasm, except maybe for some very odd people, so people don't tend to write that sort of thing "for fun". They will write it for money, however - which is how most accounting software packages got written historically, if you don't know. Someone got a consulting contract for one or more companies, wrote the stuff, then generalized it and starting selling it to others. Open source can do that just as well as anybody else.

Installation? Look, there is plenty of downloaded Windows software that fucks up when you install it. And grandma isn't going to install them either. And "grandma" is bullshit anyway - plenty of "grandmas" can use computers better than you can.

Learn to do things the Linux way - get your software from your distro or from sources that support your distro. Learn to use KPackage, apt-get or whatever, Checkinstall, and KConfigure. Do that and most installations will not be a significant problem.

Look, there are four kinds of users: casual users, power users, office or professional users, and technies. The first one doesn't install hardware or software - they just surf the Web, do some documents, play with some images and some MP3's and some games, send email, etc. Linux can handle this easily. That's "grandma". The power user knows enough and is determined enough to figure out how to make Linux do what he wants it to do. So is the techie. The office user doesn't install hardware or software either - his IT department does that. So his only problem is learning to switch from Windows to Linux - which is an issue of (minimal) training and motivation, not phoney "usability".

The only problem Linux has that is significant is when new hardware needs to be installed that is not directly supported by the kernel and for which there are no drivers. The solution? Don't buy that hardware. Just because WIndows supports more hardware is not reason to jettison Linux - unless you run a business on that particular hardware - which is rare. Users need to understand that you check for software support before you buy hardware - no matter whether it is Windows, Mac or Linux. What do you do if you see hardware you like - but it's designed for the Mac? Dump Windows and buy a Mac? I didn't think so.

All these complaints are red herrings. Linux has its problems - so does Windows. The bottom line is Linux doesn't make you pay through the nose for its problems like Gates does.

And Linux is getting better faster. Windows isn't - it's getting more bloated and more expensive faster. And as long as Gates is in charge, that's the way it's going to be.

So the end user has to understand that and make up their mind whether they want to be a source of the wealth of the world's (second) richest man or whether they want some cheap software that works well enough to do most of the stuff they need to do with a computer.

Linux can be improved - and it is. Next year it will be much better than it is this year - and Longhorn still won't be out.

Re:compatibility / applications / installation

[Dot.Com.CEO]

I have been reading most of your posts in this discussion and let me say this: you haven't got a clue what being a user means. I shall analyse my position:

1. Hardware WORKS in windows. You download the driver, doubleclick, next, next, finish, reboot, it works. Full stop. Now compare to linux. Download driver. rpm -Uvh *.rpm, perhaps a --force in there, notice the errors because the bin package is not compatible with your distro. Download tgz. Make, make install. depmod, vim modules.conf. Reboot. Pray. It works UNLESS you upgrade your kernel (and have suse). Now THAT is a good user experience. I cannot understand how you can say Linux is superior in this matter, but anyway... And don't you dare say apt-get or emerge are superior. They are not. Once you go outside the approved .deb or whatever depositories, you are treading on dangerous ground. And you WILL need to go there if you want multimedia support.

2. "Look, there is plenty of downloaded Windows software that fucks up when you install it."... Big huge hairy bollocks. Unless you are doing something really wrong like messing with the registry or installing seriously buggy applications it's not really normal that something like that happens. For the normal user who has 10-20 apps installed and doesn't install/uninstall things, it just works. How about when you do a rpm -i --force (which you HAVE to do sometimes) and it just completely fucks up your system? Oh, I'm sorry, it really is my fault, I shouldn't have "forced" the installation.

3. "The only problem Linux has that is significant is when new hardware needs to be installed that is not directly supported by the kernel and for which there are no drivers. The solution? Don't buy that hardware". Really? So I should buy what I consider an inferior and overpriced nvidia card rather than an ati for playing games in my Windows partition because nvidia drivers are easier to install? Or I should buy a via mobo rather than a nforce one because via nic drivers are pre-compiled in the kernel? Do you think that hardware companies do not support Linux as well as windows because there are more windows users out there than Linux users and it doesn't make economic sense? No. They don't support Linux as much because the linux userbase is fragmented as hell and there is no "Linux Driver Model". They develop one driver for Windows and they package, I don't know, 5 plus a src.tgz for Linux. Whose fault is that? Is it the Microsoft monopoly or the pigheaded Linux developers that have been resisting the push to standardised binary kernel modules?

4. People want stuff that is standard, user-friendly and just work. Standard, contrary to /.'s opinion does not mean "approved by an international standards body". It's what everyone uses. Can oo or staroffice or hancomoffice or kwhatever open the excel-macro-ridden xls documents I use at work? No? Can I open, manipulate .psd files in a color-calibrated environment? No? Then, my dear friend Linux is not ready, full stop, however much you might think that Linux is a superior solution to Windows - which it isn't, it's a different, more elegant philosophy. Accept it.

Linux has its places. It's my desktop, it's your desktop but it is NOT grandma's desktop. If you make people choose whether to use a free OS that would make them work twice as hard or even 10% as hard or to spend 100 euros and use a troublefree and standard OS, guess what they would choose. Why do I use Linux? I like the challenge. Not everyone does. And I STILL use Windows for the things that are impossible to do in Linux.

So please kindly stop trolling your uninformed views, it gets truly annoying to see such blatant zealotry even in a forum as unbalanced as slashdot is.

Re:compatibility / applications / installation

[NewStarRising]

"casual users ... don;t install software" What utter nonsense. My parents, both non-techie, non-power-user, have both needed to install Adobe Acrobat reader on their windows boxes to read certain documents, have wanted a new graphics package to handle digital photographs and the camera to go with it. Yes, I _could_ have traveled the 10 miles to spend 5 minutes installing it for them (download, double-click, next, next, finish, reboot). But a casual user is perfectly capable of this. The only thing they need from me is "Sure, that peice of software is safe"/"NO DON'T INSTALL THAT".

Re:compatibility / applications / installation

[0x0d0a]

perhaps a --force in there, notice the errors because the bin package is not compatible with your distro.

Yup. It has to be packed for your distro.

I don't have any problems with my Red Hat system, though. If you feel a need to be mainstream, don't use Black Cat Linux or something oddball like that.

Once you go outside the approved .deb or whatever depositories, you are treading on dangerous ground. And you WILL need to go there if you want multimedia support.

It's "repositories". I have xine, mpg321, xmms and mplayer installed, and I'm using just the Big Three Redhat repositories -- Fedora, Freshrpms, and Dag. I'm using only stable from each. Oh, and transcode. There are probably more multimedia-related pieces of software on my system, but that's a pretty good example...

For the normal user who has 10-20 apps installed and doesn't install/uninstall things, it just works.

True. But this same user *also* won't have any problems on Linux, especially since those 10-20 apps came on the Linux distro CD that he purchased.

So I should buy what I consider an inferior and overpriced nvidia card rather than an ati for playing games in my Windows partition because nvidia drivers are easier to install?

I use an ATI card in my Linux box. It's true that 3d cards are less well supported under Linux than Windows, but that's not a function of Linux in any technological respect -- it's simply how many people are on each platform, and where more of the development money goes.

They don't support Linux as much because the linux userbase is fragmented as hell and there is no "Linux Driver Model".

Well, there's no *term* "Linux Driver Model" because the Linux folks don't feel the need to have marketing bullet points. As for providing the same functionality found in the Windows Driver Model...it seems to me that Linux does the stuff that the WDM does. Dynamic loading and unloading? Linux does it. Hotplug support? Linux does it. What specific missing functionality are you complaining about?

They develop one driver for Windows and they package, I don't know, 5 plus a src.tgz for Linux. Whose fault is that? Is it the Microsoft monopoly or the pigheaded Linux developers that have been resisting the push to standardised binary kernel modules?

I'd say it's Microsoft at fault -- Microsoft doesn't support more than one architecture, whereas Linux runs on everything under the sun.

Can oo or staroffice or hancomoffice or kwhatever open the excel-macro-ridden xls documents I use at work? No? Can I open, manipulate .psd files in a color-calibrated environment? No?

You can list functionality all day that Windows apps have and Linux doesn't, and I can list functionality all day that Linux apps have that Windows doesn't. It doesn't say a damn thing about whether either OS is suitable for the desktop.

Re:compatibility / applications / installation

[Master of Transhuman]

They had to install Adobe Acrobat Reader?

Whoop-de-doo.

On Linux they wouldn't have had to install even that. Xpdf works fine. The associations are already made. Click on a PDF and read it.

Let me rephrase: casual users don't install significant amounts of software because they don't even know it exists. They may install on occasion. For that, Linux can install dozens of apps with no problem as long as those apps were packaged for that distro. Linux has distros - Windows doesn't (unless you count the tons of stuff that WOULD NOT RUN ON XP or if running on XP WILL NOT RUN ON Win 98 - which the Windows trolls don't take into account when they talk about "install problems".

It's all bullshit. The occasional dependency problem is a problem for Linux - but it's not a problem the average casual user is going to run into. Not enough to override the advantages of using Linux.

Re:compatibility / applications / installation

[Master of Transhuman]

YOUR Windows troll views are equally annoying and far more uninformed.

There IS no stuff that is "standard, user-friendly and just works" - on Windows or anyplace else. If you think so, you have never used or installed SQUAT on Windows. You've never used anything but Microsoft Office, apparently - and even THAT is a pain in the ass frequently if you try to use more than the average user's twenty percent of the features.

The notion that Windows crap "just works" is fucking laughable. "It's not really normal", he says. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

So buzz off, troll.

Re:compatibility / applications / installation

[Dot.Com.CEO]

I'd like to thank you, first of all for your informed and calm commentary, as opposed to the couple of Linux zealots I usually have running after me as soon as I post my views. First of all, my distro is Suse 9.0, running a minimally patched (nvidia's agpgart) 2.4.20. As standard as they come, I suppose. I also run Windows 2003 server patched to be a workstation. The experience I have running Windows is different to running Linux. Different, not better. *I* am able to solve problems I have with Linux, but my arguments were that the average guy cannot. Nothing more, nothing less. And drivers is, at this point, the bigger problem with Linux on the desktop. I've gone through hell to install an ATI card on an nforce motherboard and, tbh, the argument that I shouldn't buy ATI because it's not as well supported is a bit weird. It works fine on windows and the average guy or girl does not really care about the politics of Linux or open source software, they just want their PC to work as well on Linux as on Windows.

I also don't think the "driver model thing" is marketing talk. It is truly something there to help developers build a driver quickly and with the minimum of fuss. And a WDM driver works not only on W2k, w2k3 and xp, it also works (except graphics drivers, that is), on W98. Not bad, I think. There's no such thing as even a graphics driver for the 2.4.20 kernel. Do you have dri installed in your kernel? Yes? Well, you need to re-compile. Or vice-versa...

My argument is that once properly configured, a Linux workstation is of equal quality to a Windows PC. But most people don't see properly configuring Linux as a challenge, like I do and probably you do as well. They see it as something that should not happen.

Re:compatibility / applications / installation

[0x0d0a]

*I* am able to solve problems I have with Linux, but my arguments were that the average guy cannot.

Hmm. In general, I'd say that in general, most people can't really solve problems with either platform. There are probably more people more experienced with Windows ATM, which gives it an advantage. Honestly, though, I suspect that most IT support-types will attest that people need assistance with the simplest things (a common frusterated lament I've seen on Slashdot is someone's boss calling them over because an icon was moved or deleted from their desktop, and that person doesn't know what to do to repair it).

There are a couple of different sorts of people that would have ease-of-use concerns on Linux. The common case people use is "grandma". "Grandma" is currently, I think, reasonably well dealt with on Linux. The "grandma" demographic knows how to use their computer to do web browsing, email, and word processing, but nothing else. "Grandma" does not configure or set up the machine. Some not-particularly-computer-savvy office workers might be considered "grandmas". I currently think that Linux is in a state to handle that. That was one of the first ease-of-use areas that was focussed on for Linux. There have been a couple of stories about this working out fairly well.

There's then the "typical office users". Typical office users might be exemplified by, say, a secretary. Unlike "grandma", the TOU uses a broader range of applications -- maybe something business-specific. The TOU may have extensive application-specific knowledge (knowing a CAD package or Excel, as it is used daily), and generally uses the computer on a daily basis. The TOU is not interested in learning the guts of the computer inside out. The TOU *may* install a software package or two (a P2P application is a popular install, or perhaps an instant-messaging application). A lot of non-technically-oriented-but-computer-owning college students might be TOUs. I think that Linux currently can handle these reasonably well, if not perfectly -- the primary issue comes up if (particularly in the case of the P2P app) the software is not shipped with their distro, though generally it's packaged (probably on the package's home page). The users may be more than slightly peeved at not knowing how to install a software package if they don't have root on their system (not an issue for a home/college user, an issue for a business user). These users may be seriously inconvenienced by having to learn a new application (OOffice rather than Word is not a trivial move if a secretary knows how to do something to a paragraph using that particular checkbox hidden deep in a preferences box). I think that generally, TOUs can use Linux, but the transition is not flawless, as it is for "grandma"s.

The next group of folks I think I would call it the "power users". People that like to poke at their systems a bit, but don't really have a lot of expertise beyond checking checkboxes -- but they know what a number of checkboxes mean that others don't. They might be the guy in the cubicle that the other people go to when they get stuck before hassling with IT. The "power user" may have a number of utilities installed on his system, and probably has a couple things in his system tray that he's installed. He probably has his own set of themes. The "power user" has poked around and looked through the preferences dialogs of most of his applications. The "power user" is looking at a significant amount of relearning if he's familiar with Windows. He is comfortable running InstallShield installers. The utilities that provide the functionality that he uses under Windows may be much harder to use under Linux. Frequently, at this point, Linux folks expect people to have a desire to learn more about their system if they want to do things, and utilities may refer to technical concepts. Pager documentation might talk about viewports and workspaces and expect users to know the difference or be willing to learn. This user is current

Re:compatibility / applications / installation

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Your analysis is very good, however, I have to disagree on a very fine point. Actually, I'd like to point you to this, a journal by a guy who is trying to find an "easy" Linux distribution. I think by reading his journal you'll see he know his way around unix, however, the process of trying to find a purely "desktop" Linux distribution is not easy at all. My experience with Suse, his current choice, is there, basically I had to go through hell to configure it, and then other things broke. Your argument might be "don't buy ATI". Well, I did, that's a done deal. You might say "it's well known in the Linux world that nforce motherboards do not play well with ATI AGP cards". I don't think that a hardware combination that mainstream should have problems with any distribution. And I also don't think it is fair for pointing the finger to ATI. They DO provide the drivers, and they DO work. The problem is you need to recompile the kernel without dri support for it to work. Now comes the question - is there any kind of user other than the one who really does nothing productive with his Linux PC than play around/ program /learn unix who is going to install sources, headers, make, etc, go through menuconfigs and compiles etc.? Answer? No. At least I did not.

My problem with Linux is that the mainstream distros (and by that, really, I mean the only two left, Mandrake and Suse), pass the problem to the developer of the package that has the problem. This is unacceptable. Distributions should make sure things work. If they don't, it's the distribution's problem.

I am currently using Xandros and I think it should get much more credit than it is given. It is truly perfect for my needs and I truly wish I had heard of it as a real alternative a bit before. I got the business version that comes with Staroffice and the Crossover programs, making it really worth it. PLUS everything just works out of the box. You really only need the one cd for the installation, and on rebooting you have a fully working system. And it has a task-based approach to doing things, wizards everywhere, sharing folders through smb is done EXACTLY like Windows. Right click, sharing, share. That's it.

The other huge problem is the Linux omnipresent philosophy that "Windows is bad". No it's not. Main tasks are done through wizards and the interface is more or less intuitive. Therefore, there is this tendency for making things different in Linux. While this is a fair argument to make while speaking of Linux (and other Unices) as a techie tool, while speaking of Linux as a drop-in replacement for Windows, it just doesn't work. And let me make myself more clear - the problem is not the design, it's the overall philosophy. Try, for example, using Thunderbird, the new mozilla mail component. I did, just to waste time. I have five accounts, and thunderbird treats each one of them as, basically, a separate process. Might as well have five different mailers open. I have to create separate filters for each account, etc. etc. Evolution does things well, it is one step above Outlook in terms of design and basic functionalities, and it doesn't choke on my 1Gb mailbox, imported without a problem once I found a way. But it is a copy of Outlook, and that's a fact.

My point, to wrap things up, is that you can't have it all. You can't have the simplicity with the hidden power model that an office user, grandma and a power user wants and has in Windows while having a 5 cd install with 5000 different programs. You also cannot please the hard-core techie crowd who think that anything but compiling from source is crap and they cringe when seeing someone run a Windows app in Linux because "it hinders development of Linux apps". You can already see it, Lindows and Xandros are here, yet the slashdot crowd ignores them even though they are superior distributions. Why? They are not free. I DON'T CARE, and Linux is here to provide an alternative to Windows, not necessarily a free alternative. It is utopic to think that a freshly installed Debian Linux PC will be usably by grandma. It won't.

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[Master of Transhuman]

> Windows users pull their hair out. Many of them
> ay "damn it, this is just too hard" and go buy a
> Mac. Many Windows users say "good riddance".

Windows users try Linux and pull their hair out. Many of them say, "Damn it, this is just too hard" and go back to Windows. Many Linux users say "good riddance."

Many first-time Windows (in Asia, Latin America, etc.) try Windows and pull their hair our. Many of them say, "Damn it, this is just too expensive" and switch to Linux. Bill Gates does NOT say "good riddance."

There are people who should not be allowed to touch a computer (or a firearm, or much of anything else as well). You cannot judge an operating system's usability by these people.

The other issue is training and habit. People trained in and used to running one OS will ALWAYS have trouble using one that is not what they are used to. I am used to Windows 98 and to a lesser degree Windows 2000 Explorer - I find Windows XP Explorer to be confusing with its moving screens and whatnot. In fact, I'm used to using PowerDesk on Windows 98 and 2000 - not Explorer at all, so I find Explorer confusing to use on any version of Windows.

But I CAN learn to use any OS given a certain amount of time playing with it. So can any reasonably intelligent user. And that does not necessarily translate into training expense, either - especially since most corporate "training" is a fucking joke. You don't want to spend money training people to use Linux? Don't bother training them. Just give them the product and tell them to learn to use it. Maybe give them just enough training to point out the differences. Then sit back and stop worrying about a couple months of 15% less productivity - you'll get it back later when you don't need to pay the Microsoft licenses and retrain everyone every X years for a new version of Windows that screws with the eye candy just to be an "upgrade".

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[Master of Transhuman]

Nobody "uses a total OS" - you use applications that are built on top of an OS.

Only when you have to CONFIGURE the OS - for hardware or software installation or user maintenance or some other ADMINISTRATIVE task - or when the OS PERFORMANCE is an issue - do you need to worry about an OS's "usability".

Since UNIX still runs most of the world's servers, I'd say it's still an open issue as to which OS is more usable FOR ADMINISTRATORS.

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[Master of Transhuman]

Because it's a NICHE market, as you said?

Take another example - integrated library systems (ILS). A niche market, right? Well, there are a couple Linux-based ILS in existence and some libraries are using them. Still not putting Windows-based systems out of business - yet. But the software is being developed.

It takes TIME for the OSS system to PENETRATE NICHE MARKETS - because they ARE NICHE MARKETS.

Linux has only been significant for a few years. Microsoft was around and significant for the last fiteen or twenty years - and some niche market stuff started being developed back in DOS days. Come back in fifteen years and see how much Linux niche market software there is then.

Given how little most people know about Linux, I personally am amazed at how much niche market software is already available for Linux - such as ILS software.

I think you'll find it's...

[Gordonjcp]

... "vacuum", but you were bang on about "its/it's" and the question mark.

Nat == Former Microsoft employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny but true!
Miguel and Nat both met at Microsoft for the first time. Nat was an intern working on IIS and Miguel was interviewing for a job.

See here on Miguels own site: http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/ and check the Ximian history page

Re:Linux will take-off...

[Paul Jakma]

Roaming user profiles controled by logons is also something that Windows does well but Linux doesn't do out of the box.

RedHat Linux (and hence now Fedora) have done this out of the box for *ages*. Run authconfig and you are given a choice of several Network directory systems to use for account information (NIS, LDAP and/or Hesiod), and a choice of several authentication services (LDAP, Kerberos and even SMB). Then run autofs to automatically pick up the appropriate network volumes..

All of this presumes you actually have some kind of directory service in place, which is not trivial to setup be it on windows or unix. On unix one might use the 'directory administrator' GTK LDAP tool to manage user accounts, or the more level (but still graphical and user-friendly) 'gq' GTK LDAP frontend. There used to be a nice GTK kadmin app included with GNOME 1.2 or so, to administer Kerberos, but it appears defunct and dead. (the command line kadmin still works obviously, and can be run from anywhere, kadmin has its own network protocol).

I regularly use a large, global, corporate Unix network. No matter where I go on this network (ie access it from), I can always just sit in front of any arbitrary computer and just login. My home directory and my files are always there, so my browser's config and bookmarks are there, my email client's config files are there, the config files for my desktop are there, my custom background is there, etc.. I log in and its all just there, as it always is and just works the same no matter where I am. Wherever I lay my hat, my /home is already there. (the only downside is that being far from home can mean slightly slow NFS access, but its fine for running a GNOME desktop from, it's more noticeable from the shell.).

I have never seen or even heard of any decently sized Windows network having such transparent and wide-ranging roaming support for its users. Indeed, I suspect the reason windows requires this intricate "roaming user profiles" support and such is because of its idiocy in not confining users to a "home directory".

Anyway, I suspect you never actually have seen a large corporate network, never mind a large Unix or heterogenous network. If ever you do, you'll probably find Linux (and solaris, and IRIX, and ..., but not Windows) does "do it" out of the box, with just a quick twiddle of the RedHat (or other) GUI configuration tool or, for lots of installs, with a few lines in a kickstart config.

The difficult part is, by far, in setting up and administering the infrastructure required, not the clients, unless the clients are Windows.

Hmmm.....

[SerpentMage]

Interesting that you mention this. I do not know whether to believe you or not. So lets say I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

The reason why I mention this is because I had the same thing happen to me with Netscape. In 1996 when Netscape held their first conference I was blown off by Netscape. We wanted to initally buy about 4000 client licenses. In the end what happened was that we were too small for their tastes (I was working for a major Swiss Bank at that time).

While attending their conference I saw that Netscape's days were numbered. BTW the meeting blow off happened after the conference. I could not exactly put a finger on it, but the buzz at the Netscape conference seemed wrong.

Tying this back to Ximian leads to me believe that maybe this is "Netscape" all over again. Hmmm.... Interesting, not sure, something to think about no doubt...

Re:National lab?

[Master of Transhuman]

No, they use Exchange - or their ISP uses some Windows crap - and the virus/worm/trojan/exploit crashed the server and he never got the meeting time.

Or maybe the server simply crapped out when they got too many emails because Windows crap is not scaleable.

Or maybe he decided a national lab really wasn't worth selling to... I might.

Re:Windows on the way out

[Master of Transhuman]

Okay, what will Microsoft do in 2010 with less than 60% market share?

Not good enough? How about 2012? That's only EIGHT years away from now.

Want ten? I can spot you ten - let's move it to 2014.

Real question: what will you do when Microsoft has less than 60% market share?

Probably post on Slashdot: "Dream on."

My REAL REAL question: what will you do when Microsoft has NO market share - as in OUT OF BUSINESS?

Have a nice day.

Re:Linux will take-off...

[Master of Transhuman]

Er, HP OpenView?

IBM tools?

Or do you mean FREE stuff?

Re:Linux will take-off...Earth Mac's are easy.

[Master of Transhuman]

Er, what part of that 90% marketshare is the Mac part?

And last I heard, Linux has exceeded Mac on the desktop (albeit a few quibbles about the exact numbers, perhaps).

Re:Linux will take-off...

[Master of Transhuman]

> it is best to have a firewall installed (either
> hardware or software or both), but it is a pain
> in the butt for your average home user, and most
> people aren't willing to deal with it.

Hope you enjoy your new upgrade to Windows XP - because IIRC they are gonna turn that built-in firewall on by default.

Have a nice day.

(BTW, if you can't handle a simple firewall like Kerio Personal Firewall, you have no business having a computer connected to the Internet.)

Re:Huh?

[Master of Transhuman]

This is /. and these are geeks.

They can't not ever not stop not doing whatever it is they never were not stopping not doing - not.

I will now code in Perl, APL, and LISP for the benefit of those who believe C++ is an equally readable language.

Not.

Strip away the emotions...

[Pecisk]

Linux Desktop will grow. No one ever have doubted about that, even Bill. If you are some overemotional anti-Linux or pro-Windows zealot, be ready to be proven wrong, in the scale of time. Yes, there are interest. Yes, there are (small/medium business, enterprise) very cautious about such new thing, because it runs in new programming philosofy and it hasn't such nicknames, sorry, brands like Microsoft or Adobe behind it. You get them demonstration. Set-up one box. It works for month, two. If it a migration, of coarse , there are several small quirks here and here, but they get solved. Then we set-up another box. Then another. Of coarse, in enterprise it's bunch a boxes and then another one, and then whole department goes to Linux. So it's growing. Sure, there are lot of problems to be solved. But they will be solved. No one doubts that Linux Desktop is and it will be to at least on 30% of workstations in the end.

Re:Strip away the emotions...

[Mant]

I don't know what enterprises you are familiar with, but from my experience those with more centralised IT policies simply won't let you set up a box, and certainly not have a department go Linux. It simply won't be allowed on the corporate network, and won't get any support.

Small business probably has it much easier, as it is often much less formal and people can just go ahead and do things.

I'm not particullarly pro-Windows, but I doubt that Linux will be 30% of workstations. Maybe it will, but I'm certainly not convinced it is inevitable. Right now Linux only sometimes is as easy to use as Windows on the desktop, and Windows still leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe it will catch up and suprass it, but don't assume it is inevitable.

Same old song and dance ...

[dbcad7]

It's sad really,.. again and again I hear these comments like "linux is ALMOST ready for the mainstream desktop"

Exactly what is not ready ? what is it that can be done in Windows, buisness wise, that can not be done in Linux ? most Windows machines I've seen in buisness, are mearly fancy terminals anyway. Are the Linux "Office" equivelants really that inferior, or require that much training to adapt to ?

In truth, I beleive that Linux is more ready for the buisness environment than the average home user, and this is only because I think that installing programs in Linux is a little more challenging for the "joe average Windows dude" until he spends some time learning it.

I only have Linux on my home machine, (Mandrake 10 now) and I have had freinds visit (Windows only people) at first, other that showing them what icons to press to surf the net, they know not what to do.. after the initial dumbness wears off they realize... it's the same only different., I of course dazzel them with stupid tricks like running two Gaims and talking to each other on the same screen (I can hear the oooohhs .. out there) and showing them the transparent menu in KDE.. etc etc.. They use Firefox, and of course end up installing it at home on their own Windows machine at home.. but generally everyone thinks they could get along fine if their machine had Linux only as well.. but most don't really have the patience to learn the differance between running a "setup.exe" and installing a RPM .. I guess that's the real "learning curve" with Linux, is dealing with program installs. (I won't go into dependencies, I AM trying to present Linux in a possitive light)

Not to jump on the "my distro's better than yours" bandwagon,.. (I have tried many) But I would like to say, that the latest from Mandrake is really quite flattering to Linux, is easy for new Linux users, and even though I have a little more Linux experience, and could do the whole compile the system from source thing.. I keep ending back at Mandrake.

I think Linux is more than ready. perhaps a big company with a fancy slogan, could you know "just do it" or something.

Re:Same old song and dance ...

[mjm1231]

Installing from RPM's using an integrated package manager like Mandrakes is, in principle, much easier than running a setup.exe in Windows. No prompts for install directory, where to place program group icons, etc. However, the difficult part (perhaps in both cases) is finding the software you want to install.

I tried Mandrake 10 a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to burn some CD's, and trying to find the CD burning packages in the available package lists is a real pain, unless you already know the names of the packages you want. And even this is not foolproof. Verifying that cdrtools, etc., was installed was easy, but if I didn't know to look for that package name, it would have taken quite some time. I wanted to run K3b, but couldn't find the package listed. I spent about an hour downloading the rpm, setting Mandrake's tools (rpmdrake? I forget...) to install from my download path, etc., etc. Not the sort of thing your average end user would be comfortable with.

Only later did I discover that k3b was already installed, but was placed under the System tools/archiving menu (how many people would think of that as the primary use for CD burning?) This sort of thing is the reason I keep going back to Slackware, where I know exactly what's installed and where everything is (because I put it there!) But Slackware isn't really the best option for the average user. (CollegeLinux, based on Slack, might be though.)

Outside of that, the one big thing keeping me from switching my family to linux is that they are all heavy Paint Shop Pro 7 users, mainly for very simple things like cropping and resizing digital photos. My sons are also heavily into creating 2d sprite sheets from video game screenshots, a hobby I don't claim to understand, but which they do with lightning speed in PSP. One look at the learning curve of Photoshop (and GIMP) is enough to turn them from looking at those products again. With digital photography being a big usage area of computers now, I imagine there are a lot of people who use very limited but easy to use photo editing products like this. What are the choice here on Linux?

Back to the issue of ease of use, for technically oriented people and power users, Linux kicks ass over Windows. When I can't do something in Windows, most often it's because it can't be done or doesn't work. In Linux, it's usually because I don't know how. The latter is a problem much more easily resolved.

On the business side, our recent upgrades to MS Office XP left all our secretaries unable to figure out how to do a mail merge. Some of them have 10+ years experience doing mail merges with Office. So retraining costs are not limited to switching to Linux and open source products.

Most people's idea of X compression is out of date

[Nailer]

SSH compression is about 12:1, and pretty poor for most purposes.

There's an Open Soruce X compression scheme from NoMachine that can do 60:1 compression and benchmarks well against Citrix. Check out the Freedesktop.org X server mailing lists from last month for more info/discussion.

Not his fault !

[BESTouff]

After pulling a no-show with nearly 100 participants planned (most of whom are in a position to make purchasing decisions), we are certainly going to be taking any claims regarding customer service with a sizable grain of salt.

That's not his fault. The scheduling features in Evolution 1.5 are still a but buggy sometimes, maybe he'll show up next week ...

The coolest part about that picture

[pommaq]

is Nat's shoes - green suede Adidas Rekords. Seems mr Friedman has excellent taste in sneakers, a trait that's not too common in geeks.

Re:Another osnews.com story

[drunkahol]

It should also be pointed out that osnews.com has done a LOT of linking to "news" posted on /.

Critical mass in germany

[Qbertino]

My predictions for Linux reaching critical mass in germany haven't changed. Right now it'd be roughly another 12 months for it to happen. And I still _do_ expect germany to be the first. I'm starting to meet more people somehow involved in Linux than I can count.
Once Linux is rolling in that direction I also expect things to go very fast. Remember how fast Windows95 gained critical mass when all of us were saying 'Who the heck needs an OS that uses 50 MB of diskspace?' and 'Gee, look at Geos on PTS DOS, this is the future of PC operating systems'.

Booosheet 1% == Linux Desktop Market Share

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile 2004 Linux Rules the desktop when in reality: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

Windows = 91%
Mac = 4%
Linux = 1%

* OSDN-owned Slashdot thinks its niche opinion represents the majority of the world. This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk about.

* Speaking of OSDN--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with OSDN, it's a-okay.

* Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.

* The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capitalism around it that provides the environment for it to exist. We all know what happened to that idea.

* Slashdot editors are abusive. We all remember The Post. It's amusing the editors never mention the issue. The worst editor is michael, who will mod you down, insult you for your post count, and post unprofessional color commentary along with the article. This is the same bizarre person who cybersquatted Censorware for years--even as Slashdot posted articles negative toward cybersquatting! Michael played it off like he was some sort of stalking victim, which made it all the more bizarre.

* Somehow, user-ran executables are always a "New Microsoft Hole" (actual article headline). Meanwhile, LinuxSecurity [linuxsecurity.com] posts weekly security advisories for all the Linux distributions. You never, ever, EVER see any of these mentioned on Slashdot--bizarre things like arbitrary code execution via MPlayer.

* Microsoft is supposed to be some sort of non-innovative rip-off artist. Meanwhile, the same people posting those comments do it through KDE with taskbars, sidepanels, start menus, similar print dialogs, and an integrated web/filesystem browser. Slashdotters--ripping people off then criticizing those who came up with the ideas in the first place.

* Linux is "ready for the desktop." This is the yearly uttering since 1998. Never mind that there is STILL no binary installation/uninstallation API for desktops, you can't come home with a printer and a CD and stick it in to get an Autoplay menu that lets you set up the driver. Somehow, Linux is just magically supposed to be ready--that is, if someone else sets it up for you and you never change or add your hardware or software and doing nothing else but check e-mail and browse the web. Conveniently, this includes grandmas, so people can post their grandma-using-Linux stories as "proof."

* Corporate-owned, subscription fees, banner ads, reposts, and complete falsehoods. Remember when Slashdot was a great tech news site for nerds? Before the point of the site was to have an anti-RIAA, anti-"M$" agenda? When it was just about posting cool technology stories regardless?

Slashdot is dead

Compression adds latency

[Moderation abuser]

Most X performance is about latency rather than bandwidth. If you're on a LAN, straight X is a much nicer proposition than the compressed protocols because the latency is lower, imperceptible even.

So, if you're running it over a high latency link like ADSL or god forbid a modem then go for it with the protcol compressors.

Don't be ridiculous

[Moderation abuser]

Have you compared RDP with X on a LAN? X wins, no questions about it (except Gnome). MS have sacrificed interactive performance for the majority of remote display users on a LAN in order to increase performance for the minority who use dialup.

BTW, X apps run fine over DSL. I do it all the time. If however you want to bitch about how Gnome apps run over DSL, I'll join with you cos Gnome really does suck when compared to KDE, CDE, GnuStep etc.

Re:Don't be ridiculous

[dublin]

Have you compared RDP with X on a LAN? X wins, no questions about it (except Gnome). ...BTW, X apps run fine over DSL. I do it all the time. If however you want to bitch about how Gnome apps run over DSL, I'll join with you cos Gnome really does suck when compared to KDE, CDE, GnuStep etc.

GNOME's abysmal performance has less to do with X than it does with Gnome's reliance on CORBA, one of those "elegant" ideas that just doesn't fly in the real world, and never has. It amazes me how Gnome/Linux users can have the gall to gripe about Microsoft bloatware, when their own system is every bit as obese...

Latency, not bandwidth.

[Moderation abuser]

The perception of the performance of any GUI depends on the *latency* of the GUI. If you compare X with RDP, X has a significantly better latency response than RDP does so when there is sufficient bandwidth it is a faster option than RDP.

The bandwidth required to run X is cheap. It was designed for shared 10Mbps local area networks and on today's 100mbps switched networks it absolutely flies. I run several hundred engineers using full screen Gnome (yes, that was a mistake) X sessions on a couple of login servers and the burst rate doesn't flatten the interfaces even when they log in. It peaks at around 4Mbps for a few seconds during login and then dies off to bugger all. It doesn't get anywhere near 10mbps, never mind 100mbps or 1000mpbs.

The "run it over a modem" set is a very limited subset of the population who use remote GUIs. The vast majority of people who use X and RDP, do so over a local area network. So the statement that X must be replaced because it doesn't run on a 300 baud modem (or whatever) is bullshit. Especially when there are protocol compressors which you can plug into the architecture to improve low bandwidth performance (at the expense of interactive latency BTW).

-(-(-(-(1))))

[Xhad]

The best part is that the sentence says the exact opposite of what he probably meant.

Man, don't I don't not dislike not this sentence construction.

Re:-(-(-(-(1))))

[Trogre]

I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less.

Dance with me...

[tverbeek]

And by the way, both Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza's April 12th blog entry have a picture of Miguel and Nat dancing with David Vaskevitch, CTO of Microsoft.

Which just provides further evidence that people who use Linux tend to be cuter than those who work for Microsoft. (We really should use this fact as a marketing tool.)

Re:Dance with me...

[markan18]

Cute, hell yes they are but, fortunately for some (many?) of us, being cute is not a prerequisite for writing good software. IMHO, it is foolish to reject a developer because he/she is not cute so i object using this as a marketing tool

Re:Dance with me...

[tverbeek]

I'm not talking about for recruiting developers, but for marketing the software to users. Make it a status symbol to be part of the "cute and sexy" crowd behind Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc. We can still recruit aging and ordinary geeks to work on the stuff, but make sure to send the babes and stud puppies to public events. ;)

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[N1KO]

The general image of Apple is: expensive, doesn't have any programs/games, to upgrade the system you throw your computer out the window and go buy a new one and it is easy to use.

Eclipse one the 5 primary platforms?

[aleewade]

We are going to take common functionality shared between the five primary platforms (GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Eclipse) and we do work to get them to a shared platform.

I wonder if Novell is putting pressure on Ximian to back down from Mono in favor of Java? (Eclipse is great on Java, but I'll be sticking with #develop/MonoDevelop.)

Gnome vs KDE. Mono vs Java. How good a fit for Novell is Ximian, anyway?

Re:Eclipse one the 5 primary platforms?

[polin8]

iirc, Mono was one of the main technologies Novell wanted from the acquisition of Ximian. I doubt they'll push for a move to java. However, Eclipse has been shown to run on the Mono runtime.

Re:Linux will take-off...

[BenjyD]

In my experience (University NT4/2000 system), roaming profiles in Windows are slow and unreliable. I turned off roaming for my login as it never worked properly. Copying around configuration files seems a very poor way to do roaming.

Re:Linux will take-off...

[PretzelBat]

I am actually a Microsoft Beta Tester for SP2, and so far as I could tell, their "built-in" firewall didn't protect me from much. I disabled it and use zone alarm combined with my DSL router's firewall.

I could be wrong, and the hidden, proprietary, uncostomizeable MS settings may have been both completely secure AND completely unobtrusive, but given MS past history with security, I find this rather unlikely. I think a better explanation is that, yes, Windows Firewall is better than nothing, but that doesn't mean your computer is secure.

And BTW to you, this is the kind of arrogant, elitist attitude that contributes i>absolutely nothing towards solving the problem.

BTW, if you can't handle a simple firewall like Kerio Personal Firewall, you have no business having a computer connected to the Internet.

You may not think they have a "right" to the Internet, but YOU don't have any say whatsoever in whether on not they use it.

Boy genius?

[beforewisdom]

Nat Friedman ( to a lesser extent Miguel ) looks barely old enough to drive a car.

Is he some sort of boy genius/ uber geek?

Steve

It would be cool

[beforewisdom]

since Novell now owns Ximian, owns Suse, Suse made YAST free that people other then rpm users could download Ximian and that you could downloads isos of Suse.

However, this would seem to work against their plans for a unified desktop.

That is a worthy goal, I just hope they don't reinvent the wheel and throw away what has been done........if that is possible.

Steve

This ain't no traditional double negative....

[mattdm]

This ain't no traditional double-negative-for-emphasis. I'm not bringing it up as a picky grammar thing.

The quote just actually ends up saying the exact wrong thing, all for the sake of being verbose.

People mistake using lots of words for being educated/formal/businesslike. Instead, just use simple straightforward sentences and be a better communicator.

Blantant zealotry? Pot, kettle....

[jotaeleemeese]

"1.-Hardware WORKS in windows"

Rubish. I will repeat it again. Rubish. I have battled with digital cameras, MP3 players, wireless cards, keyboard switches, CF card readers that did not work with Windows. Or that broke somthing else when the drivers (after click-click-click, you have not got a clue what happened to your system - click) where installed.

"2. "Look, there is plenty of downloaded Windows software that fucks up when you install it."... Big huge hairy bollocks. "

Yes Microsabee, we know all software ever developped for Windows is perfect. Shame that MS's own patches are well known for breaking things. And that is just for starters.

I shall continue, but all is so nonsensical that actually does not make any sense....

Where do I get this

[sharkey]

People just don't notice it because it's a small market. For example, there's been a bug-reporting feature [in Linux] since GNOME 97

Here I am using GNOME 2.6 like a sucker! I'm 94.4 versions out of date.

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[GooTi]

...and it runs on fast machines.

That's the easy part. The difficult part is to scale down.

I'm posting this here for visibility

[bonch]

The grandparent post is a REPOST from anti-slash's db tool. Someone else wrote it in the past and it was modded up to +5, then their searchable db tool catalogued it for easy reposting when the topic comes up again.

Mods, visit Anti-Slash if you don't want to be duped--they do this almost every single day, and they list them on the front page and mock you.

Re:I'm posting this here for visibility

[be-fan]

Asshole. I mean, literally. I clicked on their forum, on a message titled "re: in defense of /." and got the goatse.cx guy. Urg...

Re:Linux will take-off...

[Master of Transhuman]

You missed my point. If they turn on that firewall by default, a lot of "grandma" home users - the ones the Windows trolls think are only served by Windows - are gonna suddenly get cut off from their email, their ISP, whatever. Panic time, supposedly.

The point the OP was making was that a Linux firewall is a nuisance and a problem for casual users.

Well, now that problem is a problem for Windows users.

You may be right that the built-in firewall is crap - probably are right. I don't use it, I use Kerio. My point was that people who don't use are gonna have to find out how to turn it off if they don't want to use it.

And as recent articles have said, given the state of the Internet today, people without firewalls and antivirus have no business being on it. Were you aware that THIRTY-THREE PERCENT OF THE SPAM comes from home users machines being hijacked by spammers because they have no firewall and no AV?

It's not an "elitist attitude" - it's a fact. People who don't know how to take at least basic precautions shouldn't be on the Net because they are helping screw it up for everyone.

Re:Uh, no it doesn't

[be-fan]

No. Just, no. There are:

The Common Controls. This is used by most straight-Win32 apps.

The Microsoft Office toolkit. This is used by MS Office.

The .NET toolkit. This is used by Visual Studio.NET.

These are just the big ones. Popular Windows apps commonly use seperate toolkits. iTunes and Quicktime have very non-native-looking ports. Lots of apps use Borland VCL. OpenOffice uses its native toolkit. Adobe Photoshop Album uses Qt. There are a bunch more less-used ones too.

I'll leave it up to others...

[leonbrooks]

...to explain the birds and the bees to you. (-:

Re:Linux will take-off...

[ratsnapple tea]

"It's not an 'elitist attitude' - it's a fact. People who don't know how to take at least basic precautions shouldn't be on the Net because they are helping screw it up for everyone."

So in your utopian wet dream, the only people allowed on the internet are geeks? Explain to me again how that isn't elitist.

Look, you have to understand that not everyone has the time nor the inclination to learn how to fully secure their systems, and they shouldn't be expected to. If you want to blame someone for "helping screw it up for everyone," blame Microsoft. Don't blame users who have better things to do with their time than read the latest SecurityFocus alert.

Re:Basics tasks & understanding of the UI (on

[cyways]

There was a study done recently with a group of 20 users who had never used a computer before.

So what? Most times the issue is introducing Linux desktops as a replacement to Windows desktops. A test that puts a bunch of totally inexperienced users in front of Linux and Windows has no relevance in 90%+ of real-life installations. The real problem is that most people using computers in office settings are already familiar with Windows, already familiar with MS Office, and already familiar with IE and Outlook Express. Giving them a new desktop with different icons, a start menu full of new, unfamiliar programs, a different office suite, a different browser, and a different mail client can easily become a support and training nightmare. Most admins I talk to (who all use Linux as a server plaform) balk at the notion of converting desktops to Linux because they fear a never-ending array of support issues. And, since most of these admins have little or no Linux experience (relying as they do on me for that), they certainly don't feel comfortable providing the support and training their users will need to survive the transition.

Whenever I read any of these "desktop Linux" discussions, it seems to me the people posting have little or no experience actually supporting real people using Linux for everyday activities. This discussion, for instance, quickly devolved into debates about widgets and toolboxes, issues that have NO relevance to putting real people in real office situations in front of a Linux desktop. While I've used Linux everyday for about ten years now, I still have a WinXP desktop and use MS Office both because they are familiar, and because they get the job done. All my Linux work is done at the command line via SSH sessions in PuTTY.

Re:Linux will take-off...

[Master of Transhuman]

No, moron, geeks are not the only people who should use the Net.

Neither are drunk drivers the only people who should be on the road.

The same applies to the Net - if you are contributing to the spam and viruses that are ruining the Net, get the fuck off. This is a public utility and should not be screwed up by morons.

And I DO blame Microsoft for this mess as well.