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Linux's Achilles Heel Apparently Revealed
ahab_2001 writes "In Information Week's latest 'Langa Letter', Fred Langa points to something that he calls Linux's 'Achilles' heel': 'New Linux distros still fail a task that Windows 95 -- yes, 95! -- easily handles, namely working with mainstream sound cards.' After lamenting his difficulties in getting a particular sound card to work with nine Linux distros, he concludes that his experience 'empirically shows that, despite its many good points, Linux still has some huge, gaping holes--holes that Windows plugged almost a decade ago.' (Oddball note: Information Week prefaced the e-mail alert pointing to this article by saying 'Occasionally, we have news or analysis of such importance that it warrants a special alert to you.' Hmm...)"
I did set one up once, but all I got out of that was knowing how some weird dude pronounces 'leenucks', whatever that is.
Giving windows credit for working with sound cards gets thing rather backwards don't you think? Considering the MONOPOLY windows has, they don't need to to be compatible and work well with the sound cards. The sound cards need to make sure they work well with windows. Microsoft can do what ever they want and the world must switch it's practices and standards to suit it--which of course is the problem now isn't it.
So I gotta agree with this guy, Linux does have its share of problems, but its not because Linux is deficient in anyway, its just that there is a different mentality about Linux than Windows. Lets take his sound card example, the manufacturer of the sound card had two choices, support Linux and spend money on potentially smaller market, or save that money and focus entirely on Windows. The company probably hoped that some Linux driver coder would just whip up a driver and save them the hassle. That's the wrong mentality, and until companies see Linux as a financial win, these sorts of problems will exist.
Sigh, I can relate with this guy, I've tried and tried but my DLINK DWL-520 rev e PCI wireless card still doesn't work under Linux.
I know that where I work, having a sound card is critical to operation of the company.
I cannot imagine how someone can function without hearing that Ding! each time a new email arrives. I'd be lost, ever wondering, "do I have another Symantec AV warning about an attempted incoming virus message?"
Linux is doomed if it can't even Ding! when email arrives.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
That's good -- put that on the box: "WARNING: Some sound cards suck and are not supported by Linux. Please select a sound card that doesn't suck before purchasing this distribution of Linux. Thank you."
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Doesn't help if you're the nontechnical user stuck with the bad card because the nice man at the store said it works just fine.
Kneejerk response prediction- "I am so SICK of people saying Linux has to work for nontechnical people! If you don't get it then you suxxor and shouldn't have a computer anyway and we're taking over teh desktop anyway!" How, without any non-technical users, is of course a mystery.
Winders does devices well because that's where the market's been. Linux would smoke Winders boxes in all tests if it had better drivers.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
The point is, XP's got drivers for some of those historic cards. If it got a driver into Windows 95, it still works in Windows XP.
Linux's driver history doesn't go back that far... so some hardware that works with Windows just will never work with Linux.
It's no record moment; it is (as-ever) a wake up call to the slashdot croud who perpetually fool themselves as to how good linux is. As this article highlights, failing to interact with such basic hardware as a sound card makes it unviable for mom & pop situations! How can you possibly expect people to have to try 9 different distros just for them to get the music working?
Wake up guys. You need freeze the work geared up towards developers. You need to support these distro's that really make linux child's play. They need the support of as many developers as possible, because unless Linux can really break into the home deskop market it will never suceed truely as a competitor to Microsoft other than in server and techy environments.
People talk about this being the year of linux. Well, i've been reading slashdot for the last 5 years, and every year in Jan - April it's been Linux's year; if only it were true.
It's crap, actually.
I had a dual booting box at work, and my boss, being a total asshole, refused to give me the driver disk for the super jazzy sound card on the damn thing, I guess thinking that music might ruin my productivity. Now for WINDOWS, this was a huge problem, because you couldn't install the drivers without the original cd, don't ask me why. Couldn't download them from the site, couldn't do crap.
With Linux, on the other hand, the card autodetected and played fine, using, of course, the hacked up, jury-rigged driver that linux always has to use because NO MAJOR SOUND CARD VENDOR RELEASES LINUX DRIVERS, a point not mentioned by the dumbass who wrote the article.
What was the card, you ask? Soundblaster Audigy Platinum To my tiny brain, that would qualify as mainstream.
Thus the point is proven totally false by the fact that Linux is capable of doing 2 things a Windows 2000 box couldn't: 1) use a mainstream sound card, and 2) be a server.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Winders does devices well because that's where the market's been. Linux would smoke Winders boxes in all tests if it had better drivers.
You have the cause and effect backward. Windows has drivers because it's popular. Popularity came first, vendors bending over backward to help Windows work with their products came as a result. The technical framework for third-party drivers is there for Linux. But it's not being used by most vendors.
You *are* aware that Microsoft doesn't write the drivers for most devices that work with Windows, right? It's the hardware manufacturer that makes the devcice that does that work.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Now it can't go mainstream because one pundit has trouble with one easily-replaced $10 sound card. Next, they'll say it can't go mainstream because the borders on the "Cancel" buttons are not quite the right shade, or because you can't install MS security patches.
You know hardware would be easier to support if the companies that make the hardware would either supply more information for people to write the device drivers or supply linux drivers for download.
Only so much can be done without the needed info.
(But yes, things like this are quite annoying to Joe Computer User)
-- taking over the world, we are.
Linux isn't all that great at sound, though the article is complete FUD. I've never had a problem running a Soundblaster card on a Linux machine. They always autodetect fine. And since Soundblaster is about the most common soundcard on the market...
At any rate, I've hardly ever had a linux machine with a soundcard in it. I hardly ever have the GUI enabled. If I want to play games, I use my windoze box...that's what it's there for, to be a toy.
That's what Windows is for. Not to do anything real, or useful. Can't check your email on it, or browse the internet without worrying that its executing code from every damn website, or that its autorunning attachments. Doesn't come with any useful compilers or development tools. The included webserver sucks. Windows is a toy, and it has always been a toy, and the fact that people are looking at a kick-ass powertool and complaining that it's not a toy is absurd.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This is assuming we give a shit about average mom + pop situations. Personally, I use Linux for development and my servers.
And therein lies the problem - albeit in a very in-elloquent manner, you've highlighted perfectly how linux dev's and advocats simply don't appreciate the problem - and arguablly won't for a few more years to come.
Some sound cards suck and are not supported by Linux
Shouldn't a reliable OS support all cards and options, regardless of who makes them and how good or bad they are? A former PHB of mine made this observation to me once when we were battling a video card he had bought by the crate from Vietnam ($20 for supposedly super high graphic rendering capabilities).
So after we encounter this junk SVGA card refusing to operate properly, the PHB (who didn't want to accept responsibility for having paid $10K for a big box of garbage) said "if that operating system was any good, it would anticipate unknown cards, you know, like probe it and figure it out, and make it work right. Your operating system is junk, not my cards."
Of course, he was talking about Windows NT Workstation. And no, they crashed in 98 and 95 as well... even though the box sidepanel clearly said all those operating systems were supported.
Course, there were at least a dozen misspelled words and typos - that should have been a clue too. And if that wasn't enough, the cards had wire jumpers snaked all over - apparently someone tried fixing a lot of known post-production problems (probably bought the boards from a legit manufacturer who was throwing them out as bad design, and tried to jumper around the problems). According to the PHB, the presence of these wires meant "they had great quality control because unlike the other cards, you can see they've fixed things." Oh, and when you called the international number listed for tech support, I would have sworn we reached a village phone someplace in rural Vietnam...
So per the article writer's problem with soundcards, my suggestion is to send him to PHB re-education camp. I think they have those in Vietnam too. Now if he could just get that soundcard to work in his Mac/Sparcstation/etc...
*scoove*
Ok, so we have one guy who couldn't get one un-named sound card to work under Linux. All we know is it's "An utterly mainstream Intel Motherboard". Uhh, yah, thanks for the details so someone can replicate your findings, Fred.
The fact that there's onboard sound, or a soundcard that isn't supported by Linux just isn't too surprising. Why this gets posted as "news", or as "Linux's achilles heal" is beyond me. Is 'ol Fred going to buy a soundcard for his Mac, and then pronounce that lack of support for every soundcard to be the bain of the Macintosh?
I'm actually surprised sound support for Linux is as good as it is. The sound on my laptop worked out of the box when I installed RH9 on it, a first for me! There's also sound support for my N-Force motherboard. Sound support is actually something that's matured quite a bit in the last few years.
I won't say Linux is perfect. There's plenty of things to complain about as far as Linux desktop usage is concerned. My personal complaint is the fact that copy/paste support is still kind of crappy. I can copy/paste between emacs sessions (as long as they remain open), but I can't copy/paste from emacs to somewhere else. That's just pathetic. Windows has supported universal copy/paste since 3.1
AccountKiller
I'm not sure I see the problem. You were the one claiming that Linux will never take over the desktop.
He said 'so what? I don't want it on the desktop'.
So from his perspective, there isn't a problem!
One shouldn't have to should they?
I personally have never had any problems with sound, but at the same time I amused by all of these comments. Pick one: "He's either dumb" or "He should have checked into before installing linux".
Granted as somebody posted, he did not list his video card, but that does not mean he did not discover some previously unknown bug.
Sig it.
Yes, if Linux is going to be the OS for newbies. Yes, if Linux is going to be the OS for the desktop. The users won't care *why* it doesn't work, just *that* it doesn't work.
Man, Toyota will never cut it as a car company. I went to put the engine from my '67 Ford in my '98 Corolla and none of the parts matched at all! The Linux community has been asking, wheedling, begging, and probably even bribing device makers into releasing drivers or even just specs to help developers write their own drivers. What more can the Linux community do? If this guy didn't check for compatibility before exepecting something to work, why should anyone feel sympathy for his plight? You know what, I tried installing Windows instead of Mac OS 8.5 on my iMac and it didn't work... but Linux has been running on that platform for several years.
I do not have a signature
This is assuming we give a shit about average mom + pop situations. Personally, I use Linux for development and my servers. If you want an OS for a mom + pop situation, get Mac OS X.
/really/ doesn't want to teach my dad how to use UNIX. We've had this discussion, believe me.
But you can't have it both ways; you can't say 'Linux will conquer the desktop world' as many people seem to do, and then simultaneously say '...but we don't give a shit about average mom + pop situations.'
Linux as a server environment is great; I run two fairly high-load Linux servers in a colocation center, and -- despite my periodic grumbling about RPM dependency nightmares -- I am more than happy with the performance I get out of them.
But Linux as a desktop environment? I would not want to try and introduce my parents to Linux as a desktop environment in the state any of the current distributions are in. Yah, getting printing working under Linux is certainly doable; install CUPS and the appropriate driver, configure it all, poke at the CUPS internal webserver if you need to check things out, etc. I'm more than willing to take the plunge on that. But I don't want to have to explain CUPS to my parents; they're used to a Windows box where they can go to Best Buy, buy a printer, plug it in, and put in a driver CD. Or the new digicam they just bought; they want to be able to plug the camera into their computer and get their images out into a graphical program where they can e-mail it. They don't want to have to go looking for drivers for digicams for Linux or whatever, they want to just plug it in and put in the CD.
And for another one, let's go into security updates. Sure, Linux (and open source in general) have a much better track record than Windows of fixing security problems! That's great for sysadmins like myself, but it's not going to do a whit of good in some cases; my parents aren't going to want to stay on Bugtraq to discover that their print daemon has a remote-root exploit they'll need to download a patch for and recompile. They're used to Windows Update, where it'll find the critical updates and download them, then prompt them to install. They don't have to worry about it.
This isn't to say 'Linux sux!' or anything like that; I happen to think it's a great UNIX server and dev environment, and am happy with my own Linux boxes. BUT, that notwithstanding, it's not a desktop environment I would like to introduce my father to. The investment in user education is more than I want to get into; my father doesn't want to have to learn about autoconf and make, or patch and diff, or worry about watching Bugtraq or whatever. He just wants to be able to surf the web, print things, and use Word and Excel. And my mother, a former AIX user, would feel at home in Linux userland, but doesn't want to muck about with security fixes and upgrades, and
And my situation isn't completely different than a lot of people's; there are some success stories with teaching parents or relatives enough to encourage Linux adoption, but there are also lots of failure stories. And 'well, I can't use my new digicam because I'm running Debian' is not good sales pitch to other potential Linux users.
If the Linux world is fine with that, then that's great; Linux is great in the server arena, and within that area it does what it does very well. But if Linux wants to take over the desktop world, right now, it's not as approachable as it needs to be in order to be an effective desktop OS for 'mom + pop' situations...and it needs to approach those situations if Linux is to 'conquer the desktop world.' I'd love to see Linux become a solution that I could give to my parents and know they'd be on a stable OS; in the meantime, as you say, the desktop UNIX variant of choice for non-techy end users seems to be MacOS X.
There's my $0.02. (Or more like $0.20, since this post was a little on the long side...)
--Rachel
There are two things that really bother me that make me believe this person flat out fabricated their testing:
1) The system is a brand new, state of the art, Intel system. Windows 95 wouldn't recognize half of the components on the system. It wouldn't recognize the USB, it wouldn't recognize the chipsets, it wouldn't recognize the video, etc.
To get all of this to work, he would have to download drivers from Intel - assuming they're even available (unlikely). If he did download drivers, then that probably included the sound driver - game over.
2) It is inferred that the sound card is very recent technology. That being the case, Microsoft must have been exceedingly good to create drivers 9 years in advance!
It's also worth recognizing that Intel is notorious for making hardware that is dependent on specific Windows functions. We all owe Intel a big thanks for the wonderful WinModem.
LarryD
Bush makes our troops prey...
oh one more thing...
I think going to 9 different distros hoping one would have the driver is ridiculous.
If there's a driver for it, chances are that either all, or none, of the distros will have it.
Wow, one piece of hardware isn't supported.. It's a shame, but shit happens.. Check it's supported before you buy. Yes all hardware supports Windows, but that's hardly an achievement by Windows, it just shows off the power of monopoly.
I know a lot more about linux than my mother and I think I know how and where to look for information. I'd have more difficulty figuring out the compatibility of hardware on linux than I would on windows. When I can't find a compatibility information for windows for some arcane webcam a friend owns, I fault the manufacturer for not supplying adequate information. But I would be able to say from their website that the webcam would work with what the manufacturer supplies with its product, because I've been able to before with many other products. All the relevant information I get is from a single, logical site. The MS site doesn't come into it, because the power of MS has pretty much ensured that manufacturers tell us whether and how they're compatible.
Check it's supported before you buy.
If the webcam was brand new, I would look at the box. If there's an XP logo I know it will work, without a doubt. No testing required. No searching required. Me not being the shopping type, I find the box info on the product page. I expect it there and it is in almost all cases.
Some manufacturers don't support their products well at all, then I'm down to OEM hunting or mailing them a complaint; again no MS involvement. Manufacturer's fault. I wouldn't expect my mother to know what OEM stands for, let alone know how to find it. I steer her away from habitually getting poorly supported products, because she's about 20,000km away from me. She's constantly on the lookout for a techie in her area to help her when she gets something unsupported... (but that's another story).
Lets take a look at a webcam driver for linux. First place I'd look: the manufacturer's site. beforehand I might sift through the CD that it came with in some vague hope. In most cases it will be no more than one drivers if anything. Often there won't be any support or information pages on compatibility (let alone useability). Where to now? I don't instinctively fault the manufacturer for not having it. Why? Because for I'm not really expecting a driver from them. Who's forcing them to? Why would they bother?
I now must go to google and from there to the webcam linux module site(s) and a myriad of messageboards, newsgroups and howto pages. I don't expect an answer from anywhere that doesn't include "you'll need to recompile your kernel" by someone in jest or otherwise or something along the lines of "we haven't been able to test this yet, but it works with XYZ, so it should work with your device".
There's no single way of dealing with peripheral support on linux. There is on windows. MS made sure of that. Who's making sure that people can expect without chance that a driver exists for linux when they get something out of the box?
Wow, one piece of hardware isn't supported.. It's a shame, but shit happens..
It's not simply one piece. You've got blinders on if you don't see the bigger picture. A printer here, a sound card there are just the tip of the iceberg. Take any random less-prevalent USB device. Can you say by only checking the manufacturer's site if it will work on linux?
Yes all hardware supports Windows, but that's hardly an achievement by Windows, it just shows off the power of monopoly.
Power brings with it the ability to have an impact and achieve something. I wish linux had the power to achieve half the of the things MS has in the peripherals market.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.