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Follow Up to "Linux's Achilles Heel"
donheff writes "Fred Langa has posted an Informationweek online followup to his "Linux's Achilles Heel" column that drew a lot of attention on slashdot recently. He responds to several of the most common criticisms and 'posits that high-priced commercial Linux vendors are on a suicidal course, unless they lower prices to accentuate their advantages over Windows.'"
Achilles Heel?
...Don't hurt me! I'm not the one making the Troy references!...
That Linux is a terrible actor with a great body?
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
The price from suse for five copies of linux is $598. Isn't this still almost half the price of Microsoft Operating Systems?
It would be good if the Linux community, as a whole, saw these criticisms in a positive light rather than getting our collective backs up and getting on the defensive. If Linux is ever going to replace Windows, we all have to be prepared to listen to criticism and then do something to correct the weaknesses, even if the weaknesses are only perceived, because to the perceiver, perception is reality.
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Apple has already accomplished this with BSD and OS X. Looking at the Java Desktop System, I think that this is Sun's endgame as well. For now they'll leverage everything Linux, then slowly replace all programs with Java ones, and the Desktop with Java Looking Glass. It's hard to say how it will work out, but I wish them the best.
... that it is a defacto standard system that runs the same basic flavor of *NIX on multiple hardware platforms, irrespective of distribution, CPU type, 32-bit vs. 64-bit, 1-way vs. N-way processors, etc.
I don't.
It is exactly this sort of shit that nearly killed UNIX in the 1980s and allowed Microsoft the opportunity to supplant technically superior systems with their shoddy software and then leverage that toehold into a desktop monopoly.
Fragmentation is bad for everyone. Sun, HP, et. al. made this mistake before. If they insist on repeating it (and I believe Sun is perfectly capable of repeating acts of inane stupidity perpetually, as they really do seem to have difficulty learning from past mistakes -- remember sunview, openwindows, etc.) they will meet the same fate as before, this time with no one to rescue them.
Apple is different, in that they have always had their own OS and their own niche, and have used their underlying BSD system to actually broaden that platform some. What you are describing for Sun et. al. is a narrowing of their (Linux) platform, and undermining one of the great values of Linux
Lose that and your right back to the state of UNIX circa 1990, and that wasn't a pretty picture (or a viable state of affairs, with every hardware manufacturer's proprietary system incompatible with everyone elses).
Fragmentation is bad, and I do not "wish the best" for anyone trying to fragment the free software world in general and Linux in particular. Quite the opposite: I hope any such efforts fail miserably and teach a lesson certain parties seem quite challenged to learn, no matter how often they burn themselves trying.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
No matter how Pro-Linux anyone is they have to realize that charging as much for a distro of Linux as a copy of Windows XP is wrong. Constantly I read on Slashdot how MS is overpriced and Windows XP is not worth even half of what the retail price is but when this guy comes out and says that commerical distos need to reduce their prices the pro-Linux slashdotters go wild and a flameware ensues. I think what he said that set everyone off was that the quality was lacking in the Linux distros and that what was made them worth less then the asking price, what he should have said is that the prices are ridiculous for both commerical Linux and Windows because both are in fact priced outrageously. The price points set by Microsoft have made their OS one of the most pirated peices of software on the planet and even with their size and influence they know that there is no way to ever experience complete success against piracy of their product. We do not want the commerical Linuxs to experience the same problem or else it will slow their development because the do not have the resources of a Microsoft or an Adobe to live off of. Commerical Linux needs to lower its prices and start selling itself as what it really is, a MS alternative that may take a bit more effort to get off and running but will pay dividends down the road.
Please do not let scientific accuracy interfere with the intended humourous/interesting/insightful value of this comment
His recommendation that vendors lower prices is taking htings much too simply. As a person whose job it is to sell Linux to non-Linux shops, I can tell you there are two conversations here: 1)Linux on the server - here it is already price advantaged as most Linux deployments in server rooms are replacements for mainframe/solaris/sco enviroments and WAY cheaper than those solutions 2)Linux on the desktop - here the price issue of the distry is a secondary concern. Customers worry first about retraining, security, disruption of business due to change, application compatibility, vendor support, price of the productivity suite (Office/Openoffice) then the price of the OS.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
Langa's criticism sounds fair to me. I've been there, done that so many times. Official spec sheet says product X supports product Y. You have product Y. You buy product X. Product Y doesn't work with it. You complain. Then you hear variations on the following theme
*Very few of our customers are using product Y.
*Personally, I would never have recommended product Y.
*Why are you using product Y? Product Z is so much better.
*You don't really need to have product Y work with product X.
*By "support," all we meant is basic functionality. It does allow product Y to frangulate over the standard three-gnorgl raniseft. I know that the main selling point of product Y is that it can frangulate over eight gnorgls more than standard products, but we only support the basic functionality.
*Anyone knowledgeable could have told you that X's support for Y sucks. It was your dumb fault for believing the spec sheet.
*We've found that most of our customers LIKE having Product Y hang, freeze, and emit smoke.
*Oh, we're sorry about that, but it was marketing that put that on the spec sheet, not engineering.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Zealots aside, I agree with this article and the former article. It's been a frequent issue for me when installing many different Linux distributions that:
1. It's not a surprise if my network card works.
2. It's a mild surprise if my sound card works.
3. (up until recently) It'd amaze me if my graphics card worked to its full potential.
Net, sound and graphics are the most important peripherals that should work flawlessly. Sound and graphics especially, as they're the sensory output of your computer, without them you don't know what's going on.
Linux does not have the same quality of driver database as Microsoft's OSes do. This is merely because Microsoft is dominant. Perhaps a sweet way to handle the problem would be to create some kind of abstraction layer that allowed you to use vendor-supplied Windows drivers under Linux, but that is extremely unrealistic, and it'd be slow and bloated (someone will now pipe up and tell me that it is being worked on).
Linux has been given a boost by the recent dominance of particular audio chips from Creative (such as the EMU10K1) and graphics chipsets from ATI and nVidia.
Sadly, Linux drivers are provided mainly by people who have some hardware that doesn't work under Linux. So they start a driver for it, get far enough for the driver to work well enough for their needs, and then leave it to deteriorate over time without any attention paid to it, as they change hardware. End users then get some kind of beta thing that hasnt been worked on for 3 years but still have to use it. This is the hardware manufacturers fault -- Linux devrs dont have the money to buy and reverse-engineer every piece of hardware. They need the specs, and ultimately they need the vendor to make a Linux driver by proxy, as vendors do for Windows.
Currently though, you don't look bad for not making a Linux driver. People don't open the box and say "wtf is this? No linux driver?!", because they morbidly expect Linux support to be limited. In the domain of onboard sound or graphics, or newer hardware, Linux support is the exception rather than the rule. Vendors need some good reason to add Linux support, and it's not up to me to decide what that reason would be. "Thanks" is not good enough.
I should also mention that even if most home Linux users do obtain a driver for some hardware, they'd be at pains to find out how to install/compile the damn thing, especially if it involves recompiling the kernel.
I'm not flaming Linux, I don't need a crock of shit from the zealot crowd telling me I'm an idiot faggot and so on, I'm just being realistic and saying there is work to be done.
What I'd like to see in the future is a Universal Driver Abstraction Layer, some kind of compile-once-run-many virtual machine that allows the same drivers to work on any OS that supports it, the only problem is that OSes make very different demands of the drivers so this may never come into fruition.
A great example is one of my early posts about how I didn't trust Linux filesystems, and that I'd lost files on numerous occasions due to power failures on ext2 systems. I went back and looked through my whole archive, but apparently this thread was before the cutoff date for archiving... lost to history.
Roughly summarizing, I posted that I didn't trust Linux in a production environment because ext2 was unreliable: you couldn't trust it in a power failure. I didn't get EVEN ONE useful response. What I got, instead, were a mix of (approximately):
1) "Well, gee, I've lost power 14,232 times and I've never lost a file"; (ie, problem doesn't exist)
2) "You should always have backups"; (problem is unimportant)
3) "You're an idiot, you should have copied a backup superblock. Moron. Go play with Windows." (problem is stupid user)
4) "I lost power to my NT machine and I lost 23,124 files!' (NT is worse so it's okay for Linux to suck.)
It was really interesting to see how different the posts were when I mentioned that a couple of years later. I can't find that post now, but by that time, Linux had journaled filesystems. We had a fairly interesting commentary back and forth about how NT 4.0 didn't really have journaling, and that it wasn't until 2K that NTFS was truly robust. But everyone agreed that journaling was good, now that Linux had it. Pretty significant shift in stance, eh?
I've seen this so many times that I'm forced to conclude it's some kind of defense mechanism.... if you really love your pet project, and it has shortcomings, gloss over them or dismiss them as unimportant. I think we would be wise to be more aware of this, and that users in general don't request things for no reason at all. They may just need education. It may be simple ignorance on how to approach the problem in Linux.
Chewing them out, on the other hand, for not manually repairing their filesystems by copying a backup superblock, well.... that's stupider than their not knowing how.
This is Linux FUD week it seems
How are the Information Week articles FUD*? They looked to me to be well-documented and logical. Plus, he could have flamed the idiots that flamed him in...and didn't. He actually gave them a respect they didn't deserve.
*by the MS definition, of course.
The users. I'm a regular linux evangelist, but when i see feedback like this guy got from us - accusing him of lying, being an idiot, working clandestinely for Microsoft, SCO or the Christian Right... I just feel ashamed and want to distance myself from the whole thing. These knee-jerk reactionaries, zealots and narrow-minded elitists make us all look like fools and tarnish the image of Linux far more than some guy who can't get his soundcard to work. It has to stop.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
XP Home comes with an industry standard web server?
Irrelevant, as the original poster's link points to what is touted as a "desktop" version of SuSE, not a server version. But, if you really want, you can get Apache.
XP Home can operate as a full-fledged file server?
With Windows File Sharing, or an FTP server, or an NFS server, sure. Just download it.
With unlimited client-licensed connections?
Nothing stopping you from accepting as many connections with third-party software as you want.
XP Home provides a secure, virus-free work environment for the corporate desktop?
Linux doesn't provide you with one either, so this isn't really a good point for you to be making.
Seems to me that XP Home is a bit overpriced.
Not when you consider that the author's original concern was not with how many different kinds of FTP servers and word processors ship with his OS, but how compatible the OS is with common hardware. Windows is more compatible than Linux. Windows (the version cited) is cheaper. In his view, Linux is therefore overpriced, considering that it costs more than the listed version of Windows yet can't maintain the same level of hardware compatibility. End of story.
All it can do out of the box is play music, watch DVD's, connect to the internet, and download malware while you're trying to get real work done.
Of course, in a corporate environment you would most likely be installing full disk images, complete with all the software you need (and patches) to the client machines, so Windows could "out of the box" do all the things you listed (which no one really cares about on the desktop, except development, depending on the user).
You have an interesting definition of FUD, it would seem.
He bought a Linux distribution for as much money as Windows would have cost. He installed it on his PC. It didn't work as advertised.
He then wrote an article about this, in which he explained what didn't work. Linux activists told him he was lying, hiding facts, actively working against Linux, that he was an idiot, a technical moron, that it was his fault, and that the part that didn't work wasn't actually needed.
Those responses were written by people with very strange ideas of how to build a wide acceptance and support for Linux. They seem to have the idea that any and all forms of criticism is written by people actively against Linux, people who should be taunted, haunted and ridiculed, and their articles hidden, removed or just written of as FUD.
This is inexplicably stupid, and actively working against wide Linux acceptance. Nobody in their right mind switch to a product that is promoted by people who cannot take criticism, people who do not listen to facts, who cannot accept an opinion contrary to their own without ridiculing the other person, people who, for whatever reason, are so paranoid that they think that there could "Never, Ever, Be Anything Wrong With Linux, and therefore anybody who says so is after us".
He bought a product. It didn't work as advertised. It could not be fixed by the support. He has every right to complain, tell everyone what happened, and not be ridiculed, called an idiot, or accused of spreading FUD for doing so.
Calling his article FUD is clueless, and actively working against wide Linux acceptance.
But I guess I am now the person, most likely paid by Microsoft, who should be haunted and taunted for pointing out something as ridiculous (sp?) as that Linux could, in fact, have areas where work needs to be done, and that anybody who has paid for a distribution has every right to write an article about it. Without clueless activists calling him an idiot.
I want to be a part of the Free Software world. I do not, however, want to be a part of a narrowminded world where you cannot under any circumstance listen to criticism, where customers must be experts and are otherwise called "idiots", and where anything negative written or said is a sure sign of mental disabilities or a covert Microsoft operation.
If that is the world of Linux, then I will never tell anyone I love it.