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Exploring Linux Desktop Myths
Krafty Koder writes "Over at Newsforge (Part of OSTG, Slashdot's Parent) there's an interesting article that attempts to dispells the myth that Linux isn't ready for the desktop or that Windows still beats Linux.
Three myths are explored - that Linux is harder to use, difficult to install and that there's not enough apps ."
Apparently they changed their name to the Open Source Technology Group.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
When you buy a new PC, Windows comes pre-installed on it. You don't have to go through the process that Linux requires. The hardware manufacturer already rejected modem X, figured out that Wi-Fi adapter Y is the one to include with the computer, etc. The OEM did all the hard work for you. Even when you give a user the Windows XP CD to install, he is already ahead of the game in that he knows the OEM already configured the hardware to work with XP.
Just a minor point, but the last time I ordered a new amd64 shuttle box, I requested it dual-boot XP and the 64 bit version of fedora core 2. XP was no problem, but fedora didn't support the SATA chipset contained within the box, so I either had to go with an older IDE based hard drive or just go with XP until the driver was updated by the manufacturer of the chipset. I chose to keep my snazzy new SATA drive and wait for linux to catch up. That was four months ago.
Sometimes the problem isn't that "most" people will have a problem with linux distros, but that the cutting edge technology folks aren't able to get linux support for simple things like chipsets. Once I get SATA support, I'll be the first to install a 64 bit version of linux. Until then, it's XP for me...
In 1984, Steve Jobs invented the concept of homo-computing which basically was Apple directing the development of personal computers with other companies complementing the centric homogenious platform in very limited and controlled ways. Apple was succesful for a while because of the belief at the time that proprietary computing was the way forward. However, Apple eventually lost steam as Microsoft built the Windows operating system based on the concept of hetero-computing which brought together all the members of the computer industry. Microsoft's idea was that if everybody worked together to make a bigger pie, the rewards for each individual company would far surpass those under Apple's feudal system. The following golden decade for the computer industry made Microsoft the richest company in the world with the majority of its employes becoming millionaires or even billionaires. During this period, however, Apple suffered greatly from the lack of innovation and interaction with the rest of the industry. They never really recovered as even today they merely offer enhanced technologies from the 80s (notably the user interface: hand input device and window menu location). Today, homo-computing accounts for less than 2% of the entire computer market. On the rise is a new concept, mono-computing. A number of indivuals, working separately in free underground locations, are building the Linux operating system. It is expected that the computer industry will suffer as the lack of financial rewards, other than paying support for fixing a multitude of problems, discourages intellectual property research and technological development in general. Operating system level innovation will probably nearly disapear once the Linux developers have finished pillaging the intellectual property of existing Unix systems. The paper tissue and adult content delivery industries are currently experiencing a peak, a possible side-effect of the growth of mono-computing development.
- Word Processor
- Spreadsheet
- Presentation Software
- Web Browser
- CD Player
The first three are nicely handled by Open Office.The fourth is handled by Netscape, Mozilla, Konquerer, and perhaps others.
The fifth has several nice apps that work just fine.
OK -- playing DVDs is not easy. But you do get a well-functioning X-Windows system which is an add-on for windows.
Yes, the Open Office does not have 100% of the features of Microsoft Office, but I can say that it has 100% of the features that I use on a regular basis.
Unfortunately there are few administration tools for software packages that run only on Windows, although these are getting upgraded to platform-independent versions as time goes on.
Bottom line: I still have a windows machine along with my linux machines, but guess where I do most of my work?
-----------------------------------------
Computeri non cogitant, ergo non sunt
Your so incredibly right. Linux is in desperet need of something as simple as the windows install sheild so you dont have to read a manual to install anything. Other then that, I think linux is leaps and bounds head of what joe average gives it credit for.
You mean just like you don't have to on Linux, either? Thanks for re-affirming the fact that difficult application installation on Linux is a myth.
Funny you mention that. InstallShield is available for vendors to use if they want to create an installer for Linux.
Why the heck vendors are sticking with their own crappy command-line-only installs is really beyond me. Only one I know of that uses IS for Linux is if you download the Java NetBeans Cobundle.
Actually, UnrealTournament 2004 may also use ISX. I remember some nifty Java installer....
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
I think the issue here is you're more likely to have to use make to install FREE software on linux. Just as you would use it to install FREE software on the Mac. If you're BUYING software for linux, you can bet you'll get an installer or an rpm or something. That's one of the things I don't see mentioned a lot is that we're comparing the ease of install of a corporation's proprietary software to the ease of install of in-progress open source stuff. Most things that you would pay for otherwise, such as office suites, web browsers, etc. do have installers (Open Office, Mozilla, etc). The things that you use make to install you probably don't even have access to on an M$ system. It's like complaining that Dell sent you a free graphics card but you ahve to install it yourself when you could have paid Best Buy $200 to install it. It's not quite fair to compare the M$ office installer to a network sniffer program you found for free on some h4x0r d00d's site. It seems this happens a lot.
My experience with Windows is that, so long as nothing goes wrong, there isn't much maintenance. But, when problems arise, even finding documentation on how to fix things is a problem, despite its popularity.
Recently, I needed to change the subnet on the public side of a group of computers, including a Win2K server and some Linux boxes. The Linux boxes took 5 minutes each, and all the daemons adjusted to the changes with a simple 'service XXX restart'. Never even had to reset the hardware.
It also took 5 minutes to change the IP on the Win2K box... but it required a restart... and several very important things didn't come back afterwards (Exchange and RAS in particular). It took two days to track down WHY, because everything looked correct.
Turned out that the settings were correct, but neither Exchange nor RAS are tolerant of changes to the binding order of interfaces, and any significant change (like an IP) to an interface changes its binding order... making it invisible to both applications. This isn't documented in anyplace convenient; I only found it by tracking down specific error message text via GOOGLE, piecing together information off of several of the results, finally finding a very nice MSKB article on the subject... which hadn't appeared in the GOOGLE search results!
I'm now fighting a problem where this same machine has decided that its second and third net cards are deaf... They exist, they detect the network, Win2K says they're working, but the rest of the network can't talk to them. And the customer gets frustrated, while I try to find SOMETHING on the net that would explain the behaviour. I could have fixed this problem within an hour under Linux...
As Dogbert said, "We have the very best kind of evidence. Anecdotal!
In which universe was IE first of anything? First horribly written web browser? First web browser to show that yes, a script kiddie really can infect your computer just by viewing a web page?
The first "big" browser was NCSA Mosiac, from which Netscape sprang in the early nineties. Netscape launched and made themselves a nice little name with this "Interweb" thingy, and started to talk about making the OS irrelevent. This got Bill nervous, so Microsoft then finally bit the bullet, gave up on MSN and created Internet Explorer. It wasn't even until Internet Explorer 4 that it was worth a damn!
http://www.corespace.net/slashdot.jpg
That is what I see in Firefox 0.9.2 on Windows and Linux.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Actually, UnrealTournament 2004 may also use ISX.
UT2004 actually uses the excellent Loki setup tools that are now maintained at icculus.
Wherever you go, there you are!
A large variety of useful applications are simply not available on things like the red hat network (so there goes up2date).
Up2date is great for upgrading packages that I already have installed during the first little while after I buy the operating system (at the moment, I think I have 3 years, but only because I bought "Enterprise Linux" which costs more than MS Windows, so there goes the cheaper concept.
Up2date will get me new software if I happen to know what the package name that I want is. For instance I wanted to install GVIM. The redhat network package for Enterprise Linux was compiled without support for the GUI, alas. This is what I had to do to get GVIM.
I suppose I could have gone to the VIM website, and download their version of the vim RPMs, and ran rpm --install on that. It probably even would have worked, but I don't know for sure that vim.org has the same RPM version, if it installs everything in the same place, and what up2date would think about that package. I have only been using Linux for approximately 2 years at this point, so it is perhaps understandable that a complete newbie like myself would find the various methods of software installation extremely complex.
Next topic: configuration
My biggest complaint against linux on the desktop is the extreme absurdity of some types of configuration. My linux workstation is my work machine, and so it has to do things like run apache and our application server (Interchange if you are curious -- http://www.icdevgroup.org).
Well... Installing apache was easy. Installing Interchange was hard. It requires nonthreaded perl, but a gazillion things require the existing threaded perl 5.8.3 that came with the OS. So, I build my own perl from source, and then copied into /usr/local instead of /usr, and then hacked at the Interchange source so that it looked in this new location...
Why not just uninstall the old perl? Because I can't. When I issued the
command, I encountered dozens of errors. And I couldn't upgrade -- they were the same version, just with different compiler switches set.
Oh, then I got an error that my system was set to the incorrect language encoding. I'm not 100% sure I understand what that means even having fixed it -- but here's what I had to do
Ok... so... exactly what does i18n stand for? Having a normal computer user find the i18n configuration file and hack at it isn't reasonable. Especially if you don't tell them that the error is in i18n. Now a normal user might not be trying to install Interchange, but hell, even our sysadmin wasted 4 hours figuring out what config file to change.
My point? Linux on the desktop is a freaking toy until a user can do everything they need to without opening a terminal or becoming root ever.
This includes installing software, configuring the machine, and running applications.
Incidentally, Windows crashes since I installed XP (2 years): at least 10, at most 15.
Linux crashes since I installed Red Hat Linux (first v. 7.2, now EL 3 WS, approx 18 months): at least 10, at most 15.
My definition of a crash is anything that goes wrong to which the only easy solution is either pressing the power button or typing "init 6".
The one big thing I still use Windows for is to run Visio. And I do some rather complex stuff with it at times, that simple drawing tools cannot compare to, such as programming my own shapes. Anyone have this for Linux (even commercial payware) or BSD?
And for those who are thinking of trying an exploit on me ... it's not connected to the net.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Slashdot is a very bad example. Its HTML markup is horribly invalid. The Slashcode devs are working on getting it fixed (albeit too slowly IMO). Check these links out:
Retooling Slashdot
Redesigning Slashdot
Fixed XHTML in Slashcode
The last one is a slashcode user who fixed most of the issues all by himself. So if you want to blame someone blame the slashcode devs not Firefox.
"Second, if I want to use the nVidia drivers (which nVidia actually provides, bravo!), then all I have to do is RECOMPILE THE KERNEL!"
Uh... huh?? You lost me here. The NVidia installer provides a bunch of pre-compiled modules for certain kernel versions. If your kernel version doesn't match, then it tries to compile a module for you. No kernel recompilation is necessary.
Mandrake will ASSUME you want this and directly asks you. With a beginner install I believe the default is "yes", as well.
Never confuse volume with power.
No it doesn't have any problems displaying open/close form tags. If IE is not displaying the extra new lines then it's actually doing it wrong. Form tags, as specified in the w3 standard are block-level elements.
Block-level elements are those elements of the document language that, by default, are formatted visually as blocks (e.g., paragraphs). Inline elements are those elements of the document language that do not cause paragraph breaks (e.g., pieces of text, inline images, etc.).
That is why you get the extra space around the element. This is the intended behavior of form elements. If you want to get rid of the space, as mentioned, use a style sheet of margin:0; or display: inline;
[alk]
i18n = internationalization
It's shorter
You're the one spreading FUD.
"1) read the security bulliten"
I did not even know that libpng had a security issue....Yet it was patched.
"2) locate and download the specific files that patch or replace the library"
This was very tough, when running KDE my little SuSEwatcher icon turned red. Red is not a good color...
"3) install them with what will likely be a CLI package manager"
I clicked once on susewatcher, which is a graphical icon and it said something about security updates being available. I then clicked on a button that said start online update....By the way, you can also configure Yast to do automatic updates.
"4) determine and re-compile each app that has a dependancy on that library"
Oh such a pain, SuSE online update launched, not once having to have to invoke the CLI. Patches were already selected all I had to do was select next and voila! they were installed. No need for a reboot, unless it was a kernel update.
"5)(optional) take the time it takes to apply the 'many eyes' principal to the resulting patched source and contribute any fixes he writes."
A developer has that option, at least its there.
Now going back to that kernel update, if you're running an Nvidia card with the Nvidia driver its likely to fail loading, dumping the user back to a Command line interface. It would be nice upon the module failing to load that this would either invoke the loading of a non-accelerated driver in some type of VESA mode, with the appropriate warning.
"You certainly can't tell me anything about FOSS superiority in this instance. You just might try, but it'd be lies and distortions from an open source apologist desperately seeking validation of his allegience. nothing more. the sooner you admit that to yourself, the sooner we can get down to brass tacks and lift this sorry mess up into the 21st century."
I just did, seems like you've not used the latest Linux distro's in quite sometime, before you mouth off crap that may have been true a number of years ago. Oh, by the way, your spelling mistakes are highlighted in red in Konqueror...
StarTux
That's weird; I just had the opposite experience (and I'm new to Linux). Bought a new AMD64 and installed Gentoo and WinXP on it. Based on what I've heard about hardware support on Linux, I braced myself for a struggle. But in both Gentoo and WinXP, about 90% of my hardware was detected without a problem.
." So with Linux, I'm discovering what the problem is, learning about my system, and fixing it. With Windows, I have a black box that works sometimes and doesn't work other times and I grope around in the dark hoping to fix problems by accident.
Then I realized that with Gentoo, I could actually figure out what was going wrong with the other 10%, because Linux has logs and configuration files. I Googled and found out how to fix everything. WinXP, on the other hand, remains a mystery. Some things Just Don't Work. For the life of me I can't figure out how to tell what's going wrong.
It seems that if you ask a question about how to fix a problem in Linux, you get answers like, "What's your dmesg output?", to help you diagnose. But if you ask about problems in Windows, the answer is always "Try reinstalling
I'm also puzzled by your comment that you don't want to recompile the kernel. Maybe this is a Gentoo thing, but kernel recompilation is really easy. Most of my hardware hassles were the result of not enabling something in the kernel, so I can't imagine how I would have got my system running properly without recompiling it.
I should buy some cement.
There is no way I could explain to my Mom over the phone how to install .
Open synaptic. Scroll down to mozilla-firefox. Right click and select "install". Now click on the "Apply" button at the top of the screen.
Don't worry - it will get the software from the web, and all else it needs, install and ready to use.
Need a database? An office suite? Frozen Bubble? You don't even need to go to a shop or pay money or register for a lifetime's supply of SPAM - just follow the same instructions. It is SO MUCH EASIER than Windows, it is not funny.
I am anarch of all I survey.
I just built a shiny new Athlon64 box with an nVidia chipset and nVidia graphics. WinXP installs fine. Then, I just load some drivers and everything works.
I just built a shiny new Athlon XP (didn't have like $1,000 for a FX-53 and motherboard, plus it wasn't in stock at fry's) with an nVidia chipset and nVidia graphics. Windows XP stopped working and resets 4 minutes after it loads. I would install it again but I need SATA drivers for my SATA hard drive, I don't have a floppy drive. Windows XP won't let me load the drivers off a CD or off the hard drive. So I installed windows XP on my friend's computer since he has a floppy drive (stuck my SATA drive in his computer.) Put the drive back in my computer when windows finished installing, didn't get past the boot screen.
Now, if I wanted to install Linux, first I have to be paranoid about hosing my XP partition (oops).
Now, if I wanted to install Windows XP, first I'd have to put in my IDE drive and be paranoid about hosing my boot sector (which it will do no matter how carefull I am.) Which means I have to boot into my debian installer and run rescue mode, then run lilo again. Then I have to put my Serial ATA drives into the computer and run the installer from inside windows, THEN I need to remove the install of windows from my IDE drives, it would just take too much time.
To get linux installed on the SATA drive, I can put the drivers on a CD and load them thru the debian installer. Isn't windows supposed to be easier to install than linux? Why is it that ease of use usually means, easy for the average setup, impossible for everything else.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
(not ultranova)
Judging from the proportions in the graph at http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html:
IE6: ~75%
NS5+(incl. Moz): ~5%
IE4+5+5.5+6: ~88%
The other thing of note is the slope: NS5+ and "other" are slightly rising, the 4.x browsers are pretty much flat at 0, and all other versions of IE are falling across the last 6 pixels.
Of course it's very hard to get any reliable numbers out of that graph, but I think this is accurate enough to refute the exact percentages of 97% and 1%.
...I certainly hope this is a troll, because otherwise you haven't been paying attention
X isn't slow. Client/Server relationships are really freaking handy, like when I want to run an application remotely (say, administering a server farm)
And the NT graphic hack? A dangerous kludge, period. Bad gfx driver = dead system.
And FYI, using X.Org, I get better framerates in many 3D applications than I do in Windows.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.