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LinuxWorld Response to 'How to Kill Linux'
aneroid writes "In response to John Dvorak's "How to Kill Linux" column, LinuxWorld has a riposte to the columnist's assertations. From the article: "Because most of the time, with mainstream devices, I work out of the box. For the "savvy user" and OEM builder, the Linux driver "problem" isn't the problem it was. The days when my poor user had to sweat blood to get me onto a laptop are long gone. Sure, if I get slung onto some random old machine there are still wrinkles, but from what I see on the Windows support forums, that's hardly unique." <update> The story is actually from GrokLaw originally - credit where credit is due.
Linux doesn't do things for no reason. If something changed, it's because YOU changed it, not because Windows suddenly decided that, on this hour's autodetection, it would corrupt your IDE drivers.
This flies in the face of science.
Driver support on Linux is fine. I have always bought bleeding edge hardware I only run Linux and everything works fine. The last time I had a problem was when I bought my IBM Thinkpad T40, only the wireless card wasnt support, which wasnt even a problem for me since I didnt have a wireless router. It is now fully supported by an open source driver(ipw2100). I fix computers as a part time job and I run into driver hell more often on win then any other os. The other day I was updating a win xp computer and it said the ATI drivers had to be updated, so I let windows update update them. A few min later I could only get 4bit color. I had to uninstall the driver from windows update and revert to the old one. Going to ATI.com and downloading the offical driver said that I was getting a driver for the wrong graphics card. Even if a peice of hardware is reconized on win you have to track down the driver and many times if you lost the cd your screwed.
I have been using Linux for many, many years, I am really not the one who needs to be converted. But I have to admit that just this weekend I spent I dunno how many ours with kernel-recompiles and trying every possible settings, drivers to get MIDI working on my box. And I failed.
On my Windows XP I fired up the utility which came with the driver and hit "Test MIDI" and there it was, out of the box.
Thus while it might be true that the for most of the people and for the most generic cases the driver hell is hopefully gone, there is quite a bit left to go until hardware manufacturers ship drivers which work out of the box just as easily as for Windows.
It so happens that 3% of my customers are using Linux on the desktop and I expect that number to double in the next year. So far, I have had very few issues getting hardware to work on Linux. A few things still are a problem (wireless LAN cards, but there is ndiswrapper for that). Hopefully thanks to Theo, we will see more WLAN support on Linux (out of the box) in the months to come.
I am not saying that there aren't rough spots. Take for example, my parents' Olympus camera which appears to the computer as a USB MSC device. Sure it is easy to get this to work as a normal user if you know the system, but if not, then how do you expect the user to edit the fstab to make the drive user-mountable? If course this is a distribution issue, not a Linux issue and could be resolved by modifying the installer.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
100s of /. posts, and not one saying, heres a web site lists 800 devices, cf the # with linux and the # with MS drivers...
I can only assume that part of the core of the argument - that windows is better becuase it has drivers for stupid people like me (by the way what is a driver and why do i need them ...)
Lotta snide, sarcastic, know it all responses, but very little int eh way of documentatin on what % of new devices are ok with linux, as opposed to MS.
It already works pretty well on the Acer Ferrari 3000 series. Most stuff "just works" (wifi, USB, firewire, card reader, dvd writer etc.) and JDS is a fairly tolerable desktop if you can put up with Sun's pointy-haired decision to replace a lot of the native GNOME applets with (inferior) ones written in Java.
I think they are working on refining power management now.
Stick Men
Dvork had a point, but he vastly overstated it. But consider the case of binary drivers like ATI/NVIDA, and the ndiswrapper and captiventfs drivers mentioned in the article. How many of us can use an open source ATI or NVIDIA driver for 3d graphics? How many wireless cards work without ndiswrapper? And of course the open source ntfs is still read only to my knowledge.
The open source equivilents of thse projects are not dead, but they are moving significantly slower than other projects that have no binary equivilent. Users are not forced to write their own drivers to get hardware compatiblity and people live with the non-free alternatives.
What Dvorak is suggesting is that if such binary driver equivilents existed for other forms of Linux drivers, development on open source equivilents would slow down. Well, he said it would die which is of course not true, but still his trollery had a hint of truth to it. Esoteric hardware would likely never have native drivers written for it, just as most wireless-G cards do not today.
It would most certainly hurt Linux for this to happen, but at the same time it would help in other ways. Increased support for esoteric hardware would have a lot of benefits for Linux too, and people could still write native drivers for more common hardware. It is hard to say if there would be a net benefit or not under what Dvorak proposes. Either way it's utter bullshit because Microsoft would never do this. Oh well.
501 Not Implemented
Drivers under Linux suck (compared to windows). Sure they are great... if you know how to manually tweak module settings. And I do... but I don't care to. I just want to do the basics... you know, like BOOTING and such.
People here are talking about the random old piece of hardware not supported, but I'm having trouble with my standard DELL Inspiron 9100/XPS laptop. So much so that both the latest 3.7 Knoppix and MandrakeMove did not want to even boot up on this! Even Windows worked without any funky drivers!
I still use Linux, mostly because of the price, but I have to test most configurations thoroughly before I can decide to use it. (Factor this into TCO?) When I hit on a stable combo, I just hope the MOBO does not stop being manufactured for a while at least.
When Linux runs, I have to admit... it runs well. Still beats windows for server applications hands down. (I've had windows servers crash on me because I right-clicked on the desktop.... but this was because no drivers were installed on it... something I soon and easily fixed.)
Also when I used to run Debian and upgraded to 'untested' I had some serious problems. I needed to do this because of certain USB support and proper Serial-ATA drivers. (I needed the 2.6 kernel) My machine sorta worked. (Well Quake 3 worked the best ever!) But most things were a pain... my removable 250 Gb external FAT32 USB/firewire drive was a real pain.
For now, I am still only running Linux on my old AMD K6, Windows XP on my DELL Inspiron and TV media machine (3GHz P4) and OS X on my Mac (Just Love Apple/OSX's user experience... sucks with game availability though). Perhaps Apple (Amiga/C64/etc) had the right idea about locking down the hardware a bit... the variety of chipsets are the greatest cause of frustration for PC (and Linux in particular) users!