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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.
The days when my poor user had to sweat blood to get me onto a laptop are long gone.
The days may be long gone, but they haunt my memories and have me running XP.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
"Assertation" is a word used instead of "assertion" by someone who finds they've got a spare syllable lying around and nowhere to put it. It's a bit like "irregardless".
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.
are not the problem they were, but they are still a problem and are severe enough to put a lot of people off. That said driver issues will never be the death of Linux. Dvorak was talking complete horse pucky there.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Because we all know that the majority of computer users are "savvy".
I can attest to that actually - these "You visit illegal websites" messages that SpamAssasin has been dumping to the rate of ~50 an hour since last week must be coming into my Linux mail server from an alien civilization, not from stupid people that open ZIP attachements in messages written in bad engrish and then run the executables inside.
Quite a riposte. Not that I thought the original "how to kill Linux" column was particularly insightful, in fact it was down right dumb. Microsoft can no more kill Linux than Sun or anyone else. But c'mon. Why legitimize it with this?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
While I think the issue of drivers is an important one, WHY must some people even give credence to Dvorak's heated columns - knowing full well that he always writes something sensational and occasionally ridiculous - simply to work the ad banners on his site.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
This is the man that a year ago predicted that in 6 months, not only would OS X run on x86, Apple would produce a dual PPC/x86 computer to help ease the transistion. He wasn't even remotely right on either of these.
IE he gets paid a decent amount of money to talk out of his ass, and it's not really even worth thinking about a response to the drivel that spews from his (mouth/pen/keyboard?)
Monstar L
here is a link to the groklaw story
How Can you kill a movement with thousands of members worldwide?
6 4
Dvorak thinks that just because of a lack of drivers for some hardware, that people are just going to get frustrated and leave? I have just as much trouble, if not more, finding drivers for some of my hardware for windows.
If anything we should just Kill Bill http://www.splitreason.com/productdetail.php?id=1
"Let me spell it out for you: I get used because I'm open, trusted, free and reliable"
Are all us, Linux users, like that? My guess is "no", even my hope is "yes"
It is good that LinuxWorld has dismissed Dvorak's FUD. Dvorak is more of a source of entertainment than real insight. I remember Dvorak ranting about the "System Idle Process" in the Windows task manager "eating" 98% CPU. If we want his FUD to stop, we need to stop paying attention to him and editors of Slashdot and others need to stop articles linking to his BS.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
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.
Linux on laptops has improved. You can get a basic install working on a modern laptop, but getting all the things windows users take for granted can take work. Lots of work, including installing kernel patches and patches to those patches. You also frequently have to sacrifice goats to get certain features working.
The worst offenders are (in no order of importance or difficulty): suspend (to disk or ram), accelerated 3d graphics, DVD playing, battery life monitoring (and general ACPI stuff), wireless networking, bluetooth, power-saving features (like CPU throttling) and making them extra buttons do things.
We buy laptops for new students each year and stick linux on them, and it generally takes us a couple of weeks to iron out all the kinks, and sometimes we dont bother. If anyone knows a UK supplier of laptops with Linux pre-installed that do all the above things out of the box, let me know, I might want a dozen in October.
Baz
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.
How to Kill John Dvorak's career ~ stop reading his articles.
Linux is the operative system with better driver support out-of-the-box. Windows fully depends on 3d party companies. Guess what happens when your support finishes or the company bankrupts? I know a few people with scanners that don't work in XP - there's not support except for windows 9x systems. Windows XP SP2, for example, doesn't supports SATA, you need 3rd party drivers in a floppy (unless you integrate them) if you want to install XP in a SATA box. Linux and freebsd just work.
Guess what will happen with "Windows 64 bits?". Tons of unsupported devices will never work on windows 64, companies are not going to waste money on redoing drivers for a dead product (specially lots of crappy devices made by crappy companies). And you know, you can run 32 bits programs but you can't run 32 bits drivers in a 64 bits kernel. Which is why the Windows world is going to take forever (give them 10 years as minimum) to switch to the 64 bit world, many people are going to continue using 32-bits Windows for lots of years.
And it's only worse for the dual-core CPUs which are coming at the end of Q2. Dual Core means that people will run SMP kernels, and it also means your drivers need to be SMP safe - its VERY easy to hang your machine with a non-SMP-safe driver. And everyone is going to run dual core machines - even the ones who want to run 32 bits windows. So, wait a few months, I predict we'll spend a few years laughing at Windows users just because of those reasons - lots of blue screens because of non-SMP-safe drivers and unsupported devices in windows 64 bits. Meawhile, in the linux world, everything will work (we'll get a few non-smp-safe-driver bug reports, but we fix those quite fast)
The whole point of the article is that Windows has more drivers than Linux has, so if Linux was to get support for Windows drivers, everybody would use Linux. Right? Wrong (of course)! Why?
The programs you are used to on Windows don't run (or don't look as good, and don't run flawlessly) on Linux. Wine is great, but Microsoft is starting to attack Wine, as Slashdot has recently pointed out. Until all programs are being built for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it is no easier to use Linux.
Even if people aren't that attached to Windows programs, many Linux programs look very different and are much harder to use than Windows equivalents. The only programs that are up to or almost up to Windows's level of ease is Firefox (compared to IE, not AOL or MSN), Thunderbird, and, just barely, OpenOffice.org. Mainly this is because, again, everybody's used to Windows.
Most people don't know what drivers are, and they shouldn't have to, as Paul Graham has said before! They just expect to plug-and-play. They won't pay for Windows drivers on Linux, because the significance of drivers isn't apparent to them.
Finally, the reason more people write drivers for Windows is because more people use Windows. If more people use Linux, more drivers for Linux will soon follow. Drivers are not the cause, they are the effect.
Before you walk a mile in someone's shoes, you should insult them so you know how they are and what they're doing.
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
So, basically ALL the benefits of having a laptop. Go linux! It's DEFINITELY ready for the mainstream
I am typing this from a laptop, and it runs Linux (Oh No!). Has APCI, CPU Throttling, Suspend, Wireless networking, etcetera.
How did I do it? Days of patches? No, popped in Mandrake 10.1 Community, generic install, everything ran perfectly, I don't think that you need to be a zealot to install linux on a laptop, Linux has come a long way in the last few years.
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
No, Linux is more like European higher education. You don't get in based on hand-outs, parental connections or a fat wallet - all you need is proof of your intelligence by way of examination, and if you get in... it's free.
Same with Linux. It's free, assuming you can grok it. As a CS major its' hardly a self-compliment to state that you can barely figure your way around it.(You mean you still can't listen to music, watch videos, browse the web, have a decent desktop?) There is really no excuse for it with the copious amount of documentation and support, especially for someone whose familiarity with computers extends past 'surfing the Internet Explorer.'
You are likely to reply back, smearing this as "elitism" or some related non-sense. Alas, you would have misunderstood.
You miss the point. Installing Debian is nothing. Getting your sound to work and getting the desktop to display at the right resolution is a bitch. Getting a laptop to work correctly is hard.
I can't comment on Slackware, but I gave up on plain Debian after a week of frustration. I could install it, but I couldn't use it how I wanted.
Thanks God Ubuntu came....(and Mepis, Xandros, Knoppix, take your pick)
Open Source Sushi