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Linux on the Tipping Point
Reader stormcoder wrote to mention an article on Enterprise Linux I.T. in which the author posits that even though Linux is built on a legend, the reality of Linux outstrips even the myth. From the article: "..the fact that Linux has traditionally been compared to Microsoft's Windows brand products and not the other Unix variants will most likely lead the general public to perceive all this as Linux sailing on to new horizons while Microsoft stalls out. This perceptual shift should totally reverse the previous mainstream view that Microsoft and Intel were somehow at the forefront of high technology computing -- thereby pushing Linux over the magic edge of a social tipping point."
Oh yeah, every year for the last several years. Examples follow"
March 2003
July 2003
November 2004
December 2003
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It consists of a Linux kernel developed by Torvalds and his colleagues by radically improving an earlier open-source Unix released by Andrew Tannenbaum in 1987 If he is implying Linux was is based on Minix, he is incorrect, albeit, extreamly early versions of Linux did use the minix filesystem and minix to bootstrap. In design, though, Linux and minix are fundementally different. Also I am sure Tanenbaum would disagree that Linux is a radically improved version of Minix -- as he is an advocate of microkernels.
I'm no fan of Microsoft (posting this with Firefox on Gentoo Linux), but to be fair, that's not quite true. Few home LANs use a domain server. Simple LANs should work at least as well as they did in Win98, which was fine for me.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
This was exactly the same way for servers back in 1999, 2000, 2001. In fact, the only ones to get it right was IDG and Gartner, when they proclaimed that Linux would have less than 1% of servers on the internet by 2005. And we all know that Linux on the servers have not gone well. Right? Oh wait....
I suspect that we have allready gone over the tipping point. It is now just a matter of companies such as IDG/Gartner to point out that they were wrong on this as well. Of course, their own income will plummet.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Games are an issue. There is a real chicken and egg problem there, i.e. good games could be written for Linux, and Linux would dominate, but until if dominates there is no reason to write games for it...
Word processing: MS office can run on it; I find Oo.o better for basic paragraphs and formatting, and who actually using the drawing tools in word?
Movies? No problem! Even MS formats that have been only for WMP (even on win32) in the past play ok now. Maybe players could use better GUIs, but that is being worked on with stuff like kmplayer. Besides, most email-forward-type stupid movies are actually flash or Powerpoint. Flash is fine; every Powerpoint feature that I've tried works in Oo.o Impress, with, IMHO, smoother animation.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Also note the idea that Linux is derived from Minix. Of course anyone who knows anything about kernel architecture knows that it may have *inspired* Linux but certainly did not provide a codebase which was "improved" in Linux.
Furthermore, the only technical advantage I can find for Solaris is that it is closely tied to Sun's hardware, and so runs quite well on expensive systems. Having used Solaris X86, I have concluded that the OS is featureless and difficult to use in comparison to Linux. Similarly with all the other commercial UNIX types, you still see the fact that the main advantage which is sold is its tight optimization for specific hardware.
I thought the article was a bunch of crap, but then I have never seen the ideas he says are being superceded.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
No, I think he was touching on the point that such comments that describe stupid practices of Slashdot users have become a stupid practice of Slashdot users.
Was your comment supposed to be witty?
Most homes and small offices are just fine with XP home. Plug in, DHCP from router and you're done.
Heck, to add a network printer, just browse the network and double click - the drivers generally install themselves. WAY better than Windows 98 and W2K.
IMHO, at $100 for OEM, Windows XP Home is a pretty good deal for the average home user and small business. IE and MS Office on the other hand can be replaced quite well by free OSS alternatives.
No, not until you get to 10 computers with XP Pro. (There's a 5-network-connection limit on XP Home, 10-network-connection limit on XP Pro.)
Back in NT 3.51, Server and Workstation differed only by a couple settings which you could make and then have a Server. Microsoft got smarter about that as the years went on, and now you can't make the low-cost version look/act like the high-cost. And you're right, Linux is the way to go here because you get full functionality from the get-go (for Free as well).
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
It's easier to fix a broken windoze computer with Mepis than it is to reinstall windoze. You might even retrieve your wife's pictures with it and you will surely not have to spend hours digging up browsers, spell checkers, paint programs and all the other software that makes a Winblows computer usable.
There are enough people like me willing to help Joe at no charge to make it much cheaper too. I teach a Linux for desktop users at a local computer club and can say that interest in free software has never been higher and the migration has never been easier. They are able to teach each other once I get them going. The progression is geometric and Microsoft will never catch up.
Game over.
btw... matlab is available for several platforms... including Linux...
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Every one of you who reads this site regularly should read it. Linux is not yet at the "tipping point" of crossing the chasm. The past year has been enormous though. I give it 2 more years, personally. IBM and Novell are huge and will make it happen.
Berto
"never" is a very strong word.
Firstly, in my rebuttal I'll immediately dismiss no. 1, since in my experience linux "just works" far more easily than Windows. You obviously either haven't used linux in a while or have used the wrong distro.
Secondly, obviously linux already has threatened Windows on the desktop otherwise Microsoft wouldn't be significantly lowering coorperate and government prices to counter linux's cost advantage.
But anyway, usually nos 2 and 3 is what people describe as "tipping point". It means that application developers will fully support the OS, and people will compare both operating systems like equals when choosing which to buy, thus the better one will win automatically. This can't be achieved before the "tipping point".
For games this is starting to happen. Linux now has several extremely big name engines that include support, including the Doom 3 and UT2004 engine, which will bring a multitude of games along for the ride, for example Americas Army. UE3 will support linux to an even greater degree, at at least a similar level to Windows. Worlds of Warcraft can be run on linux through Wine without problems, though I haven't personally run this.
Your no. 2 falls some due to the fact that at least 90% of home desktop users do not want specialist programs that aren't web, email and word processor. Many specialist windows programs run quite easily through wine, like Adobe Photoshop. Others have extremely good linux equivalents, if you look at the linux app stack it is extremely comprehensive.
I'm not sure how full my rebuttal was, but I definitely disagree with you. I think all it takes is time.
From the article: " It consists of a Linux kernel developed by Torvalds and his colleagues by radically improving an earlier open-source Unix released by Andrew Tannenbaum in 1987"
No, no, no... How many times do we have to tell these people that Linus DID NOT ALTER MINIX to produce the Linux kernel!!! When will these people get it right before blathering on?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
The only issue with this is that the streaming video systems found on most porn sites don't always work properly under Linux + Firefox/Mozilla...
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
I've been typing Chinese on Linux for well over three years now. When I got into it, a mature, useable (although admittedly not "pretty") solution was already available: XCIN. It, in turn, had been based on the work of folks in Taiwan from around, I think, 1995. The Japanese have been hacking on OSS for ages too, and Japanese input has been around for even longer.
Nowadays, there's SCIM, which rules, and it didn't just come into being "this month", although I'll admit that it is new. It's much prettier looking than XCIN, and it has a better pinyin input method, which is important for people that type Chinese that way (I use wubi). SCIM's wubi support has some small problems when used with alternative keyboard layouts like Dvorak that were relatively trivial to work around in XCIN.
Frankly, when I'm forced to use the stock input methods that come with Chinese Windows (MSPinYin, gag), its user unfriendliness is absolutely horrible. No one in China really uses it, they all install third party input methods.
The ability to write third party input methods has existed as long as the XIM standard for the X Window System has, which, oh, lets see, would be the late 80s? It's just a matter of market share. Until recently, few people in Asia were using Linux. Now they are, and so they're writing input methods.
I'm pointing this out because Chinese input has nothing whatever to do with Linux. It has to do with the X Window System, which has supported a framework to input CJK text forever. Windows' stock Chinese input method sucks so much that no one here uses it.
I mean, it's just a completely moronic comparison, and I don't know why it keeps getting modded up.
Oh, and with respect to Mac OS X: I hate to burst your bubble, but Mac OS X's CJK input method sucks a fat one. My girlfriend (she's not Chinese) has a Mac, and SCIM rocks all over that POS. The only nice feature it has is the zooming character thing, which is kind of cool (but like most sort-of-cool things, gets annoying really fast and I'm not sure how to turn it off.)
As usual, "Linux can already do that". :-)