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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."
I should add, I just think it's turning into a "boy that called wolf" kind of situation. Eventually it will happen, but not because you keep saying "this is the year".
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Linux is well ahead of the latest Microsoft products and so shines in such comparisons. It is not, however, remotely a leading edge system in the same class with the BSD family of Unix products and Sun's Solaris.
The BSD family of Unix is very large some may say it also includes HP-UX. Though if you include the open-source BSD's: Free, Open, and Net BSD. I would disagree that it is not even in the same class as them; as Linux has far more commercial support and technical features.
Also some may consider Windows NT based systems to be part of the BSD family, or atleast its TCP/IP stack.
as the article states - is the effect of the new powercell chip from IBM. I, too, am eager to get my hands on a workstation that will be up to 10 times faster than anything from intel. Apparently linux is the only major OS with support for the chip at this time. No support is mentioned by microsoft for the chip - and I wonder, had MS ever successfully supported a non-x86 architecture for any real length of time?
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I think the best possible situation would be if Linux is used on office machines, since it's so much easier to lockdown and centrally administrate than other mainstream OSes. At home, people would use Mac OS X, because it's much better at providing peripheral support and simple means for end-user administration. Either that, or Windows.
:)
That's a world I could happily live in.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
I installed my niece who just turned eight Gentoo Linux on her new PC(she got it for her birthday). She absolutely loves it, browses the web and downloads music happily, and has even learned how to install new programs with "emerge". This should be enough proof of how much more userfriendly Linux has become and how awesome Linux is for introducing kids to computers.
My opinion is that people who pooh-pooh Linux are going to wake up and find themselves on the wrong side of the learning curve. The fact that MSFT feels the need to sling mud at Linux speaks volumes in itself. The way Redmond has taken to squeezing more revenue out of their existing customers in order to shore up quarterly numbers. They're sure acting like a company on the defenisve.
Apart from MSFT, all the really fun stuff in IT is happening in OSS. There's no way a company the size of MSFT can be as nimble and OSS is a more efficient development model. Building on the shoulders of giants. MSFT can't compete with that.
You mention "several years" but only have examples from two.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Jenna Jameson will show us the way.
I converted one of my workstations over to linux as a means to broaden my horizions. Not too long after that I got a call to finx one of my friends computers. After 3 hours of cleaning up malware of all kinds I learned that 1) He had a fetish for hot asian teens, and 2) I would only get this call again, since he didn't want to learn to use a newsreader.
So I floated the idea of him getting a mobile rack and putting linux on a cheap 40 GB HD. I selected Mandrake since I had grown to loath Redhat.
6 months or so later he uses linux almost exclusively. I don't have to say why. And he's bragging to his friends as work how awesome it is to surf for porn on linux, and how him computer isn't crippled by shit.
But the masses, they don't hear the kind of cloistered evangelism taking place on Slashdot. It doesn't even exist in their world. But the dream of malware free porn does. It might not be the high road, but the way is there. And it has nothing to do with the rambeling delusions offered up in groupthinkgeek pieces.
Linux will reach critical mass in germany within the next 12 months. Everybody with more than 2 braincells and some IT knowledge has predicted this for years. For more and more partners I work with it isn't a question of wether or not one should use Linux, but how to apply it. It's actually a thing I bet my business on two years ago and to date I haven't regreted it. :-)
MS Windows is done with. People allways call me insane when I say this, but even the most notorious Windows users here say they will migrate to Linux when Win2K support ceases.
It could very well be that MS will pull a publicity stunt and start releasing their own Linux Distro, with DX9, NTFS and all. They'd have to admit having done a big mistake, they'd be 3 years late, but I guess with 40 billion on the bank it's not such a big problem taking hold of the 15% growth FOSS IT services market in something like 6 months flat.
Anyway you look at it, the next years are going to be interessting and probably lot's of fun aswell.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You actually have the driver problem in reverse...
Windows users have to find the manufacturer website and download the drivers, or else use the old ones that came with the hardware (if any).
Linux distributions typically come with a good set of drivers which will support all the hardware in most modern machines, infact a modern linux distribution like mandrake actually supports MORE hardware out of the box than windows does, such as SATA.. If you have SATA drives then windows won't install without third party drivers, many video cards aren't detected byu default and are driven by generic (slow) drivers. A lot of users don't even realise they need to update the drivers either.
Also, linux distributions present a single place to update everything, not just the os but also the drivers, windows update does provide a facility to update your drivers, but most hardware manufacturer's don't take advantage of this so it's rendered useless.
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A lot of us can't run it because... /usr/share/baoeu/otehu/ -x -die. Pressing a flurry of keys might feel faster, but it isn't actually faster.
- the software support isn't there. No CATIA, no ProE, no etc. Can't be an engineer using Linux alone.
- it is still fucking slow. Hate to break it to you, but as a long time xfce4 user, XP is still faster. Yes, doing everything CLI is probably faster as far as system response goes. But it's slower for getting things done because double-clicking an icon is easier than typing
And so, until linux developers wake up, linux as an engineering tool will not progress. Engineers already have a million pieces of proprietary scientific software they have to learn; adding linux to that isn't worth it when there is fast, and stable Windows XP.
And it's stable enough as a desktop, though not as a corporate server. Maybe that's because, in at least one thing, MS has its priorities straight. They've focused on making an OS that's sane to use while attempting to make it stable. And, lo and behold, it works.
still haven't gotten octave working with gnuplot. fuck it, i've got more important things to do. i'll do it in matlab.
As much as I dislike Microsoft, if it wasn't for them, I think over two-thirds of Slashdotters reading this wouldn't even be into computers like they are now.
Hate the business practices, but don't hate the technology. Microsoft is a great software company; they were just stuck with the problem of DOS backwards-compatibility for ten years. I haven't seen a BSOD since late 1999 when they released Windows 2000 and began unifying all their Windows products onto that codebase.
And another thing for Microsoft-haters, get over Clippy! Haven't seen him since '99 either. And Microsoft Bob was in '94--11 years ago. It's time to live in the now.
Linux rightfully deserves the title of being on the forefront of technology
I don't think Linux is on the forefront of innovation at all. What it has popularized (it sure didn't start it) is community-based development. But it's based on a 30+-year old UNIX model, and its desktop environments resemble Windows in many areas. A prominent OSS guy whose name I don't recall said it best--"All the volunteer effort in the world, and what do we do? We clone UNIX, then we clone Windows on top of it."
If there was ever a top innovative OS, I would say NeXTStep. A lot of the features it had are just now making it into mainstream operating systems, OS X included. And yet, GNUstep/Openstep efforts flounder and get ignored while "Qt" and "GTK+" continue to get used. Sigh...
Anyone in an ISP who has to manage Windows servers already knows what a nightmare it is. Linux simply reduces administrative headcount and improves security by its very design. Whereas it's typical for a commercially managed Windows server to have 30 accounts in the Administrator group just to get the work done, Linux boxes tend to be far far far more tightly managed. They're just built to BE managed, as opposed to Windows which is more of a Desktop machine with a server tacked on to it. So commercial service providers, the ones with thousands and thousands of servers already know that to offer affordable services to their customers they have to do it with Linux, Unix, AIX or Solaris. Windows is always a customer choice not a vendor preference.
"Today, however, by all rational measures it should be obsolete. Nobody designing an operating system today would make it anything like Unix, unless they wanted it to be compatible with Unix. I don't want to get into specific critiques"
No, you people never do, because inevitably these critiques go like this
Critic: I don't like how Unix does *foo*, I'm sure a new OS could do much better
Unix; How?
Critic: Don't ask detailed technical questions, we'd sort that sort of thing out further down the road
In case you didn't notice, the last people to ship a major new desktop operating system used Unix. On the other hand, the last DOZEN OR SO groups that set out on the path illustrated by my hypothetical critic arrived at systems which were not merely incompatible with Unix, but worse than it in an incredible number of ways, such as BeOS - which makes it necessary to have a bewildering number of separate execution contexts for graphical applications (1 window : 1 thread) and provides only unreliable IPC to communicate effectively between threads.
The other anti-Unix argument I've seen is that we must consider some specific Unix variant from 1980 or so to be "Unix" and every change relative to that is "proof" that Unix was no good. This allows the zealot to argue that Unix is a poor operating system design without being sidetracked by inconvenient facts like the 25 years of evolutionary improvements since that point. Needless to say such arguments are mere wanking.
One of my clients is moving their practice to a completely paperless system. A key part of that system is signature capture. Medical and legal documents are pretty useless without a signature.
I couldn't find one single signature capture device that could embed signatures into an open-office document.
Some of my clients are ditching tape backup for on-line, off-site, backup services. These services require the installation of a software "client" on the server that stores the data. Guess how many of these services run on Linux? Not so many.
These examples illustrate the problem most businesses have with Linux. Linux is great for stand-alone boxes where interoperability is not a factor (databases, web-servers, proxy servers, firewalls - etc). It doesn't look so compelling when you consider compatibility with lots of devices and services.
Businesses look at aquisition costs, and recurring costs of technology, but they also look at the cost of "incompatibility". Not being able to do something, sometimes, costs way more than buying software licenses.
The barriers to Linux these days are not technological barriers, they are mass market standardization and acceptance barriers. For Linux to really shine in the business world some things about Linux will have to change. It will upset the Linux "purists" but the business community will demand it.
Linux is about choice - but that's what the business community doesn't want. They don't want to have to choose a window manager, or a distribution, or even a web browser. The business community wants all of that choosen for them, and a reasonable level of certanty, that most vendors they want to work with, will support their standard configuration.
-ted
If Linux reaches a "tipping point" there will be tons of programs and movies for it. Everybody, even Microsoft, will start writing for it.
Too many people keep asking where the open-source free version of their Barbie Fashion Designer is. Hey, Microsoft is not writing that and including it with Windows, you know. How in the world, then, does Windows survive without that being written and included by Microsoft? It's because other people write it.
The fact that people have put so much hard work and time into making things like Open Office or the KDE or Gnome applications is proof that people are desperate to do anything to get rid of Microsoft and will literally do hundreds of times as much work as Microsoft has to do, in order to defeat them. If it was not for Microsoft's monopoly it would not be needed, as commercial software would be available for Linux or whatever the alternative system was.
Unfortunately the fact that Open Office was written has given rise to the greatest piece of FUD ever, spouted repeatedly right here by the astroturfers. That is that for some reason every application on Linux has to be open source and given away for free, and that without it you will not get any software for Linux.
Since I am personally working on an evil closed-source capitalistic piece of software for Linux, and making a good paycheck selling it right now, I consider this attitude pretty stupid and very misleading.
What ho, I'm not so sure (well, you're obviously right about baby Jesus and the one button mouse)...
For years Fnac (French pan-european books music and electronics store) offers macs but with salespitches indeed basically going "Macs suck, look at this Compaq here..."
But recently this has changed completely, I now hear them sell the thingies pretty balanced: "No, it doesn't run Windows, maybe that's a problem for you, but maybe not? What do you want your computer to do?"
And other intelligent noises like that. And indeed sell a good number of iMacs, portables and mini's. I gather pro's don't buy their G5 powertowers there...
Sort of like Hell froze over. Must be because they also sell a gazillion iPods every day...
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