Slashdot Mirror
Linux Can't Kill Windows
nberardi writes "Infoworld is running an article in which the author claims 'Linux is established and has a niche that, as various pendulums swing, will grow and shrink. Show me charts and stats and benchmarks that prove Linux superior to Windows in every measure and I'll not argue with you. But no matter how much money and dedication is poured into Linux, it will never put a dent in Windows' mind share or market share because Linux is an operating system, a way -- and probably the best way -- to make system hardware do what it's told. But you can't turn Linux into a platform even if you brand it, box it, and put a pricey sticker on it.'"
This is just sensationalism. If you look at for example the server market, or the governments sector, linux is already beating up windows.
My long term projection would be, that Linux will push Windows into a third of the market, something like 1/3 linux, 1/3 windows and 1/3 else.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Last week I gave a class about Linux to 4 people who haven't used it yet. They were blown away because they didn't realize it had a desktop and all the fancy programs that Windows has. I think what really is hurting Linux is just myth. That myth is that Linux is just a text interface for servers or something like that.
Linux isn't really about killing Windows off.. whoever thought that the primary idea behind Linux when it was created was to make MS go bankrupt and for no one in the world to ever use Windows is a bit dilusional. Linux is an alternative. It's a choice. The same thing could be said in reverse: Windows Can't Kill Linux.
There's too many people who are interested with tinkering.. with having something being totally customizable if they take their time. With being free and able to run their computer the way they want. Is this the majority of people? Not even close! But it's enough that Linux will sustain itself in spite of any FUD MS and crew would throw at it.
Who cares if Linux never overtakes Windows? I know before I discovered it in '98, I thought I was doomed to the endless update/virus/adware world that everyone else was in (except those crazy mac people.. which now due to the mac mini I am one as well.. side tracking....)
Anyway, the point being.. Linux is strong due to it's following, and has great potential to do quite a few things Windows has troubles with. The choice is there for anyone to pick up that option if they so choose. What's the big deal?
From the article:
Businesses and organizations of all sizes need consistent, predictable, scalable, self-contained platforms for server solutions.
I thought Windows was winning on the desktop? Isn't that what we're always hearing?
Linux and Windows don't compete.
Ok, so the whole "Get The Facts" campaign was done just for grins?
Open source Unix, in which category I place Linux, BSD, and Darwin (the OS layer of Apple's OS X), is a 500,000-piece bag of Legos that comes with some drawings and a few models you can use, build on, or tap into as references for your own creations.
Also wrong. There are distros that are like that, but there are distros that aren't. Linux offers choice, and not just the "bag of Legos" kind.
And, just in case the article author reads this...ever hear of Wine? As soon as Wine gets DCOM working correctly and Installshield working right, it won't matter to Joe User if the OS is Linux or Windows, just so long as he can install TurboTax and Doom3. Check back in a few years, and we'll see if you're singing a different tune.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
His first sentence is right on the money - "Linux is established and has a niche". So the question is - what is holding it back? And here, he misses the bleeding obvious - every single one of his points (from TFA - the reasons to keep unix or windows around, the cost analysis, etc) is flatly wrong or misses the mark. The answer is, I think, obvious --- Linux is the OS designed by geeks, for geeks. It's the classic example of overengineering the wheel. The problem is, I have yet to see an interface for *nix that does as good as job as windows does of 'packing everything under the hood' and making an operating system that (as a friend of mine, the chief sysadmin for Connectiv would say) "protects users from their own stupidity". When someone can come up with an interface that is as intuitive and user-friendly as windows, then (and only then) can linux hope to compete in the desktop market.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Flash forward to now: I have worked my way through the following distros, by doing a full wipe-and-reinstall each time:
Mandrake 10 (as mentioned);
Mandrake 10.1;
Gentoo(lol)
Each time, as soon as the nVidia binary driver was installed, UT04 would start and run without a single tweak being made to the UT04 install.
The lesson to learn is this: although the majority of open-source Linux software is not self-contained (and this is by conscious design) and has dependencies that need to be tracked-down and installed first, there is no reason at all why a company can't just package up everything it needs in one big self-contained lump, eliminating the need for dependencies or the need to run on a specific distro entirely. As for the comment that you need to recompile for different hardware: I have no idea what you're talking about. Clearly, if you have a x86 app, it will need to be re-compiled to run at full speed on a PPC system - a difficulty not encountered in the Windows world for the sole reason that Windows is only capable of running on x86, and similary for MacOSX.
I suspect I've just been feeding a troll, but oh well - who cares? :)
I regularly use three platforms; Windows, Linux (Fedora) and OSX. Conclusion? I cringe at having to use Windows. I find that once you learn UNIX it is faster to get anything done. Albeit you have to learn UNIX.
Now having said that, what I see more off are peacock articles. All fluff and very little facts because the three operating systems are TOO similar. Compare it to cars. These days all of the cars are good enough! They will last four years without too many problems. So then how do you distinguish yourself? Write articles like a peacock struts its feathers, all emotional.
The easiest way to illustrate this peacock argument is to take a bushman from the jungle and get them to figure out what a computer does. Without helping them. My guess is that the bushman will have a hard time figuring out what the mouse is for. Most likely they will use the mouse as a slingshot and head back into the jungle. I am not saying that bushmen are dumb. I am saying that computers require some upfront learning time regardless of the OS used.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
He believes Linux isn't a "whole platform", and I can see where he gets that idea-- Linux isn't very unified (Do have KDE or Gnome? [0]) and anyone who hasn't dealt with a modern package manglement system has dealt with Dependency Hell.
So let's imagine some company, we'll call them Red Hat, to pull a bogus name out of thin air, and let's say they were to take this Linux thing, and make a nice standardized platform out of it. People ship you an application, you take your server, we'll call it a "Red Hat Enterprise Server" or something like that, and you can simply load the app on it and run it. They wouldn't say their app runs on Linux. They'd say their app runs on Red Hat.
To him, _that_ would be a platform, and that would have a chance at taking on Windows. It would be Linux behind the scenes, but it's more that just Linux.
Too bad nobody's ever going to do something like that.
-JDF
[0] Thankfully, even if you generally only see one of these, you can still have the other behind the scenes and run stuff intended for either...
Definately agree. 2 cases I have seen recently where someone who hasnt really "used" any OS wanted to try Linux. First person was a friend of mine who decided he wanted to get into IT, just on whim. He'd heard us discussing this Linux stuff so bought himself a PC (hadnt had one before) and downloaded FC3. With in 3 months he is Linux+ certified (not a big deal) and can use the OS to do anything he wants. He thinks its amazing, so simple, so easy. I got him to try Windows XP, last time he used a computer for anything major was Win95. He hated XP and is happy as can be with his Gnome/FC3. He's now looking around at other distros and learning stuff at an incredible rate. But my point is for someone who isnt familiar with either OS, either OS will do what they want just fine. Its when your set in your XP lazyness that Linux becomes difficult or confusing.
Second point is i got my wife using tools for her everyday tasks that exist on both OS's. She isnt a power user either, most of what she does is her mommies gorups, emails, web pages, gaim and little photo editing etc etc. All of which she used open source packages to do on windows. I decided to rebuild her downstairs PC with Gentoo. Took her a day to get used to KDE, and where to find her programs. Now she just does what she used too. She doesnt miss Win XP and couldnt care less that she is using Gentoo.
Kinda sad that I'm the tech guy and I'm the only XP user left in the house. Damn EQ2 and its inability to run on Linux.. hehe.
IT is Dead. The industry is Shot Join Others Who Feel Your Pain http://www.internalstrife.com/
All I had displayed was the fluxbox window manager with firefox, gvim, and a matplotlib window from a python session.
I had to switch vterms to convince him, as I was running Linux, as he also assumed Linux was all CLI.
He should've known better too: He wasn't some PHB, but someone who used X11 and fink under OS X! If those who are as technically literate as this don't get Linux, how will the "average consumer" ever get it?
Yeah, 'cause there's so many of them :-)
:-(
Debian would be a platform, or Novell/SUSE, or RedHat - if they finally committed themselves to being one.
A platform is a platform only if its stable, and I don't mean "stable" as in "does not crash". I mean "stable" as in "does not change significantly every 6 months". So Debian would be an ideal choice.
However, Debian itself has zero commercial drive. I wonder what drives Debian at all, and other people wonder, too, given the admirable rise of Ubuntu.
But people want pretty software, and Debian stable features GNOME and a stone-aged KDE. And while GNOME on Debian seems to be more advanced than KDE, forgive me, I would not chose it for fancy software. It looks so painfully dull
KDE on the other hand looks nice and lively, but is it a platform? I wonder.
Obviously there has to be a balance between the drive forward, the wish to leave behind all that old cruft (fsck compatibility!) and the conservative approach to not chance anything to not break compatibility.
Still, what drives the PC market is cool software, not cool licensing.
Just to give you an example: mplayer is technically cool. But its complexity scares people away. It's only cool because it's free. You won't be able to sell it to anybody, because as a software _product_ it sucks. badly. Even with gmplayer.
Or take GIMP. It's cool 'cause it's free. But it's just an aggregation of image manipulation tools. It's not a _product_.
There is this small gap between a program and a product that Open Source software seems to be unable to bridge, this final, annoying, painful step of really _finishing_ it so that it _could_ be sold.
My conclusion: Linux needs commercial(-grade) software. Firefox is not enough. Instead of scaring commercial software vendors away with stupid fundamentalism we should be fair with them.
It's like combat: the force with the superior size and resources is going to be unbeatable until they make a major tactical or technical mistake. Use the Iraqi War if you want an analogy: the US is cleaning shop, and it's because of superior technology, tactics, and sheer size (of the establishment, not the deployment). Training, too: Windows (say, all the futuristic military tech) is damn easy to set up and install, and everyone knows how to use it, so anyone can use it. Linux, on the other hand (say, a trial-and-error mortar system) is difficult to use for someone unfamiliar with it than Windows is, and it's not always as straightforward to get a system up and running.
The Vietnam War would be a good example of how the superior force (size and resources) can still lose. Shitty M-16 rifles, poor coordination, and the disadvantage of not being on home ground (ie, the other side had "home team" advantage) all made things difficult for them. If Linux were to get a wide corporate install base, I think things would slowly start to get away from Microsoft.
Also, I think RedHat (the company) is a big problem for Linux adoption. Their support is pretty bad, and they tend to still have a very "non-corporate" software attitude. Bug in your kernel? "Here, try this beta kernel." It's not a very corporate-friendly attitude, in my opinion. Are there any other good corporate options out there? No, not really, unfortunately.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I've only ever had one distribution blow up on me when I installed new software, and that was SuSe Enterprise 8 sp1. I installed the development tools, and the system stopped working properly.
Upgrades are a bad idea at best, unless you have an upgrade-in-place system like a *BSD (they often get it wrong too) or gentoo. Gentoo in particular is easy to update from version to version, and what's more it tends to work, especially if you sync soon enough after a new version announcement. :)
You want it to be as reliable on the desktop as Windows? If installing programs blows up the OS, and upgrades don't work right, it sounds like Linux is already there. Those are "features" that Windows has had as long as there's been Windows!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
DLL hell is not unique to either Linux or Windows. It has been a serious problem from the moment the first person updated a shared library on the first system to support them.
The logical symbols mechanism in VMS allowed many problems to be avoided, instead of loading a filename the program would load a logical symbol. It was easy to run a system with different versions of the same shared library in use simultaneously. UNIX and Windows never used symbols in quite the same way.
I think that folk need to look at what they get from a shared library. At one time it made great sense to save memory by having multiple processes share an in memor image of an executable. It makes particular sense if you are running something like Apache where child processes are being spawned off from the parent and share resources with it. I don't think it makes a lot of sense as a general approach when memory cost $50 per gigabyte.
We could probably do much better than shared memory if we went back to static libraries and instead used more intelligent linker technology. When I link to stdio I pull in maybe 500K of code and use at most 40% of the code paths. When I link to more recent libraries the library is much larger and the fraction I use much, much less. A shared library is an all or nothing affair, every part of the library has to be loaded in case another image might need it. Even if the code page is never touched the memory has to be allocated.
As for the question of user interfaces, I think that the way they are designed today is worse than sub-optimal. I would prefer to go back to an architecture similar to the one that the NextStation had. Instead of having the program implement the user interface as code it should send a description of the user interface to the windows manager and have it perform all the necessary animation.
This approach is similar to what we did in the early HTML days but the idea is to take the approach much further. I really dislike the fact that most programs are single threaded and the UI goes to sleep every time it is asked to do anything computationally intensive of requiring the network. The architecture I just described allows the window manager to keep the user interface alive even though the program logic is 'thinking' and the programmer does not have to do any work to achieve this.
The other advantage of this approach is a bit more controvertial, it limits the scope of the UI designer. This is a bad thing if you really, really love to foist a bizaro UI onto the user. On the other hand it means that every application can be skinned so implementing the bizarro UI is simply a matter of telling the program manager how to do it for every program on the machine.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
You, and the article make a bunch of good points, but you miss one key one that will keep things in play: cost.
The article, although apparently from the POV of the purchaser (business, in this case), it actually speaks from the point of view of the software industry. End purchasers care about continuity, proper performance, and price, in roughly that order. All the article's arguments are valid when the end user interacts directly with the software producer. If they have to screw around with Linux kernel changes themselves, yes they get pissed. But when there's an intermediary (packager, vendor, consultant, etc.) who can provide continuity and performance, there's a nice opportunity to capitalize on the massive bag of Legos which those intermediaries obtain for $100 to several thousand less per copy than Microsoftware. If the intermediary/alternate vendor can figure out a way to split that $100 + between themselves and the consumer, there's an incentive for the consumer to _consider_ change. That's precisely the niche that IBM's in. I wouldn't be surprised to see IBM start opening up more of their core products, if and when:
a) transition that revenue to services (services is always the top of the stack)
b) address the platform/continuity issues the article brings up
c) doing so would represent a kick in the teeth to a competitor
This is not to be a OSS triumphalist, but I think there's a decent enough balance in there that it might be just a wee bit early to call the OS market sewn up by Microsoft.