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Vista Launch Good for Desktop Linux?
Sensible Clod writes "XYZ Computing has an article hypothesizing that the arrival of Windows Vista may be a big opportunity for Linux to make headway on the desktop. Massive feature cutbacks for Vista as well as huge hardware requirements are cited as major factors. From the article: 'As the time gets closer and closer to the public debut of Vista the operating system seems to be constantly losing the luster which was associated with Longhorn...Whether it's the lack of a new file system or the Monad scripting shell, the absence of innovation in this operating system is giving it a black eye'. The article then shows the need for action to be taken to get Linux onto the computers in stores (display models!), and pinpoints a few important improvements Linux distros in general need to make. Very interesting read, and timely."
Just like 2004/3/2/1 was...
I started (or attempted to start) using Linux a few years back when I started university, just out of plain curiosity. My buddy and I downloaded the ISO images of Red Hat Linux 8.0, and from that point forward, it all went to shit.
I figured it would be no problem, I used Sun's Solaris quite a bit so I understood the shell at least. Install went well, even though I was confused why I needed seven million partitions which I had to allocate manually and to have a root password since it was a single user machine. After my install, I restarted my machine, saw a bunch of ugly crap being spewed to the screen, and before you knew it, X Windows loaded up and I was in Linux. "Ooh, this looks neat, just like Windows. Let's see if I can surf the web!"
This is the point where I discovered the 'magic' of Linux. It couldn't find a driver for a simple ethernet card. So I got onto another computer running Windows, and found some type of driver for it. All right, I'll just burn it to a cd, pop it onto the Linux machine, and we're good to go. I started looking around for the CD ROM icon...where was it? Apparently I had to mount it manually, luckily I know UNIX. Then it asks me for root password. Okay, so I enter it. Then I can see the CD ROM, great. Oh look, the driver is in the form of source code, I have to compile it. So I tried to compile it with the configure script that came along. Oh wait, I need some !@#$ing stupid C library. All right, so I download that as well in the form of a RPM, which luckily worked, and then I was able to compile the driver.
Okay now what? According to the instructions, I had to recompile the kernel making the driver a part of it. 'Recompile the kernel?' I thought, 'What kind of sick operating system makes you recompile its kernel...' Apparently I didn't know what kind of twisted people designed Linux. Oh wait, it wants the stupid root password again...good God. So after about 5 hours, I had Internet...given that I knew how to use a UNIX machine. Four days later I tried installing something else, it asked me for the same stupid C library but version 1.2.3.4.5 instead of the version I had...God forbid...1.2.3.4.4 (oh what a fool I was for not updating every 10 minutes!) Within an hour, my drive was formatted (twice out of spite) and running Windows XP.
A few months back I was inspired again to run Linux. If you read the tech news, there's no doubt about it, it's taking over the server market. A Linux sys admin will make 20 grand more than a Windows sys admin (Makes you wonder if 20 grand is worth eventual suicide), so I felt I should pick it up. Of course now I was more prepared, I've read books, admin guides, worked as a student UNIX operator, 3 years under my belt as a computer science student, two internships, and had studied the Linux kernel in depth.
I decided I would try a whole bunch of distributions, I tried Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 2, SuSe 9.1, Debian, and Mandrake 10. All special in there own little way...like retarded children. As soon as SuSe loaded up, I was like..."nice nice, very sleek...", then a hissing came out my left speaker that wouldn't go away. Nice autodetection for the sound driver. Bye bye SuSe. All right, let's try Red Hat 9...oh look Red Hat won't give any more automatic updates because now that it has a little bit of money...!@#$ open source, let's become the next Microsoft! Oh Debian and Mandrake, just plain ugly and slow.
What about Fedora Core, Red Hat's latest method of getting code for free rather than having to pay programmers in India $0.85 an hour to do it. Why pay someone when you can have some idiot from GNU or some grad student do it for free, then sell it for 400 bucks a pop. It was surprising though that that experimental piece of crap worked better than all the other distributions, even though its autoupdate some how corrupted my kernel and I had to overwrite it.
But what I find most stupid is the philosophy behind it. Why make something so complex for free? I'm an excellent software e
I'm a small business woman and in order to control costs, I have looked
at open source software as an alternative to MS. As a non-technical
person, it has been a very frustrating journey.
First of all, the term "free" seems misleading. It seems that you can
aquire a "starter" version of a Linux distro that is not production
ready for free. But if you want want that is tested and stable, one
needs to purchase an expensive yearly maitenance fee for each computer
it is installed on. My understanding is that one can aquire something
called "source" to the expensive linux distro version, but that the
source doesn't actually run the computer.
When researching, I read about "Redhat Linux" (sic ?). It seems that
they allowed one to download the complete "working" version for a while
but then they did a switchero and hid the working version download and
made it available to paying customers only. To pacify the rest, they
gave a "starter" ("Fredora" (sic?)) version to them. It seems they cut
off affordable support to those with the working version and replaced
it with something more expensive than MS.
My IT consultant put FireFox on my computer and it looks like another
switchero is in the works. With the members founding a corporation, it
looks like they will start charging for the good version and leave the
a "starter" version for the non-paying customers.
So is the business model of open-source to bait people with free
software when their software isn't as good as the commercial offerings,
and when it does become good or they get enough people on board, do
they just jack up the prices as much as possible? Seems to me this is
a poor business model, and I can't understand why a saleman recommended
it to me as a way to keep costs down. I would rather go with a vendor
where I can expect things to stay the same and a vendor that has a
clear business plan. That way they won't just change the rules halfway
like open source seems to.
Maybe it is a wrong impression, but that is what a good business woman
like myself sees.
No, enjoy your AIDS
When I have to use Windows, I use Windows 98.
I don't know of any features in 2000, XP, or Vista that is compelling.
More bloat, that's all.
So, as an OSX fanboy you found OSX to be the best in your own little "shootout" (please). What a shocker! Thanks for your insight, you sheep-for-brains drooling little twit.
So long as Longhorn looks a little prettier and the pressure eventually is pushed to corporations/people to upgrade for compatibility, people will move to it.
But then, when they find out that their old applications don't work anymore, the chronic issues getting 3rd party hardware to work, or even the hardware that came with their machine that came with Vista doesn't work, difficulty installing applications, networking issues to their fileserver, office documents will look formatted strange, printing issues, etc, etc.
Then, they will run in droves to Linux. Regardless of their desktop environment -- KDE, Gnome, FVWM, TWM, or hell, just a windowless xterm would solve all of these problems.
FreeBSD, Solaris, and OS X users will also wait in line for the features that Linux has to offer. They will follow like a stampede in the planes of Africa.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I am a Linux user. Have been for over 10 years. I love it in my server rooms, its easy to troubleshoot, administer, its as reliable as the hardware and power (more so actually), but if I never have to type 'startx' or login to a box that is set up at runlevel 5, thats fine by me.
I even have Linux on a 4 CPU Itanium SGI Prism with 2 dual head graphics cards which might be nice for custom visualization applications, but after logging in and the file manager crashes the first time you use it, and there are these little semi-hidden windows on the desktop when I'm not logged in as root (don't know what they are yet, I believe its an SGI thing). The OpenGL screensavers silently die when you run them as root. The OpenGL screensavers, even on such a highend box, are not completely smooth and flicker free.
I'm not blaming Linux here at all. Linux is fine, its the entire GUI subsystem of Linux and all other *NIX OSes (besides OS X) suffer from the same problems because they are the same GUI.
Once someone, gasp, even a commercial company fixes the GUI and end user issues, then Linux or some other *NIX system will gain mass appeal, not a minute before.
Well, the US is fast becoming a poor country--sure there are a few rich, but what happens when all the non-rich are pushed down from middle-class to poor? There's not enough money in the world to satiate the top 1% in this country. They'll keep taking ours until they end up with all of it. Presto! Poor country! I mean, even the poorest countries have a few rich people at the top who profit from it all. Soon we won't be any different than Nigeria.
And anyway, there are a lot of computers in the US. In fact, considering that China hasn't become super wired yet, the US might have a plurality (51% maybe?), though not a "vast majority" of computer users. That of course will change once Asia and Europe finish overtaking the US in every way.