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Windows Beat Unix, But it Won't Beat Linux
Onymous Hero writes "The amazing thing isn't that Windows beat the pants off Unix; it's that so many of the Unix companies survived until today. An article from eWeek looks at why Linux has been so successful where Unix failed." From the article: "While the Unix companies were busy ripping each other to shreds, Microsoft was smiling all the way to the bank. Because the Unix businesses couldn't settle on software development standards, ISVs (independent software vendors) had to write not a single application to get the whole Unix market, they had to write up to a half-dozen different versions. Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems? "
Make that three.
NeXT are still in the Unix business.
.. you just have to choose your API's/frameworks carefully.
.. as long as you're developing on Unix.
i mean, its not so difficult to set up a project that will cross-compile, use GTK+ or one of the other, smart, GUI libs, heck even SDL+libcairo works wonders, and then get it running on Solaris, Linux, *BSD's, OSX, and Windows
but you certainly can't easily do it the other way around: develop on Windows, and port across. It can of course be done (with GTK+, etc), but its not as easy as it is to do under Unix.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
And it won't for one simple reason. Its open source and free. Time and time again people say that Linux won't be able to last another year against Windows, and time and time again Linux is still here and stronger than ever. It is for one simple reason. It will last so long as people still have an interest in it and keep developing for it. Theoretically, Linux could last forever against Microsoft because there will always be people who don't want to buy into them. And there will always be people who want software for free and be able to modify their software. We could sit at 24 million Linux users for the next century and be fine. Still using Linux? (version 8.6.12-ac3) You bet I am.
Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
Well let me think... I'll write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, after they pry my cold dead fingers off my smoking gun.
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
From TFA:Hold on a second...according to Ulrich Drepper, the LSB was fundamentally broken.
(Note: see the Slashdot discussion regarding Ulrich's assertions here.
If Ulrich is on target, LSB, far from being the saving grace of Linux, could well be its downfall.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Back when Unix ruled the world you programmed in C at the OS level, you had to understand about pipes and processors and threads and lots of other elements of the OS. This meant it was a pain to re-learn across all the other platforms.
Now there are (for enterprises) only two real choices, Java and
Linux is winning in large enterprises because its the cheapest, and safest, way to run Oracle RAC and J2EE Application Servers. If you really don't care about the OS (and most of the time you don't) then you might as well pick Linux.
If programming was still at the OS level then IMO Linux would still struggle as you'd have to understand a lot more about it. J2EE in paticular has made hardware a commodity, and in the commodity world Linux is the best choice.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
haha I know this is off topic, but...
When clicking on the story to ready it, there was a sun ad saying "With their evil systems, it's no wonder their name rhymes with hell"
haha Classy.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I find the whole question rather odd. You can just as easily write a single application that would run on all UNIX systems of a particular flavor.
Why group the different UNIX vendors together then complain that they are different? Why not put microsoft in the same group with them and complain that what you write for UNIX does not run on Microsoft?
the Unix businesses couldn't agree on software development standards
Oh, and Linux can?
This is exactly what you get when you have the open source, we don't need no stinking standards operating system.
If you are running a small company you don't have the time or other resources to support a hundred versions-- you go where the users are.
I can see Linuxers reading this article and spitting their coffee into their monitors (wooooot).
Great falme-bait for a Friday!
Cogito Ergo Sum
Why is it that for Linux to succeed Microsoft must fail and vice versa? Surely there's room for both of them in the market and competition is a healthy thing to prevent stagnation. No one looks for ATi to destroy Nvidia or wants Sony to put Nintendo out of the market so why the constant desire to see Microsoft fail? I actually like a lot of what Microsoft is trying to acheive with its next round of software. At the same time I love the progress made by Debian, Ubuntu, E17 etc. one spurs the other. If Microsoft fails surely thats bad for the American economy and in the long term means less jobs for people like ourselves, it's almost like wishing another Katrina on yourselves, doesn't make much sense to me.
" Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?"
Now how does that make sense? Microsoft didn't meet anyone elses standards either. If anything even though the Unix guys didn't exactly pull it off, they still did a better job meeting standards than Microsoft. The truth is they were all doing their own thing, just MS managed to sell enough to get the userbase it needed to make developing for their platform a no-brainer.
In short, it wasn't Windows standards compliance or lack thereof that made them win, Windows won in spite of it.
Sigs are awesome huh?
From the article:
The second advantage was it had Linus Torvalds.
There are other open-source Unix operating systems: the BSDs.
None of them, though, have had even a fraction of Linux's success.
Because Torvalds is the single leader of Linux, it has avoided the old Unix trap of in-fighting, which continues to bedevil the BSDs.
Excuse me? Sure, there is in-fighting among the BSDs, but there is certainly more in-fighting and more competition among the Linux distributions.
For instance, the ports/packages of OpenBSD is inspired by FreeBSD's, while NetBSD's pkgsrc has been selected by DragonFlyBSD. OpenSSH, from OpenBSD, has been adopted by both FreeBSD and NetBSD (not to mention countless other OS) and pf has also been imported into FreeBSD and NetBSD. And so on and so forth. That does not sound like in-fighting to me.
So... in-fighting? Sure, there is competition between the BSDs, and a fair amount of sniping and name-calling, but I don't think this is worse (or better) than the in-fighting between the different Linux distributions.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
As hokey as it may sound, I think some of it has to do with the attitude or "coolness" surrounding Linux. When people were introduced to Linux, it was this new hip cool thing, and if you didn't know what Linux was, then you were out of the loop! Unix always conjured up images of the old greybeard sitting in the lab tinkering with the machines.
The business world loves to be hip and Linux certainly provided that.
Sure they were.
Besides, Apple of today is very much NeXT. Just look who's running it.
1. Most Unix operating systems ran on proprietary hardware only. NT could be installed on cheap hardware you could buy from a store.
2. The exception was SCO Unix. But SCO treated it exclusively as a high-end product, so it didn't end up on desktops.
3. No serious push was made to put Unix on the desktop. As a result, Microsoft was able to sell NT as an operating system that the majority of system administrators were familiar with, as opposed to Unix where almost nobody had it on their desktops.
If these issues had been knocked on the head, Unix might have stood a chance. As for "rival" versions all making different decisions, who gives a crap? So "Unix" wasn't one operating system, but several: if it was five different operating systems, then it had five chances to be successful. Any one of them could have succeeded and changed the market. None of them did, not because they were rivals, but because they all had at least one major flaw as documented above:
- AIX might have been successful had it been available for x86 and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
- Solaris might have been successful had it been available for x86 (before Linux) and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
- HPUX might have been successful had it been available for x86 and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
- DEC Tru64 might have been successful had it been available for x86 and with low-cost desktop versions available that were properly pushed.
Whether, of course, it would have been capable of being properly pushed, given Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop market in the early nineties, is open to question.What the summary documents is a nonsense and ignores the real issues. Arguing that AUX didn't succeed because it competed with Solaris would be like arguing MSDOS didn't succeed because it competed with CP/M. The fact all of these operating systems shared a brandname does not mean they didn't independently fail. They may have failed for the same reasons, but they didn't fail because they were all slightly different yet had a brandname and some code in common. That's ridiculous.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
As far as I can tell, Unix is still winning as an enterprise server OS, Between AIX and Solaris, there's a pretty nice chunk of Unix servers out there. (Not to mention IRIX or any other Unixes). Plus BSD's will never die, since the BSD licence >> than the GPL. Linux just was the "in" thing for nerds, and when the next OS fad comes along the article on here will be how windows killed Unix and Linux, but won't kill the resurgance of BeOS or something like that.
Would you rather have 1 tyrant (Bill Gates) 3,000 miles away or 3,000 tyrants (open sourcers) 1 mile away?
Cogito Ergo Sum
You have this comment saved up somewhere waiting for a chance to use it? I recognise it.
/ 1128201&threshold=-1&tid=156&tid=163&tid=8&tid=106
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/19
Come on, you can do better AC.
all the best,
drew
--
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/57503
Paper Plane 001 video at ourmedia
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
hmmm...java - self installing executable.
Firefox, and netscape before it - self installing executable.
Flash - self installing executable.
MyEclipseIDE (a commercial J2EE feature / plugin for Eclipse) - self installing executable.
Even Oracle is a simple clicky wizard away on Linux these days.
The challenges to installing 3rd party software on Linux or any Unix are no different to the ones in Windows. - In fact, with the complete lack of package management in Windows, most Unix like systems are actually easier to create installs for.
It's not the fault of the operating system if the application vendor can't be bothered spending the extra time to make the installation process easy.
Advanced users are users too!
Are you suggesting that there's a better way than writing everything for the curses library?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
As a previous poster pointed out, we have been told again and again, that Linux has been on the path of destruction.
While I am a c++ fan, i don't see the advantage of a C++ gui API. Furthermore, while it may seem huge to you, we only have two main GUI API on linux. They are even mostly crossplatform now. Plus you know that by choosing either one of them it will run on your linux box, as both GTK and QT are installed.
As for the media framework, i guess you haven't been following it very well, but to my knowledge, we can say we have three major one on Linux: Mplayer, Xine and finally my favorite GStreamer. While initially Gstreamer was Gnome, it is one becoming a major player (pun almost intented) in KDE. Amarok uses it quite well. Furthermore, they have from what i understand an almost functionnal version for Windows, making it crossplatform too.
Choice doesn't create chaos. What creates chaos is when you are stupid to make a good choice, and that you are gloating that your choice is valid because you picked it. Choice push to competition. Plus, i would prefer choice, than a single road finishing with a wall at the end.
I don't really if Linux beats Windows, or the reverse, as long as I have the choice to work on a consistent platform Linux or Windows. It all adds up to what is better for you.
but:
Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
Seems a little bit oversimplified. I'm not directly affected because I don't use Microsoft software, but I've heard where I work that it takes months to verify if every service pack for Windows will work with existing software. And when I was a Windows developer, we were doing some pretty low level stuff with the authentication subystem, and things were very different between Win 98, 2000, and NT 4 (was that really still around then?). Granted, for a simple GUI app, Windows is very portable across its products, but if you get a little lower into the OS, things get nasty quick.
History says that if you build an app for Solaris first and that gains marketshare, then maybe it might be worthwhile to port it to other Unices if the development and porting costs can be recouped with sales and support. Linux has been changing that somewhat, but I'd still wager that most development houses that write for a Unix market almost always have Solaris as a primary platform.
As to why you'd do this (and to some extent, this is still valid), it's because Unices provide a stable, well-mature platform for apps and are capable of more processing power than your typical Windows system -- all desirable traits for an application that people are going to depend on. People use Windows because the time-to-market for development is typically shorter than that of Unix development, mostly due to the fact that 95% of the world can write an app on their Windows desktop and copy it to a Windows server platform without modification. Doesn't mean it's good code or a well-thought out development strategy, but it's an enabling technique that keeps Windows development prevalent in IT.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
What I usually read on the internet, is not that linux is dying, but that it is growing and that it will conquer the desktop market (well I am not seeing that happening right now either).
And that is the point. It's not if it's going to be around for a long time (it will be, for all the reasons the parent posted), but if it will grow to compete with windows on the desktop market. What is really stopping me right now from switching to a linux desktop is software support... I don't want to set up a server here, and I think I have the skills to use linux and do what I want, but the software isn't there. And the software will come, only if linux somehow finds its way to more homes (hmm I sense a paradoxical loop here).
So "being around" is not the problem with linux, the real problem is that people that want to use it (I know I do) should be able to... In my case, software support is stopping me.
... at least fix the "greater than 1%" to "less than 1%". By not doing so, you are not only a troll, but a god damned stupid one.
Meh.
Good grief what bull - anyone would think you've never been able to write large scale single source apps until you ship on one platform (Linux, Windows or the Mac, choose one). Between 1990 and 1994 I worked for Laser Scan (out of business for about a year now) www.laserscan.co.uk. We wrote GIS systems for VMS and 6 Unix platforms. All single source, in C, using X11 and Motif with Oracle I think, using object based code (the GNU C++ compiler wasn't up to much in 1990 when we had to choose). There was I think one header file with the few platform specific things in (like missing macros on Solaris) etc. I can't remember how many lines of code, but I think about the 1 million line mark, excluding comments. 11 years is a long time to try to remember that stuff.
But single source - that is the majority of your headache gone right there. Which leads to the next FALSE assertion:
Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
Write a single App for VMS and six competing Unix vendors from single source - why thats the same as write an app for seven different Linux vendors from single source. You STILL have the seven unique quality assurance and support problems because each distribution will be different.
It would be nice to assume that because you built it on RedHat it will run on Suse. Maybe it will most of the time. But will it always? And when it does not, will the cause necessarily always be the same when it fails on Linux vendor #2 compared to failing on Linux vendor #4? Maybe, Maybe not, that is the question, for alas quality assurance and support did not exist when he wrote plays in Stratford upon Avon.
Still, I'm sure the informed journo that wrote that article has a nice pay cheque.
mostly crossplatform
It's the mostly that's the problem. And besides, when one has to wait on a particular distro to provide their flavor of a given program (which generally you do), it's no longer mostly. As long as Linux programs have to be tailored to specific distros, Linux has a problem.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
There can't be a competition because Windows WILL NOT permit Linux's existance to continue. Given the oppurtunity, Microsoft will kill Linux. They just haven't figured out how. So Linux's continued existence and Microsoft's continued existence are mutually exclusive. For Linux or any other F/OSS Operating system to survive, Microsoft has to collapse, be split up or something....
Make no mistake, THEY WILL DO WHATEVER IS NESSESSARY TO KILL US!
May I suggest you tell Apple that "MacOS X is not Unix"?
According to you tf Apple site:
"Beneath the surface of Mac OS X lies an industrial-strength UNIX foundation..."
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/
Luckily I commented on you so that I am not tempted to mod you overrated.
Wether you call BSD dead or not, I don't care, I just use what works the best for me, sometimes it is windows sometimes it is Mac other times it is bsd. I tried linux but I am more experienced with BSD's.
The other thing is biting the hand that feeds it: Geeks. Yes, I know, we geeks are unmarketable, economically unviable, socially inept, prone to expect other people to know how to do Really Complex Stuff like unzip an archive, but before you burn us all at the stake just to get us out of the way so you can sell Linux for $14.99 off the shelf at WalMart, you might want to preserve a couple of us. Nobody else is going to make more Linux for you to sell. Programs do not write themselves.
No kidding: Programs really do NOT write themselves!!!!! So if you throw out the compilers based on the notion that including them with the distro will just confuse Joe Sixpack? That's disabling the programming process. If you get rid of the command line? Programs are written there. Throw out programs like vi, Emacs, gcc, gdb, yacc, sed, awk, and man just because they have funny names that won't look tasty on the flashy label? Wait, those are programming tools, we need those! If you make Linux into a Windows clone, thinking you'll attract all the Windows users and be just as rich as Bill Gates (because that's exactly what people are thinking!)? But Linux programmers would really hate that, and you'll scare them all away to BSD or BeOS. Hang lots of whistles and bells on it, decorate it with frosting, throw out every particle of substance and dumb it down? Yes, you will win points with the very lowest common denominator market segment - the ones who spend the money, after all - but you'll ostricize all the other users, who will get tired of being locked in another playpen and wander off looking for better stimulation. Believe it or not, Linux did NOT get to where it is by being Just Like Everybody Else.
Yes, yes, yes, I know this post is getting flamed to a crisp the moment I hit the "submit" button. That's OK, you don't have to listen to me. Look around in three years, five, ten, and see what happened.
Little things like different error returns from system calls. EAGAIN varied on socket calls. Been a while since I struggled with this, but I remember having to code up shared memory and threaded apps differently for AIX, Solaris, etc, simply because some methods worked better on different systems. Some wanted mutexes in shared memory, or soemthing else some other way, and it was a real pain in the ass to deal with. HP-UX changed some socket return code semantics in some OS release, in some very subtle way.
Infuriate left and right
"Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems? "
.INIs, then some .INIs and half a registry, then Win32s, Win32, then Win 9x and the registry, then NT, it's unique registry, then running 16 bit in 32 via thunk and later WoW, ad nauseum! Then, its C, then VB, then, Visual, then VB + VC++, whatever...
.dll, then VxDs, then .NET,...
Development, installation and running on multiple MS platforms was NEVER easy: how quick everyone forgets...
In Win 3.x installation was text files, then
Never mind the network. Monolithic, NDIS, NDISII, II(?), Netbios/NETBEUI, then Bill Gates invented the Internet and IP, then broken IP stacks....
Then COM, COM+, ADO, then AD, then....
Then this
MS Easy to Develop and maintain for, and runs on all machines my Rear.
Because the Unix businesses couldn't settle on software development standards, ISVs (independent software vendors) had to write not a single application to get the whole Unix market, they had to write up to a half-dozen different versions. Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
I've written several reasonably big Unix server programs over the years (mostly workflow engines and document management systems written in C and C++ with CORBA, multiple DB backends, etc.) and I think the posters statement is nonsense. Typically, one has to write an app for one version and make only minor tweaks to make it run on other versions. Often, those tweaks will point out mistakes made in the original and so are quite helpful in QA.
The headache is the patch management systems for all of the different vendor's OS versions. When the customer of your product says "We have problem X" and the solution is to tell them to install Unix vendor Y's OS patch 123456, that becomes a support headache. But it really is not very different from telling the customer they need to install a Windows service pack when a product that runs on an MS OS has problems.
Complaining that Unix OSs aren't perfectly standardized clones is like complaining that RDBMSs don't all implement the SQL standards perfectly. But most server application architects/programmers don't have too many problems converting their apps to use DB2 instead of Oracle. These kinds of minor differences haven't led to a monopolist RDBMS supplier.
FreeSpeech.org
The economics were: DOS==FREE (forced bundling) -- XENIX $400
When you have 1 or 2 machines, this is not too much of a problem. However, when you plan on deploying 20 or 100 or 1000 machines, this $400 adds up very fast. Management balks....
In the early '90's, we had to pay EXTRA to Dell to get 486 PCs without DOS and Windows. So the cost was EVEN HIGHER. Management would look at the cost of XENIX (or other UNIXs which were comparable) and ask why you could not do it with DOS. As a result a lot of extra, unpaid OT happened to write executives and multi-taskers for DOS when XENIX/UNIX would have been an ideal fit!
Another factor is price elasticity of demand -- lower price, more demand, higher price, less demand. DOS=FREE (or even $29) versus XENIX $400 -- now which would management let you purchase or design into your product? Concurrent (?) UNIX was $99 and it was an option, but not widely supported. It has taken FREE versions of UNIX/UNIX-like O/Ss (Free BSD, LINUX) to change the market dynamics -- it is hard to compete with FREE and with FORCED BUNDLING.
No middle manager gave a rat's ass about the difficulty of porting to different vesions of UNIX. Certainly the effort to port a UNIX app to Windows and retrain all those programmers was far greater than merely adding a few IFDEFs to existing code. UNIX lost just as squiggleslash says. When time came to add a simple print server or file, managers said, Whoa, I can add a cheap Windows commodity system, or I can buy an expensive UNIX box that has to go in the dataceneter with special power and cooling requirements. As for who would admin the damn thing, since none of the UNIX guys would touch it, the answer was as simple as Microfoft's ad campaign, why the manager would, it's a GUI, what could be simpler?
UNIX ignored cheap systems, everyone knew the money was in the big boxes, and as for the desktop, that was an insignificant market to be sniffed at. No serious vendor paid attention to desktops, only (sniff) Microsoft and their toy operating system.
Infuriate left and right
An employee suggested to me that we install Windows XP on a few machines here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using Windows XP instead of a (arguably) harder to use Linux distro. I decided to let him install it on 5 machines to see how the employees got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using Windows at home and he hadn't reported any problems - why not try it on our employees?
Once he'd got the employees up and running with Windows we let them try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: The Windows systems were a pretty good replacement for some of the Linux boxen we'd used before and the employees could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from our employees. Users could not do things they could before (like use gcc). The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when OpenOffice suddenly froze up, destroying the 70 page legal document he had been working on.
Needless to say, Redmont, having been stagnant for half a decade, offered no support whatsoever. I dismissed the employee and made him remove the Windows systems before he left.
You speak the truth, which is why this post will be modded as a troll or flamebait. Linux will remain a niche player until I can download and install a program without having to compile it from source or wade through a list of compiled binaries by platform and version. Why, you ask? Simple, the majority of commercial software developers will not want to put up with the hassel.
If Linux is to become a major player, something like the LSB is needed.
However, if Linux wins and Microsoft loses, there are still N-1 companies competing in the OS market, where the -1 is the loss of Microsoft. So still (almost) as much competition as before, and it's still good for everyone.
I want NVidia and ATi both to succeed as while they are both there, there is real competition. Linux doesn't work that way, it's not a good analogy.
That's the beauty of the GPL. It's all in the licence, stupid.
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
You are absolutely correct in every respect. I suspect that you got modded as "troll" more for your attitude and sarcasm than from what you were trying to say. But the core reasons like what you describe are exactly why I will not try to push Linux on family for quite some time.
.5 is the only version that is available on Sunfreeware.Com. So, I downloaded the source code. I couldn't compile it because my version of GTK wasn't correct and I didn't have libpcre installed. So, I decided to get the source for those. Well, some libraries that THEY needed weren't installed. When all was said and done, I needed to download and install SIX packages/libraries just to run BlueFish 1.0. One of them wouldn't compile due to some error that I don't remember, but fortunately was optional.
For example, just recently I wanted to install BlueFish 1.0 on a Solaris 8 system. (No, it's not Linux, but the principle is the same.) Unfortunately, BlueFish
I also ran into the same problem last week when trying to get Apache to play nice with Sun Java System/ONE Directory Server. Because Apache assumes that you use OpenLDAP, it didn't see DS. The only options that I could find were to either install OpenLDAP and use its libraries or install SASL. Well, OpenLDAP wouldn't compile because it claimed that it couldn't find libraries that *were* installed and available! I even told it specifically what directory to look in for those libraries, but it still didn't take it. SASL wouldn't install due to a shitload of syntax errors in the DES header file. I found numerous issues regarding that problem on the Internet with the apparent conclusion that it will not compile on Solaris 8. So, I never got that to work. Fortunately, I came up with a solution that does not require Apache plugging directly into DS.
Am I a compilation and C expert? Hardly. I at least know enough to identify if libraries or paths are problematic to the point that I can get around or correct most compiling errors. (As I said, I know that I was talking about Solaris 8, so it's not completely an apples-to-apples comparison, but the underlying principles are the same.) That kind of knowledge is absolutely beyond the cognitive thought processes of the vast majority of Windows users, particularly the Joe Six Pack who uses Windows for nothing more than surfing the web and sending e-mail to his Aunt Bertha in Sheboygan! They want to put a disc in, run the startup program and be done. Linux can't deliver that yet when libraries depend on other libraries which depend on other libraries which might depend on other libraries, and a change to one requires a change to all.
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.
Very true. Don't get me wrong. Linux is getting there. I've run into a few distributions that are *very* user-friendly right from the start. But until Linux becomes as user-friendly as Windows, particularly when it comes to software and library dependencies, it will never be accepted by the masses as a Windows alternative.
I guess that makes me a "troll", too. In this instance, karma be damned.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
From an end user perspective, when using debian, I just go to the "add remove" programs (synaptic), and choose what I want to install, then install it. (notice I didn't say download, find where I downloaded it, double-click it, follow the installation guide, and hope it didn't install spyware)
If a product isn't offered there, I can usually download a platform-independent installer. You are confusing the flexibility of linux with chaos.
Besides, it's all the same stuff anyway. Most linux apps aren't perfect, neither are Microsoft apps, the funny part is, I don't pay for most of my software, and it gets fixed quicker. I hated linux in the past because of the FUD effect, but now that I've given it a chance, I've learned it is easier to use and maintain. The reason Windows will "win" is marketing, momentum, and the fact that they don't make horrible software. (the just don't make great software either, but marketing covers that nicely)
"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." -C.S. Lewis
This is of course, going to get modded down into oblivion, but damnit, this is going too far now.
Are are you mods on crack? This is the lamest troll I've ever seen and you tools are lapping it up? Fuck me, but is slashdot ever full of POSERS if you guys can't tell that this is pure crap.
FreeBSD has Linux have always been very neck to neck. While linux would be a touch faster at this, FreeBSD would be a touch faster at this, etc. Linux has better hardware support, FreeBSD tends to have better stability. It goes on like that and pretty much always had.
FreeBSD has not benefitted from Apple. Apple has benefitted from BSD. Purely a one way relationship. Since when did Apple write FreeBSD's VM and SMP code, that makes "OSX running effiecently" -- OSX is not efficent. Its bloated to the max. You might dig is GUI and design, thats fine, but you can't tell anyone that its effiecient code because you don't have to look hard for benchmarks to make that claim a joke.
FreeBSD does not run on Apples mach microkernel, holy shit, how did this slip by? Is this just Apple fanbois modding anything even remotely pro-apple up? This has got to be happening here. What the hell is this long and precarious history of FreeBSD -- its bloody free software, what exactly is supposed to happen to it? And... ooh! So annoying, the troll even posts about how FreeBSD has wicked HARDWARE support now -- argh! Like they even run on the same machines sand you guys still modded it up!
If god were real he would strike you down for modding this up, even if you are a mindless apple fanboi.
--SD
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
Linux bigotry blinds these folks from reality. Unix vendors such as sun sgi et al, were hardware vendors NOT unix vendors. They prospered because in the 1980's through 1990's they kept their high margin hardware 5 years more advanced than the commodity priced PC market. Example, a Sun Ultra2 had 4.3GB/s memory bandwidth when the best PC's had 512MB/s.
The "workstation" companies began to fail when they could not maintain this technology lead. Why pay Sun's margins for the same basic hardware you can get from the local whitebox shop? Unix and windows don't enter in to it.
IT is shifting from expensive big iron to throw away whitebox clusters.
Linux will succeed because it allows consumers to further commoditize the cost the computing for companies that have the staff to build and maintain their own OSS distributions (Google?). For companies that cannot do this and have to purchase Linux support contracts, its generally equal to or more expensive than Windows.
He was commenting on TFA, which was about way back before glibc. Back then porting was a PITA, a daily struggle to keep track of what methods worked best on which operating systems, indeed which releases of which operating systems. The differences weren't as great as from one Microsoft OS to the next, but they were there, and there were more variants.
There was no glibc to be arsed to use. POSIX was a joke.
TFA dealt with that earlier era. You, sir, are off-topic and irrelevant.
Infuriate left and right
Which would you rather do? Write a single application that would run on all Windows systems, or six different ones, each with its own unique quality assurance and support problems?
As a programmer, I'd rather write six versions. This is because writing six versions takes longer without really being that much harder. It's not as if you'd have to write six completely different programs, just six similar ones. That would take longer than just writing one program, and then you'd have more to do and thus higher job security. Plus, it sounds a lot better claiming overtime when you're writing six programs versus just one. Of course, if I'm a manager or supervisor or something, I only want one program written. Depends on who you are and what you are looking for, I suppose.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Actually, FreeBSD does not use the Mach microkernel. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all use their own traditional kernels. The only free BSD flavor to sport a microkernel is Darwin (and its variant OpenDarwin). Actually, according to Apple, Darwin does not even support SMP on x86 platforms currently (though I'm sure this will change with Apple's transition to Intel)
Actually, this is only partly true. They tend to mix and match bits of the BSD userland from FreeBSD and NetBSD.
Apple's biggest contribution has been in the form of good press. Actually, Apple's OS only sort of resembles FreeBSD. The init plumming is all different. Directory structures are very different. NetInfo is very different indeed than FreeBSD's more traditional model for user management, etc.
And what's with the link in your last line to trollaxor.com? (Look at the period at the end of the last sentence.) As glowing an endorsement this would seem of FreeBSD and Apple (of which I'm fond of both), it would seem maybe that a lot of mods were cleverly trolled?
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
For related 'extra' information... Chapter 2 in the Art of Unix Programming (Eric S. Raymond) contains a very interesting discourse about the history of the UNIX operating system, and offers insight into operating system wars in general.
One of his points is that many early UNIXes suffered because of licensing issues. I definitely feel that Linux's edge over older UNIXes is its open source license.
Back in the 80's (about 10 years before the compatibility issue resulted in POSIX), there was a complete, well defined standard for UNIX. This was ATT's version, which was BINARY compatible across all x86 versions (not just source code compatible).
UNIX should have won out over Windows then. It had networking back in 1986. It had graphics. It had far superior technology to the main competition, which was DOS.
But, AT&T did everything in their power to kill UNIX. Not deliberately, but out of greed and incompetance. And one of the key factors was that the people who sold cheap UNIX on the PC (Microport, ISC, etc.) all had to pay an exhorbitant royalty to ATT - while Microsoft didn't have any royalties to pay.
The royalty was about $100 IIRC. That's absolutely rediculous in the PC biz. This meant you simply couldn't beat Microsoft when it came to OEM deals. Nor could you beat them when selling to the average consumer, where price almost always won out. So this was the main reason why UNIX could never beat DOS, or later Windows. Not even binary compatibility could surmount that cost difference. Fragmentation of the standards was an issue later on, and was only a secondary issue.
As an amusing side note, for a while NONE of those small UNIX companies selling x86 UNIX were paying the royalties to AT&T, not even SCO. When AT&T found out about it, it caused a serious collapse in the x86 UNIX biz. Microport went out of business, Bell Tech got "aquired" by Intel (who was responsible for the licenses - via the ATT "Micro Port" program). That is, Intel paid AT&T in exchange for aquiring Bell Technologies.
Even SCO wasn't immune. They licensed their Xenix code from Microsoft. It was Microsoft who ended up paying AT&T, and in turn got 20% of SCO stock there for a while.
Now, with Linux, there are no royalties to pay. Everyone is on a level playing field with Microsoft.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
In the meritocracy of open-source development, the good code survives and the bad code dies.
This is true for most commercial software, too. But, as long as the machine keeps dumping millions of dollars in it and continue to force it down consumer's throat, it may survive for many, many years. There are many examples of this. *cough* MSFT *cough* *cough*
Coderz 4 Life
Comment removed based on user account deletion
don't mess with those geekgrrls
If anyone is screwing themselves up, its Microsoft. They are trying to make their earnings targets by raising prices and cutting services. MSDN used to be excellent, but now, how often do you just get a book about the topic instead and use Google to look for answers to Windows issues. The search in MSDN is useless and getting worse.
Programs -don't- write themselves, and that is the ultimate point.
Right now, the entry level system for Windows, Visual Studio Express, is completely crippled, for $50. Even the $500 offering lacks source control. The only suite that really wins is Team System, and that's $2500, a year. That's almost enough to make a car payment with. I've been working with Beta 2 and for C++ its actually worse than KDevelop and for the rest, well, I don't see the justification of a $2500 premium.
If you are a small indy developer, the economics of writing for Windows is almost absurd. On the other hand, you can do a lot with Linux for the money. I have to believe that this trend will fuel the wider spread of adoption of Linux. That's not to say that it will be easy, but, the more developers switch, the more MS has to raise prices in its tools division to show growth, causing more developers to switch. Microsoft is in a feedback loop and even now licensing costs are starting to get even large IT concerns to take notice.
It used to be that Linux advocates were a minority, and they still are, but now they are less of a minority than before.
This is my sig.
I worked on a C code base that spanned several UNIX systems (the standard ones and wierder ones like AIX or IRIX). It also ran on MPE and VAX systems.
Let me tell you, there were a LOT of ifdefs going on to deal with vagaries in the size of an int, byte ordering, even memory management.
You seem to claim that POSIX gives you just as good cross-platform abilities as a system like Java or Python. But that is simply false; at best Posix is only an order of magnitude worse in terms of testing across systems that is required to be done compared to a cross-platform language like Java.
One reason for this (at least in the case of Java) is a really rigorous set of tests that help ensure to what degree Java will do the same thing across platforms. Posix is not as well defined as Java to start with, and as a result simply cannot be tested as throughly to insure a similar level of behavoral similarilty across systems.
The common Joke with Java is that you "Write Once, Test Everywhere". But in my extensive practical experience I have seen no code changes required to easily develop day-to-day Java across Windows, Solaris, and Linux. There is NO WAY if I were writing POSIX C code I would be as comfortable just writing on Windows or Linux and then deploying straight to Solaris.
Java has moved out the bits that you really do need to "test everywhere" out much further on the fringes of coding than C has.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In theory Apple removes one vector of choice (hardware) from the whole PC equation. So your logic would seem to dictate Apple will eventually win an Microsoft is doomed.
Personally I think that's Microsofts big problem - If your theory is right, Apple wins. If the theory of choice is correct, Linux wins. Note there seem to be no scnearios under which Microsoft "wins", only ones where they cohabit a space... and that's all most detractors have ever really wanted. A world where Microsoft does not win but instead cooperates.
A concrete example of that world would be Office supporting the open office doc formats. I still think we'll see that happen within five years or so, after some large shakeup.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You do have to write a different version of your app for every version of Windows. OK, maybe it's not 6, but there are massive differences between Windows 98 and, say, Windows 2000. Windows XP represents another, albeit less disruptive, set of changes. Windows Vista will probably represent the biggest set of changes yet. Each of these is a development target, with its own QA requirements and so on.
I've worked on software that had to be supported on HPUX, AIX, Solaris, and yes even SCO's crappy UNIX. There were notable differences and QA requirements, but the differences between the Windows branches are much more significant.
Windows won for one reason. It was pretty, so you could trick people into learning how to use it. Well that, and people had windows computers at home, and they brought that skillset with them to job interviews.
It can't beat Linux because Linux doesn't have stockholders to answer to. And it's losing share to Linux in direct proportion to the degree to which Linux is getting prettier.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
So, the fact that Solaris does not have an adequate package manager means Linux sucks?
1) Solaris's shortcomings are not Linux's fault
2) Most Linux distros have *much* better package managers than Solaris. You would not have had these difficulties in almost any Linux distro.
3) Use Blastwave instead of Sunfreeware; Blastwave has a much better package manager than the native Solaris one.
4) Solaris 8 is obsolescent; it's not surprising you had trouble getting and using decent freeware for it.
Chris Mattern
Who says that?
People often say that Linux won't displace Windows, that it won't overtake Windows on the desktop, and so on.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Ok, once again for the benefit folks in the cheap seats, let's review:
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows 95B
Windows 95B
Windows 98
Windows Me
Windows NT Workstation
Windows NT Server
Windows NT Terminal Server
Windows 2000 Pro
Windows 2000 Server
Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Windows 2000 Server Datacenter Edition
Windows XP Home
Windows XP Pro
Windows XP Pro SP2
Windows XP Pro 64-bit
Windows XP Media Center Edition
Windows 2003 Server
Windows 2003 Server Small Business Server
blah... blah... blah...
OK, now, let's combine that with the various versions of IE
4
4.01
5
5.5
6
As one Windows C++ developer friend of mine described the process of working with these many versions: "Lions and Tigers and Bears, OH MY!"
Making most any reasonably complex app work on multiple versions of Windows is difficult at best and impossible at worst. That Windows is a panacea is jut plain wrong.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
let the users sort it out.
There is no need to support all the different Linuxes, just do one and call it good. Hardware is cheap, applications can run over X, allowing application servers dedicated to specific apps, Linuxes are open so compatability tweaks can be done at any level. (Similar to the standard system load performed by most companies these days)
I've spoken to a few major software development teams and they don't get this at all. They see a support nightmare with all the different versions. Open scares the hell out of them because they don't have any real control over what users do.
Why bother with all of that? Let the users do what they will and support those that play ball. The community will evolve whatever is necessary to handle the exceptions and it won't cost a dime. If your app sees wide use, you can bet there will be communities that form around it. Those folks will largely support themselves. In fact, starting such a community would solve the problem and focus the efforts in one known place. Sheesh.
Blogging because I can...
From Information Week dated Sept 5, 2005 "businesses spent more than $4 billion in the second quarter on Unix servers. Sales of high-end machines (priced at $500,000 and more) grew around 20% in the second quarter, while sales of midrange servers ($25,000 to $500,000) grew more than 15%".
If only I could lose like that.
Its also interesting that of the companies controlling "more than 90% of the Unix market", HP, IBM and Sun, only Sun seems to be mentioned at all in this forum. Slashdotters apparently need to open their eyes to the fact that there is a vast market for systems beyond desktops and hobby servers.