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Linux Distributors Work Towards Desktop Standards
WebHostingGuy wrote to mention an MSNBC article discussing a move by several Linux distributors to standardize on a set of components for desktop versions of the operating system. From the article: "The standard created by the Free Standards Group should make it easier for developers to write applications that will work on Linux versions from different distributors. Linux has a firm foothold as an operating system for servers -- it's popular for hosting Web sites, for instance -- but has only a few percent of the desktop market."
What are these dependency problems of which you speak ... .... uses gentoo ...
Biggest problem with some commercial apps is they insist on using C++ and all the bleeding edge features of GCC 4.x.y. That's why they have "portability" issues. Specially on platforms where the C++ internal symbols have slightly different names (re: Redhat, try running Synopsis tools in Gentoo).
It's true there is a few too many OSS libs out there where some could be joined into one larger lib (or just even one package with various shared objects) but that's also the flexibility of the system.
But in general there are standards for development as you've said. So really and problem working cross-platform is usually of their own doing.
You can easily "install/remove" apps in Linux. Gentoo is already there with the end user application. It just needs rollback capabilities and a shiny GUI wrapper.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
First off Linux is a kernel.
... I'm using ~3.1GB of space for what I consider a fairly well equipped workstation (many tools such as GNU CC chain, GDB, various mem checkers, tetex, X11, Gnome, openoffice, etc).
,etc, etc. A complete Windows workstation takes ~15GB of disk or so.
As for the distros, yes there is redundancy. It's annoying. I tried to tell Redhat and SUSE to merge but they refused. For the most part outwardly they're all the same. You get some un-optimized heavily modified Kernel that you can't trace back to the vanilla and a plethora of pre-built tools with whacky --enable-* flags set. It's annoying and highly unproductive.
As for the options, keep in mind unlike [say] Windows a Linux based distro can target a variety of actual real world "work scenarios". This is why there are many projects out there that can "confuse" the landscape.
As for being complicated to choose between... use Gentoo. It handles 99% of all dependency problems while letting you use the latest and greatest built with the options you want enabled. How many packages do I have installed? Around 400 to 500. Can I name half of them? Not even close. Can I easily add a new package or remove an old one? Yes.
And then to those who claim bloat
I can get a basic workstation (with devel tools, X11, openoffice, etc) in around 2GB which is much better compared to Windows which on its own is 2GB. Then you have to install 6GB of MSVC, another GB of Office, another GB of Miktek [to get real work done], etc
Part of the reason why Linux distros [specially Gentoo] can be so small is the use of shared libs. Which is odd because Windows is largely based on DLLs.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Dunno about you. The man pages I read are usually POSIX or glibc functions and they are just fine. As for the various other random commands it depends. Most of the coreutils are well documented [e.g. "cp", "ls", etc].
/etc/conf.d/ entries. But mostly a quick google is all you need.
The thing that is least documented would have to be
You have to keep in mind the "man-pages" package is actually a separate project on its own. It's not strictly part of the Linux realm.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Linux is a great operating system. The main problem with adoption of this operating system in the mainstream is all the small things that makes its use difficult "out-of-the-box" and how most installation in Linux is so difficult. Here is a list of problems I have encountered with linux pretty much in the order I encountered them when I started dicking around with it: Installation stage: 1) Ooops, you have no hard drive! I had a SATA hard drive and teh distribution I was attempting to install (Mandrake linux) had no support for it. After trying a few distribution, only Fedora at the time seemed to support that hardware. 2) Hanging as the installation starts. Caused because of my newish graphics card. Therefore, I had to go through the text installation mode. Hooray! Linux is installed!!!! WOOOOTTT! 3) Horror! My nice graphical interface hangs at startup! That will teach me to have an ATI graphics card. After dicking around with the ATI drivers for a few days, I finally managed to make it work. 4) Oh noes, now my usb optical mouse doesn't work, I have to find out how to get it to work. After much googling, I find out that I must make some changes to the xorg.conf file and I therefore happily go twiddle with the settings in there. 5) Yippeee, my mouse works and I have a nice graphical user interface, now let's listen to some mp3's. First of all, let's mount my NTFS drive that contains all my MP3's.... NOOOOO!!! NTFS is not recognized :(. At this point, I get fed up with Fedora core and don't touch it for a few months.
6) On the recommendation of my friend, I install Gentoo Linux, follow all the instructions with a custom kernel and reboot.
7) Oh noes! Horror, I have no hard drive. After much googling, I find out that SATA hard drive are under the "SCSI" category for the kernel options.
8) No networking now! I must now rebuild my kernel with the Reverse engineered NFORCE 4 driver!
9) Now, do an "emerge kde-meta" and wait
10) 10 hours later
11) Yeah, I can actually mount a NTFS hard drive now. And I can play MP3's too. Now let's go check out those video clips on launch.com. ... ...
12) Try to get the totem plug-in to work in firefox. It finally sort of works but it's ugly and launch doesn't work anyways. But at least I can now watch my porn. Fiew...
13) After a session of "relaxation" let's now try to install half-life 2 on this machine. ... I won't even go into how much effort I put into this and never got it to work anyways. FOllowing that, I put linux aside a couple of months and decided to try some other time.
14) I got sick of ATI being so buggy in linux and causing my system to crash after every logout and shelled out the cash for a NVIDIA graphics card
Therefore, the biggest problems to adoption of linux is: bad driver support (which ubuntu has fixed to a big degree but it still never got my graphics card right) and bad multimedia, gaming integration with the OS. The driver is fixable eventually if you tweak enough however it is inexcusable that an operating system will give you so much trouble in trying to play multimedia on the internet. I want to be able to watch my videoclips on launch.com dammit! The issue of gaming is being somewhat worked out with CEDEGA and wine but both are very buggy and iffy solutions. I got Deus Ex to work on my computer with Wine but all newer games refuse to install or get bizarre errors. Of course, if there is already a way to get all this to work in linux, let me know.
There should be a "-1:Groupthink"