10 Years of Pushing For Linux — and Giving Up

boyko.at.netqos writes "Jim Sampson at Network Performance Daily writes about his attempts over a decade to get Linux working in a business/enterprise environment, but each time, he says, something critical just didn't work, and eventually, he just gave up. The article caps with his attempts to use Ubuntu Edgy Eft — only to find a bug that still prevented him from doing work." Quoting: "For the next ten years, I would go off and on back to this thought: I wanted to support the Open Source community, and to use Linux, but every time, the reality was that Linux just was not ready... Over the last six years, I've tried periodically to get Linux working in the enterprise, thinking, logically, that things must have improved. But every time, something — sometimes something very basic — prevented me from doing what I needed to do in Linux."

Comments

Re:Timing

[cpotoso]

> This guy was pushing Linux for a decade and decided to give up today,
> a just a few days after Vista announcement? Give me a break

Simple: $$$ from M$...

Switching to Windows to do real stuff

[ChrisWong]

I have been using Linux for years, since Red Hat 5. At my last job, I architected and developed on a Linux-based platform complete with diskless touchscreen kiosks running off a single very modest server. I was also the Linux sysadmin, and years later I'm told that the DNS/SMTP/IMAP/WWW/Samba/NTP/SSH/NFS servers I set up for them are still running great on PCs so modest that Windows likely wouldn't boot on them. At home, I've tracked the latest releases of Red Hat, Mandrake and CentOS, playing with the latest KDE releases as they come out. So the general Linux platform is very solid and works fine. Alone.

The trouble is that everything I want to *DO* now has to be done in Windows.

- My parents abroad want to video conference. Getting GnomeMeeting/Ekiga to be friendly with Netmeeting has been a nightmare. With the last Gnomemeeting update, I've not been able to connect well for months. My parents have moved on to Skype, and it only does video on Windows. Moreover, the Quickcam webcam drivers for Linux (which I have to recompile for every kernel update) are horrible: lousy performance, bad color balance ... I had no idea how bad they were until I tried installing Logitec's real drivers in a Win2K VMWare image.

- To get into my corporate VPN, I need to install a Windows driver. This is not negotiable.

- To access my office box remotely, I need RemoteAdmin for Windows.

- My wife (a music major) wants to purchase songs from the iTunes store. I've pointed her to eMusic (indie music on MP3s), but she says its too limited. No, iTunes is not feasible under Wine. Nor can iTunes find the iPod under VMWare Player.

- Everybody uses MS Office. Bosses, colleagues, partners, customers. I've tried to sing the praises of OpenOffice.org, but interoperability is limited. Documents never look right when transferring between OO and Office.

So while Linux is fine technically, my Linux PC is basically a useless box with a fan. To do anything useful, I need Windows. Whether it is my Win2K image running in a (slow) VMWare image or the win32 DLLs needed to make multimedia feasible or the Windows TrueType fonts that makes Linux look respectable or the WinXP box that I access remotely to do real work, I'm hopelessly tied to Windows. At some point came the realization that Linux offers me little value. I'm spending all my time in Windows anyway. An OS is supposed to boot up and get out of my way so I can get real work (or real fun) done. Instead, Linux is constantly holding me back. It simply does not play well with the part of the computing universe that matters to me. I'm not blaming anyone: it's just the reality of my situation.

So I'm now shopping for a new PC with Windows preinstalled. Farewell, Linux, you have been a faithful friend. Too bad I can't take you anywhere.

Re:Linux is Inhibited by Greed

[ajs318]

Of course there is a replacement for Outlook and Exchange! It's called sendmail and it's part of every unix-like system. You install an MTA (either the original sendmail or a compatible replacement) and a POP3 server on a machine (an old desktop is fine), configure your firewall to route incoming traffic on port 25 to that machine, log into your DNS control panel, and set its internet hostname as the MX for your domain. Then you run a normal mail client on each desktop. Specify your mail server's inside IP address as the SMTP and POP3 server in your mail client, and away you go.

Why I gave up on linux

[flappinbooger]

Here are two posts I made to www.ubuntuforums.org, telling the story about why I don't use linux yet:

I went through the same thing myself a few months ago. (see below the steps to get ubuntu installed and dual head video working) I wasn't 100% legit on my software and wanted to be. I went with ubuntu, and endured much pain and many late nights getting my system "just like it was with windows". That means dual screens, firewire, video editing, graphics, sound, all of it. I did all that. I captured video via kino and edited it in cinelerra. Cinelerra is "powerful" which people will say. Powerful like strapping a corvette motor to a lawn mower. It might get you down the block, but I wouldn't want to drive it to work everyday. (Editing in kino is, to me, a mystery - I couldn't figure it out.) Basically it was the most painful editing experience I ever had. I use vegas video, I have since 3.0. I had trouble importing the video kino got for me. I got the hang of editing in cinelerra, mostly, eventually, but it was painstaking and tedious. I had trouble rendering it. Then, I had to render to AVI and convert it to mpeg VIA COMMAND LINE! Come on, people. I'm a geek, but I wouldn't brag about having to do it that way. I got the job done though. One huge problem in cinelerra is putting text onto the screen. It does credits, but even after extensive digging into the docs there is no "text tool". I found main concept "mainactor" which is a commercial open source video editing package. Aha, I said. It works with windows, linux, etc etc. I tried it. It is nice. Check it out. It's the same people as the mainactor mpeg codecs. It comes in a RPM or a deb. The RPM was stable in ubuntu using the "alien" command. But some menus were just plain missing. The .deb, which SHOULD work fine in Ubuntu, had all the menus but was unstable. If it was stable, I would have paid MONEY for it and still be using ubuntu to this day. Maybe there is a recompile one could do for ubuntu. So after about a month of pain, and my wife putting up with the late nights with this "linux" mistress, she quietly approached me and said it wasn't working. I agreed, and went onto newegg.com and ordered windows xp, vegas 6.0 (with dvd) some ram, a new hard drive, and now I am happily using all legit software and it "just works". Now, if someone would come on here and say "do this, do that and then this, and you can use vegas 6.0 seamlessly and 100% foolproof on linux, well, I'd think about dapper. I haven't heard that vegas works on wine yet. Linux __is there__, I tell you. You can do _ALL_ the same things as windows*. Eye candy interface. Codecs. Web. Firewire. Sound. TONS AND TONS of free, powerful software. USB flash drives, plug 'em in. ubuntu rocks, seriously. I really like it and I miss it. I grabbed the system sounds and put them into windows XP, I liked it so much. So don't think I'm bashing anything. But right now there isn't any video editing software that is on par with vegas video or it's peers. Video editing is now my business. I can't play around, and for goodness sakes, I can't use cinelerra! *almost all

--

Ok this post is for all the other newbies out there, to help spread a LITTLE knowledge. First of all, I'm not a total linux newbie, I have installed redhat 5.10, mandrake 9, 10, etc, but never installed a distro that had everything I wanted, etc. I always go back to windows real quick. I have: AthlonXP 2500 ATI Radeon 9600 AGP dual head Nforce2 motherboard SATA 37gig 10kRPM PATA 120 gig This time, I was very determined to switch from windows completely. Here is a list of my steps: (1,2,3 etc are main steps, a,b,c are sub-steps or additional info) 1) research. I found that ubuntu was the best distro, followed by (IMO) mepis. 2) More reseach. I required the following things to WORK: a. ATI dualview for video editing b. Firewire c. Easy install of non-typical apps such as cinelerra d. DV video capture 3) Get the live CD's - ubuntu, kubuntu, mepis a. ubuntu community is the BEST 4) Test out live c