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Why Linux Has Failed on the Desktop
SlinkySausage writes "Linux is burdened with 'enterprise crap' that makes it run poorly on desktop PCs, says kernel developer Con Kolivas. Kolivas recently walked away from years of work on the kernel in despair. APCmag.com has a lengthy interview with Kolivas, who explains what he sees is wrong with Linux from a performance perspective and how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers."
how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers.
I found that rather funny. Blaming Microsoft for your own lack of creativity and ingenuity.
Besides, Steve Jobs would very much disagree.
Some of us find it quite up to the task. The choice of desktop OS is up the consumer, and their individual needs. Some people need Windows, some people need Mac. Some of us need Linux because Windows and Mac have failed on OUR desktops.
Now it's all in the marketing and politics, but on the software side it's there.
The answer is simple: Application support. That's why desktop linux has failed. Nevermind the rest of the chatter; I can tell you that had I had the applications needed, I would have switched two organizations over to linux desktops by now, possibly more.
And it's not a problem of performance; It's a question of politics. We have to convince enough software vendors to start coding in a cross-platform language/way.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
And that enterprise crap in Linux saves companies an incredible shitload of money. Enterprise users also have the muscle to keep their systems up to date. The back-office stuff is the more important arena to win, IMHO.
... and that's why Linux has failed on the desktop. However, Ubuntu has made incredible progress on this front.
Desktop users are fickle
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
One of the strengths of Linux is also its biggest weakness. If someone has a computer and for some strange reason needs to install an OS, which Linux distro do they choose? I've run Linux for years and I still can't name all the available distros. I doubt ANYONE can.
Another problem is the MS dominance over the OS market. It's hard to buy a computer without Windows and even harder to purchase one with Linux preinstalled. Your average computer user is not going to purchase a computer that won't run (because of no OS) and even if they did, when they go to the store pick up an OS, all they see is Windows.
Linux users need to stick to a Distro that works, is easy, is well known, and comes as an option to be preinstalled on computers from the majority of manufacturers, even if it is along side Windows or as a bootable DVD thrown into the box.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
So, I've had enough. I'm out of here forever. I want to leave before I get so disgruntled that I end up using windows. - Con on LKML.
How soon we'll be seeing him as a Windows 7 advocate?-)
Anyway, I guess he's been really bitter lately, going from anger from Linus not accepting his patches to escalating to the point where the entire Linux is a spawn of the devil and should be cut up and left out to dry. Sounds more like a runaway rant, really...And I guess it's good to vent all that anger, but credibility is taking a bit of a hit.
(Yeah, thanks for the SD scheduler - I've been using Con's patches for 2-3 years now and been very happy with'em. I guess I'll switch to mainline kernel when 2.6.23 hits).
Right, blame it all on the kernel performance, as if the average user could even notice, say, a 10% difference in any kind of speed.
Nothing to do with a monopoly.
Nothing to do with existing applications that WINE can't handle.
Just kernel speed. He's a freakin' genius, this boy is.
Infuriate left and right
Photoshop, everything else I need is available under the GPL just an apt-get away.
Microsoft designs software like GM builds cars: for the average person, which is defined by having average needs. For checking email, web surfing, and using Quicken, Windows is the better product. For those with either far broader needs, or much more specialized ones, there's Linux or FreeBSD. However, Kolivas makes a good point: Linux has not adapted to the desktop paradigm and so alienates many potential users with its somewhat doctrinaire requirement that they learn entirely new ways of doing common tasks.
technical writing / development
let's just nip this little tangent in the bud, shall we? he's saying the Linux kernel is so bloated with enterprise level crap, and is so optimized for the server role, that it performs poorly on the desktop.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Just a few short months ago, this very site proclaimed this was "The Year." Now a sad reality is creeping in ..... this isn't the year either. We've been let down again.
I find it hard to get any work done with just a kernel.
Oh, perhaps what the poster is really talking about is Linux distributions. Ah! In that case, Ubuntu has made major major progress and I would say is "mother" ready. I, in fact, have my family of four and my parents doing their daily computing on Ubuntu.
Failed on the Desktop? Hardly.
Anything is possible given time and money.
Everyone has a take on it. Haven't we had this discussion a hundred times on Slashdot?
My personal opinion, after having used Linux quite a bit, is simply that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. While many apps have easy to install packages, a lot of apps don't. Particularly smaller, single-developer shareware kind of apps. Many of these require getting source and compiling, something my mother or grandmother won't be able to do.
Speaking of my mother and grandmother, the other thing they already find confusing enough is the Windows directory layout. Linux is FAR more complicated in that department. They'd find organizing their documents much more difficult.
Finally, frankly, I don't find the UIs all that intuitive to use. I've used Gnome and KDE. I prefer KDE, but I have issues with both. It took me a while to figure out how to drag and drop gzip compressed files from KDE. I can't even remember how it works off the top of my head, I'd have to go do it again. But it definitely wasn't as intuitive as drag and drop from say WinZip to a folder in Windows.
The fact is, Linux just isn't ready for the desktop. Don't get me wrong, huge strides have been made over the past few years in usability and I suspect it'll get there eventually, but it's not there.
Another issue is the community, which in many places is hostile to newbies. I've been insulted on more Linux support forums for asking question than I've ever been on Windows support forums. There are places to get good support for Linux, but there are a lot of really hostile ones too. Windows may have some hostile ones, but I just run into it far less frequently.
This is just my personal opinion, based on my experiences with it. Other people may have had different experiences. I still love Linux for certain things and I run a Linux box as a file server, firewall, database server and for video editing. I'd never trust connecting a Windows box directly to the internet, but I've always trusted Linux for that. But as a desktop environment, it just doesn't work for me.
I can't get to the story (slashdotted?), but who used the word "failed" besides the submitter? Does that mean that in any industry, everyone except the largest player is a failure? Even if desktop Linux never breaks out of it's niche (nerd/geek market), by no means is it a "failure". Yes, yes - I know, not all desktop Linus users are nerds or geeks, but for the most part, they are.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
The article really focuses on how quickly the desktop responds to user operations. I haven't personally found this to be a problem on the 2.6 kernels; however, to say that work is not being done in this area is unfair. Kernel Trap has had several articles on people working on CPU schedulers to address this problem, recently the Completely Fair Scheduler was merged to potentially solve this problem: http://kerneltrap.org/node/11773.
Isn't the whole point of building a modular kernel to prevent desktop Linux from being burdened by "enterprise crap"? If you don't need it, the kernel shouldn't load it. And you can always build a static kernel with just what you need, anyway.
I think that the answe could be: too many projects all around the Linux kernel . ... they all do the same things with minor changes in the meat and a lot of graphics work to differentiate.
This can leads to a fragmentation in the resource (both human and economic) allocation to projects.
This in turn can lead to slow advance in technologies, loose of focus in development.
Three to five desktops, none working perfectly.
More than one hundred distributions, three to five browsers, three office suites
The ability to choose is important. But hings should work a little bit better before multiplying choices. IMHO.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
It hasn't failed on MY desktop!!
When did that happen? I keep convincing people to try out linux (or at least OSS on their MS Windows boxes), and quite a few make the switch. The people I see sticking with Windows are the gamers (which might explain MS's drive to push the Xbox360).
It's been working fine on my desktop since Slackware '96.
Linux on the desktop has been gradually improving, and is now at a point when it is probably pretty much equal to Windows. It may even surpass it in the medium term.
But how good it is isn't really the issue. The fact is, Microsoft has an incredible lock-in, and it is going to take many years to chip away at that. But Firefox has demonstrated that it is possible to win market share from Microsoft. The two essential ingredients are persistence and time. If Microsoft continue to stumble - as they have with Vista - then Linux on the desktop will happen more quickly.
Thank christ someone showed up to point out this grevious error.
Obviously we all here at Slashdot thought that Linux had failed across all desktops everywhere and had you not taken pains to point out that it was still working on some of them no one here would have even bothered to press the Power button, assuming instead that their computers would not even POST due to Linux being installed on the hard drive.
Thank you for the service you have provided us here today.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
He's raised some valid points, and his contributions to Linux development are great, but I think he's suffering from ego overload here. Often with patch submission, it seems that timing is everything, and it appears Ingo just did the right thing at the right time.
He's correctly pointed out that lkml is a scary place, but it has to be. Ideas have to be fought for and tested. The solution probably is to have a "polite" lkml (lkml-users?) where people who are intimidated by the real thing get to express their views. This would allow the developers to get a feel for how their efforts are percieved by everyone. Even if this list got loads of AOL "Me too" responses, it would be valuable.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Could you give some examples?
I'm not challenging your thinking, but I'd like to know exactly what Linux offers that Windows and Mac failed to offer. Is it simply that it's open source and that's the killer feature for you? Please elaborate on your strong but very broad statement.
Koliva (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koliva) is some kind of boiled wheat used for religious purposes. I did not exactly understand what is its religious meaning (do they believe is transubstantieted in the "Body of Christ" or something different). One thing is clear: they do eat it
What's fucking really needed:
- Linux fucking Desktop Edition
- Linux fucking Server Edition
With ONE fucking desktop/GUI, ONE fucking package installer and ONE fucking set of standard applications. People don't fucking want choices they just want their fucking computer to fucking work.
The above post was brought to you by Gordon fucking Ramsay.
Connnnnn!!!!!
..oh wait.
Jesus - there's NO chance of reading this story. This is the THIRD story in a row with a link to APCmag.com. Their servers have no chance to survive, and we have no chance to read the content :(
I just wrote a blog post http://www.theteabag.co.uk/ discussing my unhappiness with the current Debian stock kernel and the NVidia drivers which longer compile against it. We need to stop alienating the vendors who only wish to supply us with useful tools to get the job done, and yes, their code is proprietary, but ultimately, its the users who are made to suffer.
I mean, I couldn't get my dad to compile his own kernel, hell, I have enough trouble getting him to boil a kettle. So what is his answer when I tell him that either he pays for a new graphics card or uses an older kernel, or changes his distribution. I understand that choice is the beauty of the open source movement, but he is used to using a particular distro, and besides why should he have to?
Just my £0.02
I wonder what the site is running?
What is "Linux" for that matter?
If by "failed" you mean "failed to achieve X market share", I should think the answer is obvious: normal people don't give a flying fuck what kernel their operating system uses. And since their computers come with Windows preinstalled, they are not going to swap operating systems to get a better kernel -- or a better license. Even MacOS wouldn't be where it is, if it was developed and sold as a purely OS product, instead of being bundled with Apple computers.
On the server end, people are concerned about capacity, performance, and licensing restrictions, so it's a different ball game.
People have only two problems with the Linux kernel, and neither of them is due to the existence of enterprise features: (1) the USB doodad they just bought doesn't work automatically and (2) the specific application doesn't support any version of Linux. As to why this is so, it all comes back to the fact they don't care what kernel they have and they already have Windows, so people in the business of catering to them don't bother to do anything to fix these problems. If they did, user apathy means it wouldn't make a big difference in Linux desktop adoption.
In the end, this is a situation that only Microsoft can change, and that by screwing up. Maybe they have with Vista, but I think not. Vista will be like the old 640K DOS memory limit. Industry (other than MS) will move heaven and earth to accomodate it, should it become the status quo, which given user indifference will probably happen.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
this isnt a flame, or a troll, this is the truth, which you can go to any non-fanboy site, and find out for your self.
GUI in linux is slow... face it.. its true...
GUI in linux is klunky...
GUI in linux isnt centralised around 1 goal.. you have several parties all throwing in their 2 pence.
GUI in linux isnt intuitive. (it is more so than it was, but still not enough).
Linux as a kernel is slower than NT and BSD as kernels.
Linux, untill recently, was terrible at scheduling.
Linux is still terrible at threading.
all these combined together, mean for a bad experiance that your average joe user (nobody on slashdot can relate to average joe, since if you read slashdot, you are not average joe), which will leave them frustrated and anoyed that they cant use the system they paid alot of money for.
portfolio
Every time I've tried to start using Linux I've always ran into all sorts of problems, even with Ubuntu. /usr/bin/lib/etc/fuck or /bin/lib/X11/shit, should I use vi or emacs, what is it ctrl+z or ctrl+x because there is no tab menu like any rational person would use ...) or I can buy windows and have it all work perfectly... hmm I'll take Windows! Sorry people, Linux is a hobbyist OS and is going to remain so until the support becomes really robust, I don't know why people are working on stuff like Compiz/Beryl when there are soooo many support issues.
Install, okay... cool... this works, looks nice, don't have to worry about Xwindows/ Gnome BS. Okay, now to try to install NVIDIA driver through the auto-update (very nice), uh huh. Restarting... Uh oh Xwindows has crashed... fuck. Now I have two options: spend all of my free time for the next month trying to figure out the problem using the command line (ugh... I don't even know where to start, would it be
I'm typing this on a Linux desktop. It's a pretty hefty system (dual-core, 2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM), but it earns its living, I assure you. It's Slackware, with a custom kernel. As I've mentioned before, my view is that the distro kernel is solely there for bootstrapping the system until you can build a custom kernel to match your hardware and your needs. It's open source. We can do that, you know.
My biggest frustration with Linux is the notion that Linux systems must emulate Windows to be acceptable (e.g. Mono), and that the Unix interface is a priori incomprehensible, for no other reason than that it doesn't look and feel like Windows. I like the concept of lightweight desktop-oriented distros like Puppy, but do not like they way they so desperately emulate Windows. Right down to the icons.
Is that all there is? We have an open-source OS here, with open source applications. If we don't like how they work, we can roll our own. Mindlessly aping whatever Microsoft are dumping in to Vista this week is dumb.
What next, DRM?
...laura
Linux didn't fail on the desktop because of bad performance.. no no... it failed because of the lack of a consistent interface. One app is done using one kit, and another is done using a different kit. All with a different set of interface guidelines. We have dozens of window managers and hundreds of different looks and thousands of people who are too convinced that their way is the right way.
:)
I have a very close friend who says that she doesn't know if she has a Mac or a PC, she just wants it to work. That's it. Nothing against her, she's one of the sweetest people I know, but that is the kind of person the desktop plays to. The community suffers from a consistent overestimation of their users. They forget to consider that many users are not interested in the technology... they just want it to work and look pretty... that's it.
Oh and, by the way, this doesn't just apply to Linux, but it will happen with any free software/open source operating system out there.
Full Disclosure: I am the Chief maintainer of GNUstep... so I'm guilty of this too. So sue me...
Choice can, sometimes, be a really bad thing.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
...is not that complicated
/usr User programs "Program Files" /etc configuration Registry /bin (sbin) Important programs "Windows" /lib Libraries "Windows dlls" /tmp Temporary files \tmp /home/me your files "My Documents" /var data
/ Base of entire system "My Computer"
(OK so there are more directories on some systems, but this gets the important ones explained in 2 minutes)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Wow you really didn't bother to read the link did you.
The author was speaking about how poorly Linux performed ON the desktop. Thinks like audio skipping and the desktop feeling slow. He was talking about how the Kernel was so slanted to big iron and the server market that it has ignored desktop performance. The was also talking about how hard it is to create benchmarks that show interactive responsiveness.
He also talked about how hard it is for "normal" users to communicate problems to Kernel developers.
What he is talking about is how Linux has failed to perform as well as a desktop as it does a server.
What most people have failed to notice or care about is this is a person that actually tried to fix problems by writing code! He was a truly working under the FOSS ideal and has given up.
Too bad so many people are dismissing what he has to say.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Here
Kolivas sounds vaguely Greek to me, but my roommate thinks it is a Russian word. Is the guy Greek or Russian?
"Normal" people need pretty GUI interfaces that are intuitive. I really really want to raise my sickle/crescent and bring free software to everyone - but that isn't going to happen. I convinced a cheapskate friend of mine that didn't want to buy windows to use ubuntu - and to ditch Office 2007. Ubuntu is about as close as it comes to being doughy end-user friendly, but he when he wanted to set up two monitors with his ATI card, a process that would normally have taken him 2-3 GUI clicks, I had to come and help him - turns out ATI doesn't make a GUI interface for ubuntu - and had to manually edit source files and change settings in terminal. As long as terminal is required, look forward to Windows 7.
If Linux is too full of "Enterprise Crap" to be used on a desktop, why does it run so much faster and crash so much less than Windows XP on my Desktop?
I actually prefer my Ubuntu desktop to windows. The only problem I have is support for mainstream software. If I could get Itunes and Photoshop for Linux all would be right with the world
I was left pointing out to people what I thought the problem was from looking at that particular code. After ranting and raving and saying what I thought the problem was, I figured I'd just start tinkering myself and try and tune the thing myself. It could be that he was a natural and had great intuition, or it could be that he had no idea what he was really doing. Does anyone know? Were his patches any good? I'd have some doubts if some dude with no programming experience came along and started claiming that everything was wrong with the kernel but he knew how to save it...
I'm not the GP, but for me:
The window managers of Windows and Mac are unusable. For one the fact that the active window is the one in the front. Why have windows at all if the only way to use them is by having things side by side. No focus follows mouse on Mac. No middle-click paste. And so on.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
For me:
Virtual Desktops
Bash (not sure what shells OS X comes with)
Beagle (no sure how spotlight compares)
Apt
Beryl (ok, not really a need, but a definite want)
Evolution
http://www.mhall119.com
It didn't have any enterprise crap in it and everybody was using it in the enterprise and at home.
It needs an exact clone of Vista's Solitaire... just when I had convinced the parents there would be a solitaire on linux that was just as fine, fucking MS had to go and add sound effects..
Ahh! He has mod points! It burns! It burns!
Anyone familiar with how Microsoft locks in customers will tell you the same thing.
We have reached a point where neither the desktop OS or the Server OS doesnt matter as much as the apps they run. Exchange is the one app that is almost a must-have. Anyone can list all the non-proprietary stuff that runs 80% of Exchange functionality, or 50%, but does it better, and so on and so on.
Give it up, and start building something that takes Exchange on directly, feature for feature, with better recovery, and message pushing to handheld devices.
Or, maybe just shutup? This has been obvious for years. Microsoft keeps improving Exchange, Enterprises keep buying it, and everything else that goes with it.
Linux cannot exist on its own with a bunch of 50-to-80% solutions, expecting to fill the gap by the temporary pleasure of giving Microsoft the finger from time to time.
Either compete or change the game. Only Google and Apple seem to get this.
And can we stop asking this question over and over again?
One of the greatest things about Linux is you can pick whatever software you want.
You can have a fancy eye-candy 3D Gnome or KDE destop, or a light and airy one like Flux or XFCE
You can have vim, or a full blown IDE.
You can use ext3, Reiser, etc....
You see where I'm going.
Many people don't know what they need, b/c they are used to what Windows gives them/forces them to use.
That is one reason Linux has trouble branching out from the geek market.
Distros like Ubuntu and Redhat/Fedorda have done a great job of providing both choice, and
the base set of programs for general use.
The geeks can still install whatever they want, but the lay persons don't need to decide on choice they don't know about/care about/understand.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Too Enterprise?
if that is the best complaint they can come up with, Linux must really be doing good.
what a cute little troll.
The Greeks and the Slavs (Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian) use it. However only part of Romanian peolpe use it. Romanian people from Transylvania (Orthodox and Greek Catholic as well) use some special bread (Colaci) instead. Koliva is only used in Eastern and Southern Romania, not in Transylvania.
Koliva IS NOT used in the liturgy for transubstantiation. It is just eaten at burials and requiems.
What, besides the open source nature of linux, is "innovative" about it? Every single thread on every single article of every single slashdot article concerning linux is strictly in a "me too"
"Linux has office, it's called openoffice and we're willing to overlook the flaws because its free AND 'free'"
"Linux runs windows apps fine with WINE!"
"OSX and Vista are filled with eyecandy? Linux too, didn't you hear about Beryl and Compiz?"
So please, before modding me -1 for troll, flame, whichever, tell me whats so gosh darn different between Windows, the OS (not microsoft, the company) and Linux Distro X.
("security" might/is true, but "security" isn't an innovation in the least. also, now you can mod me down.)
while, I wouldn't quite call Linux a failure on the desktop yet.... I will provide a few off the cuff points:
- Too many distros = confused users.
- File and directory structure too confusing for Windows users.
- GUI while greatly improved is still not up to par with Windows (KDE and Gnome need to get join up as one).
- Users need to be coddled and led by the hand with easy to follow manuals.
- Application compatibility. Users have their favorite apps in Windows that they refuse to give up.
- Software developer support. While this is greatly improved in recent years, Linux needs to get more developers on board so we can see more Windows apps showing up with Windows versions.
I forgot middle-click to paste in my list, I try to do that all the time when I'm using windows and it drives me crazy.
http://www.mhall119.com
If /. can't locally cache all the articles it refers to then I quit. I just can't take take it anymore.
Regardless of what his reasons are or what you think of them (or him for that matter), he's still leaving.
As a fellow AU'er, its sad to see him leave.
As a linux guy, its sad to see him leave.
As a FOSS guy, its sad to see him leave.
He contributed a lot and I certainly wish I could say the same. So for everyone out there calling him a whiner, you had BETTER have done at least as much as him otherwise just STFU.
Evolution is (in my opinion) one of the worst email clients I have had the displeasure to endure. It is buggy, slow, and not fit for purpose. I'm only using it as a POP3/SMTP client, and it sucks at that. I'd hate to think of someone trying to use it as an Outlook replacement.
Is it possible to be modded +5, Troll? If so, this post is probably deserving.
1) Late to the market. Windows was on the desktop before Linux was even considered an operating system. It was not until the late 1990's that corporations started to look at Linux as a real operating system, and many did not adopt Linux until after 2000.
2) The desktop part of Linux was more of an after thought in the late 1990's. It was X windows + window manager + applications + everything looked different and hardware support was sketchy (and for some hardware today it still is). There were no inexpensive prebuilt desktop systems for Linux like there were for MS Windows and Linux had not top end software like the Apple/Mac did. ( I'm still talking about back in the late 1990's ). GNOME and KDE were around, but in their infancies back then. They are usable now, but back then there were mediocre at best.
3) You are guaranteed (almost) that if you go out and buy hardware that it will work under MS Windows or it will say what version of MS you need. Hardware rarely if ever says 'you need this version of Linux' (network cards are usually the exception). Go out and buy a web cam and then hope it works.
4) No 'central command'. MS is a big corporation and you can find support on their site for most of your problems, or you can call someone ( it may be expensive and time consuming, but you can do this ). Apple has the 'genius bar'. Linux has ??? Well if you order from RedHat, or some other vendor, then you can pay for support otherwise you are online hoping you hit the right search term or find the right message board, etc.
I could go on, as there are other reasons, and maybe someone else could come up with a few more.
Now don't get me wrong I love Linux, I use it every day as my primary workstation and it is fine for me, but until someone starts selling Linux desktops like Apple does or Dell/HP+MS, it will be tough for Linux to make the inroads.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I tried two different versions of Ubuntu and they both had different hardware problems that I have couldn't fix (I had no clue how to). Tech forums weren't able to help so I had to uninstall both versions. I've been meaning to download and install the newest (and greatest?) version but I'm not too sure that I really want to since WinXP has been working almost flawlessly for several months now.
Too many desktop things suffer from US patents like font rendering or some music formats playing. I wonder how long will it take for all to understand it and do something simple: either abolish patents for algorithms or move projects to a free country to be able to do with a source code whatever we want.
Case in point.
/no fanboy zealoutry responses please
We (IT support) just converted one of our users, our centers graphics and media designer, from XP over to Mac.
The Reason?
Windows XP has a 4GB memory boundary (limitation/problem, you be the judge), which Adobe CS2 was running into, directly effecting his work.
So, we bought a dual quad-core machine w/ 8GB RAM to run CS3 on. Granted this is more machine than he'll probably use in terms of cpu power, but he has now been freed of those previous limitations. That, and we had the money to burn.
Before this decision, we looked at XP 64, Vista, his RAM requirements, and CS3 compatabilties with each. In the end, the Mac was the BEST choice for this user, for the next 3+ years.
The point is, there are niche sectors of the tech industry where your options become open to other possibilities; i.e. Linux, Mac, if you've been in a Windows camp most of your life.
My guess is this will become more commonplace as time progresses. Windows isn't the only option that's out there. The more the PUBLIC, small businesses, consumers, corporations, non-profits.. becomes aware of this, and the more the tech. community does there part to inform them of it, withholding idealogical zealoutry to a minimum, the better off we'll all be.
I agree with virtual desktops (I know you can add this to Windows, but GNOME does it with no extra work), apt and Beryl (the last time I used Windows I installed a bash shell anyway, Google Desktop was adequate and I don't like Evolution).
I also find it's much easier to develop on - the libraries are for the most part very standard and there is no lack of them. Some things (like cross compiling a system with buildroot) are just so much effort to get running on Windows that it's not worth the bother.
I also like the fact that loading times are consistent on my Linux system - it doesn't mysteriously get slower and slower as time goes on or have a bad day and crawl :).
I think there should be a rule that an internet publication be restricted from publishing article involving linux on the desktop, linux-some other comparison, or generally anything that can start a done-to-death flamewar if they do not possess the bandwidth to handle the Slashdot effect. Publications using cable/dsl connections and pentium X servers need not apply!
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
I wasn't aware Linux had failed on the desktop. Has it peaked and begun a clear terminal decline without ever reaching mass adoption?
In other words, that is why Linux isn't as successful on the desktop as it should be. Tech support consists of 10,000 fanboys, each shilling for their own distro. Makes any IT manager run want to run screaming out of the room.
Why bother, when one can write one check to GatesCo and be done with it?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
You may want to look at the Windows powertools options. You can switch to having focus follow the mouse, and probably to middle-click paste (but I'm not 100% certain of that one).
I didn't read TFA... but heres my opinions based on the title and the summary of the article:
1. You can't declare that Linux has *failed* on the desktop because Linux is still a growing phenominon, and since the advent of Ubuntu, it was my understanding that Linux desktop share has only increased. Perhaps not as remarkably as some people would like, but Linux is slowly chipping away at the desktop market, and its my opinion that the dam could burst any day now.
2. Ubuntu runs better on my machine than any Windows version ever has. So to say that it performs poorly on desktop PC's is inaccurate. Perhaps it should read: Linux performs poorly on desktop PC's that have been designed specifically for Windows. I think that would more accurately fit the bill... and even then, its a stretch.
3. One of the biggest hinderences to Linux right now is the complete lack of OEM support for it. If one wants Linux, one must already have a pre-existing system in order to download or order a copy. And then they have to "switch" from windows to linux. Most basic users simply don't want it that much. Even with Dell selling ubuntu PC's, they don't exactly go out of their way to advertise it. They offer them... and if your willing to look hard enough, you can actually buy one.
The long and the short of it is: Most basic users (the largest portion of the desktop market share) don't even realize theres another option, nor do they care. They want to buy a system, take it home, and use it. It should just work. They don't want to hunt for a specific linux system... and in most cases, its been my experience that most basic users, simply pick the cheepest pc that is being offered.
Just my 2 cents...
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
Do employees never leave MS? Where are the "Xx Yy is leaving MS, Windows must be dying" stories?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
the title of the article is flamebait, of course people are going to respond to it.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
.. but failing on the desktop very unsuccessfully. More and more people are using it and now even major hardware vendors are reporting great sales results of Linux on laptops. Some even say it's the least slowest-growing desktop operating system today. Linux is so crap it can't even fail properly!
My advice? Install it now and help it be even worse at failing.
It's reasoning like yours that Linux has never *taken hold* on the desktop. Failure would connote that Linux at one point made a big hit on "everyone's" desktop and was left for something else. This NEVER HAPPENED.
Mod article 100% flamebait. (Though that might be a little redundant seeing how that's pretty much how every article is.)
--Parasonic
Stop. Reread what you just posted. First you say it's easy to use. Then you say that you configured your grandmothers machine with four buttons she can use to access the things she uses most.
If it's so easy, why did you have to configure those buttons? Why couldn't your grandmother do it herself?
I'm not saying whatever version of Linux your grandmother is using isn't easy to use. What I am saying is that well-meaning folks like you who support Linux on the desktop always use an example such as the one you gave to show how easy Linux is to use yet, by your own admission, you had to do the setup. You had to do the configuration.
This isn't to say that configuring Windows is necessarily easy or even intuitive. However, either through force of repetition or blind luck, the average person is able to configure a Windows environment more easily than a Linux environment.
I don't personally use Linux though I have fiddled with Slack 10 and Debian so maybe my perceptions are off, but the overall point is that those who support Linux and who say how easy it is to use ALWAYS say they got a family member/SO/whomever to use it AFTER they configured it for them so therefore, it must be easy to use. That's looking at it from the wrong angle.
I wrote in a post a while back about documentation and how the biggest problem with it is that it isn't detailed enough for the average person. People, despite the innate intelligence we are supposedly born with, like to be handheld the first few times when doing something. Particularly if they have never done it before.
You and I may be able to program our vcrs and dvd players (well, not me yet. See my journal for why) without reading the manual but that is only because we have been exposed to the general process for so long that we can draw upon our past experiences to get us through the configuration. Joe Average can't (or won't depending upon how militant they are).
I don't know what the answer is because installing an OS, even as streamlined as Microsoft, Apple and the various Linus distributions have done, is still not easy. There are still questions that need to be answered to configure it that I'm certain your grandmother couldn't answer without your guidance.
Yes, once the OS is installed and configured things will just work but as has been said a billionteen times before, people don't want to have go through a long configuration process. They want to be able to put in a floppy/CD/glass block/whatever and other than double-clicking on an icon, have the software installed and ready to go.
I realize this is somewhat of a rant but those of you who work with Linux on a daily basis think that using your distro is simple and easy. Which it is but ONLY because you've been working with it for X months/years/decades/eons and know it pretty much inside and out. Take someone off the street and have them do an install of the OS or a piece of software on Linux and I can guarantee you they will tell you to do things to yourself which are not possible (except if you're a master contortionist).
Easy is a relative term. What is easy for you or I is not easy to our parents or grandparents. Those who produce Linux distros need to understand this and have it plastered all over their work spaces so every time they do something they should always ask themselves, "Is this something that Joe Average can do?" not, "Well shoot, this is simple. All one has to do is rm -f *%!@, then grep for dlist -t to be sure it was disjoined at which point they can do an apt get something and finally a make something. I can do that in my sleep!" (and yes, I know what I wrote makes no sense. That it is exactly what the outside world hears when you folks talk about doing something)
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Nice to see the slashdot do-nothings are making fun of someone who actually worked to improve things.
For me, Linux offers ease of use. It "just works" on my laptop (A Dell Inspiron 9100). With Windows, I need to download a driver from ATI before I can get a resolution of greater than 800x600. Ubuntu automatically recognizes my card, and correctly sets the resolution to 1680x1050. With Windows, I need to download a driver for my wireless card, Ubuntu recognized my card and configured it automatically. Windows requires several hours to set up and install all of the drivers, software, and security updates. Ubuntu takes about an hour to have the system running exactly how I want it.
As far as software goes, Ubuntu allows me to easily install whatever I want with just a few clicks. Windows requires me to search the web for software, then (If I'm lucky) download a free or shareware version of the software, or purchase the software. I live in a pretty remote area, and there are no software stores around (Except for a WalMart and Staples that are over an hour away), so it takes me at least a few hours to get the software, or up to a week if I need to buy it online. With Ubuntu, I have it within a few minutes. Also, Ubuntu keeps all of the software on my system up to date on its own, something that Windows has no way of doing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a rabid Linux fan boy. I make my living as a Windows developer, so I spend the vast majority of my time on a Windows XP box. My personal computers all run Ubuntu though, as it's shown me that it is far easier to use and maintain.
Them's the breaks when you engage in autoerotic asphyxiation.
If the cross platform toolkits were the easiest way to build apps, and those apps were every bit as good as ones developed targeting a single platform, things would change.
Pardon me, but what the hell are you smoking? All of the applications I use on my Linux desktop are developed with highly portable (yep, cross-platform) toolkits such as GTK+ and Qt. Most run very well on many architectures and many kernels (Linux 2.4 and 2.6, *BSD including Darwin, Solaris, etc).
One data point. gEDA (the GPL Electronic Design Automation suite) has active users on Solaris, NetBSD, OSX and Linux. But when I'm working on it, I don't even have to thing about portability to those operating systems: keeping to some very simple rules makes porting as simple as "git clone ; ./configure; make install". Of course, sometimes there's a very obscure difference which breaks something, but it's always easily fixable without much thought required.
There have been several attempts to make a maintainable port to Windows, but such attempts always run up against the realization that Windows is so fundamentally different to all these other operating systems that it's almost as if it was designed to be hard to port too -- or, more importantly, from. [1]
Funny, that.
[1] There's something that sort of works now... but the bugs aren't due to lack of willingness to port or effort spent on it.
Pirate Party UK
How is this insightful?
First claiming that mysterious "application support" is missing and then switching your explanation to "politics" is telling. It suggests that if the two conditions mentioned were actually met then a third deal-breaking condition would suddenly appear.
Please examine your motivations carefully.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
Interesting complaint, but it seems a little weak. The middle click and paste. I use the keyboard for most of my shortcuts, so I dunno. They have put the middle click to good use on os x IMO.
I don't really understand your comment about the active window is in front. Would you like the inactive windows in front? Or is it that you don't like to click through windows to find the one your looking for. There are multiple solutions around this as in Expose or command-tab. I don't think I understand what you're getting at.
If we don't like how they work, we can roll our own.
I don't have time - or corporate backing - to roll my own. It is a lot more cost effective for my manager to spend god-knows-how-many thousand dollars per seat to get already written software (for both Windows and Linux, yes, I have both sitting under my desk).
But either way, you either didn't read the article or missed the point. He's talking low level stuff in the kernel, not application or GUI layer. The people on the LKML are apparently focused on appeasing their respective corporate interests (which, for the most part, fund their contributions) that their contributions tend to favor the enterprise environment, not the desktop.
Without that it wouldn't ever be considered for the corporate world. Its just a 'home toy' without it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How about stability, performance and configurability/flexibility to look and run however you want it to = I'm surprised more fuss isn't made about just how good Linux can look compared to glum old Windows - that sort of thing would attract over the users who don't really do much apart from listen to music and browse the intarweb. I recently gave someone at work an old PIII 500Mhz box with Ubuntu - they then installed XP but decided to go back to Ubuntu just because it was a lot faster for browsing. When you take gaming and Windows only applications out of the equation (I know they're very a big part of it, of course..), there isn't really any positive for Windows other than the fact that people are already familiar with it. I've always liked Macs too, by the way, though the iPod cattle and iFanBois these days kind of make me ashamed to admit it. It's nice to see Apple succeeding though. I wouldn't mind if they had a monopoly instead of MS, I've always enjoyed using Mac OS more than Windows. In fact I've always enjoyed any other OS better than Windows.. Mac OS Classic, Amiga Workbench (version 3 with a hard drive - not so much version 1 on a floppy!), Linux.. Windows is just kind of soul-less and generally feels like a poorly constructed house of cards, held together by staples, blu-tac and DirectX.
These days, all the OSes are getting more and more similar to each other anyway, all trying to duplicate each others' best features.. there's not much to pick between them if you're only concerned with features and are not concerned about the underlying technology.
which is totally what she said
Utter rubbish.
I use Linux as a PVR and it's more than up to the task. It can maintain adequate performance and responsiveness even when doing heavy number crunching. My MythTV boxes are quite often running at 100% cpu and a load average of 5 or 10.
Forget "audio skipping".
Let's try realtime video capture + realtime video decoding + 3 video transcoding jobs all going at the same time.
I can even still use my mythbackend as a desktop with very respectable responsiveness while all of this is going on.
"most people" are at a loss to see what his problem is.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Maybe the author doesn't grok the idea of setting the kernel to be responsive for the desktop. It's not rocket science, you know.
...Steve
I originally switched to Linux years ago because I had a piece of hardware that I used on a daily basis (TV tuner card) which Windows driver was incredibly buggy. Also, the Linux driver for my on-board RAID controller was much better than the Windows one.
One of my hobbies is making interesting software environments which boot from removable media or the network. While some Windows tools exist which can facilitate this, some powerful nix-only concepts like mount -o loop just don't have Windows analogs.
My favorite video player and encoder are mplayer and mencoder. While they are available for Windows, they run about twice as fast on Linux as it does on Windows (I managed to do a custom Win32 build, so it really is an apples-to-apples comparison) and some DVDs which rip fine on Linux don't work on Windows.
Scripting batch processes like image processing on my photo albums or encoding portions of my FLAC audio collection to something smaller for my portable music player is much simpler. Sure, there are a few apps that have preset functionality for something close to what I want, but nothing is ever *just right*. And while Windows does have an amazing scriptability thanks to WSH and WMI, it is much more cumbersome than shell scripts (and cmd.exe is a horrible experience to script in) and most non-MS desktop apps don't provide COM interfaces. I know what you're thinking -- most desktop users don't write scripts. True, but most desktop users would be happy to USE scripts that other people write.
Other than that, I'd be pretty happy with Windows+Cygwin.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Uppity
and she's not that computer savvy.
/s /b. In Linux it's a different command (find -name), and if you're not logged in as root, you get all these "access denied" warnings (where the heck did i put that web server root directory?).
/?". You type "man command", and then you have to scroll thru pages of explanations that you don't fully understand. (And don't get me started on the config).
Perhaps that was the cause for her lack of problems. My guess is that she didn't need much to do with the computer anyway, apart than writing stuff for homework.
An OS is like a car. The more you know it, the more you tune it, and you optimize and squeeze every little bit of performance from it to fit your needs. You install new seats, a more comfy steering wheel, cup holders, etc etc.
The problem comes with the change. One day you're sitting in your perfectly-tuned american car FR with V8 engine, and then you switch to an european car. And suppose it's a 4WD or FF with a rotary engine. For starters, the steering wheel is on what you knew was the passenger's seat. You have to change speed with the left hand instead of the right hand. You have to look to the right instead of the left.
It's much worse when you realize that the knowledge and tools that helped you to tune your old car don't work with the new car (how the heck do you fix a rotary?). It's a completely different monster, and you have to RELEARN EVERYTHING FROM SCRATCH. Lots of knowledge lost.
For example, to quickly search for a file in Windows, I open a commandline, and type dir *mask*
To get help, you don't type "command
Back to the cars analogy. If you're just LEARNING to drive, "ah, it has a steering wheel and pedals." It's easy. Of course it's easy! Because you don't know ANYTHING.
The real problem with switching to Linux is having to UNLEARN every bit of knowledge you've gained about windows with the years. It's much more painful when you're a Windows power user.
Despite my company using Exchange I'd rather use Thunderbird over Outlook (when in Windows) or Evolution as I find it a much better mail client (don't need the calendar). One thing I've noticed is that IMAP support sucks on Exchange as a server and Outlook as a client. When I worked at a different company with a Linux IMAP server those that used Outlook had problems those using other clients did not.
The new container stuff is insane.
We already have virtualization and SE Linux. We don't need an extra layer of complexity wedged in. Slowaris can have that to itself.
Utter rubbish
I would avoid phrases like that if you are going to compare and embedded application to a desktop.
I use Linux as a PVR and it's more than up to the task
A PVR proves nothing about a desktop environment. A PVR is a far simpler application and easy to tune for since it is an embedded application. A desktop has a far greater load and a much more unpredictable one at that.
building a successful general purpose desktop operating system is 10% technical and 90% everything-else. It takes a calculated, targeted, strategic multi-billion dollar investment to design a desktop experience for a mass market.
Posting a comment like "Linux has failed on the desktop" here is bound to generate hundreds of responses saying "No it hasn't! It works just great for ME!". For the majority of /. users, Linux is a perfectly fine desktop.
However, the OP is correct, the Linux desktop is a failure insofar as it has not, and likely will not, ever make any real impact on the overall desktop market. There are many many of reasons for this - some technical (ex: no photoshop, no Exchange, no iTunes), some aesthetic (except for Mac, the *ix desktop themes and styles are just not very good or consistent when compared to the XP interface), some are economic (Microsoft has deals with every major computer manufacturer to pre-install their OS, Linux will NEVER EVER EVER get double-digit, or even high single-digit, penetration when just about every computer sold to the public has MS pre-installed and ready to go).
And, please, don't follow up with a reply about how you can run Wine or how you can get the photoshop-like plugins for the GIMP, etc etc. Those are fine solutions for the technically adept, but are complete non-starters when trying to attract a larger, more generic user-base. Linux will never ever ever make an impact as a viable, every-day desktop for the average (i.e. non-slashdot-reading user). Consider that Mac OS/X has the prettiest, friendliest interface around and they only get about 6% of the market.
"audio skipping" - I've never seen this once, ever, on any system that was near Linux. The desktop is actually the fastest one for any market. The kernel being slanted towards big iron sounds pretty funny considering that it has been (and still can be) distributed on a bootable floppy disk, let alone something like 150 live CDs out there. There is no problem making up benchmarks - we've had tools to do that with. And "normal" users can find kerneltrap.org, join up, and vent away - they can talk directly to Linux Torvalds if they want to.
I sure hope the editors of Slashdot retire rich from all the money they collect for publishing asstroturf over the last decade. Since we're starting a new week, I suppose we have to sit through one PCWorld drolling stupidity, two Information Week top ten whines, and one Computer World FUD piece before we can see some real news squeezed in Thursday night.
Maybe the author doesn't grok the idea of setting the kernel to be responsive for the desktop. It's not rocket science, you know.
Of course not, Microsoft does it for the customer so they don't need to learn how to do it themselves. Would it be so hard for a Linux distro to do so as well when it is doing a "workstation" rather than a "server" install. Some distro ask and have this info regarding intended use.
I think you are exemplifying the "by nerds for nerds" attitude that the author of the article would probably argue is holding back Linux adoption.
The only thing Linux is burdened with that makes it fail on the desktop is TRUE popular application support.
Stuff like Cubase, Flash, Photoshop, Word.
No not free clones that are not up to par for "professional" work, but the real thing.
Open Office is the only clone really that is up to par for Pro work.
Linux doesn't run slowly on desktop PC's at all. In fact Linux runs superfast on a pentium 133, oh wait a minute they meant GNU/Linux *slaps forehead* nevermind.
Honestly though, I never used a distribution of Linux that wasn't really extremely fast. Unfortunately it just doesn't do what I need a desktop computer to do.
I have used Linux exclusively for more than a decade.
...
Every so often, I use Windows and think "Windows would be usable with a few changes", and every so often I reboot my Mac Mini into OSX and remind myself why I don't like it either.
For Windows, the things I would like to fix:
Would like to run XFCE look-alike as desktop (SharpE is ok, I guess, but would rather have XFCE).
Replace Dos console box with real terminal window.
Would like apt-get/yum access to install/upgrade latest software.
For OSX, the things I would like:
Would like to replace desktop with a simple one. Again, XFCE. I simply don't like the OSX interface.
Firefox instead of Safari.
I would feel better with open source Darwin underneath.
In general, I trust open source software more than binary blobs. If I really need to, I can fix it. There is no hidden spyware, no secret user data mining, no locking applications in or out of hardware or OS's. Open source is portable accross OS's and time.
For a developer, I don't know why Windows would ever be chosen. In Linux, a sea of languages, libraries, and tools are instantly available. Some of these can be installed in Windows, with some work.
The flexibility and freedoms given in Linux are quite addictive.
Linux has failed on the desktop, freebsd is dead, windows vista cures cancer, NEXT on FOX NEWS.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
The fact that I see one of these "studies" once a week, shows pretty well that no one has any idea.
wow, complete honesty from the maintainer of GNUstep, which at least admits it's not currently successful (from which it may improve), unlike Gnome and KDE, which are definitely on a long road to failure. Thanks for that nugget of frankness!
Two more reasons for linux failing:
1) Naming. For example, at kde-apps.org, the top apps include Manslide, Yakuake, manencode, digikam, K3b, KMyMoney, Amarok, Traverso...
Why on earth do the names of linux apps have to be so arcane, techie, and science fiction-like? Half the KDE apps start with K-something... It's like they were named in the 80's. Mac/Windows names just make sense, and don't scare users
2) Command line. I've been using linux for servers for 6 years, and love the command line (mostly because the guis are relatively inefficient), but for a desktop, I haven't touched a command line since 1995 -- until I installed Feisty Fawn, that is, and was forced to go command line for a buggy apt-get LAMP install. WAMP on windows : 5 minute install. LAMP took me hours to get the config right, which is downright embarassing given that it originated on Linux.
We need the maintainers and leads in Gnome and KDE to start talking about, and moving to rectify their failures, rather than blindly focussing on what they consider strengths.
It has been demonstrated over and over how a tweaked and customized installation of Linux can be made to serve virtually any purpose efficiently and effectively. Anything from tiny embedded system with tiny memory and hardware footprints to enormous memory-hogging enterprise server configurations running monster back-end apps can be done with Linux. The kernel can be infinitely tweaked and configured to link or embed drivers and all sorts of things like that to make the kernel as large or small as needed.
Software packages can also be as limited or as expansive as you like and it has been demonstrated that environments can be set up to look and feel like pretty much like anything that exists out there or even better.
I can't believe it's Linux's "limitations" holding it back. Instead, my experience in software adoption leads me to a different obvious conclusion as to why Linux's success on the Desktop has been limited: "Because it's not Windows!"
For better or worse, because it's not Windows is the reason why. Windows is entrenched as the expectation for support people and for end users alike. When it's not Windows, expect heavy resistance. The reasons for resistance varies widely but isn't as significant as the fact that the resistance simply exists and should be acknowledged.
The key to overcoming the resistance is by focusing on what "Applied Linux" does best -- serve specific functions and purposes very well. The more people see Linux on their phones, their printers, their PDAs, their refrigerators, their automotive dashboards, their watches or anywhere else that can be imagined, there will come a tipping point at which Linux will become ubiquitous and expectations will change. People will not fear the unknown Linux as much and will be able to slide into the final frontier that is "the desktop."
But I have a feeling that by the time Linux is poised to conquer the desktop, the desktop will no longer be relevant.
You only fail if you've stopped trying. I find several distro's quite useful and I've put a few friends and families on Ubuntu and they say they'll never turn back to windows because of the rock solid reliability and lack of virus', spyware, and cost. Linux is doing quite well. Of course, there's always room for improvement, but to say it has failed is incorrect.
Linus is a piece of SHIT! It's a FUCKING CRAPPY USELESS excuse for an operating system that only pimplefaced angst-ridden fucking emo kids can stomach.
Get a real OS. Get Windows. That's what you will use at work. The rest is shit.
Linux = unemployment.
Linux doesn't work on the desktop because generally people don't want to fuck about with configs and shitty command line programs to get their stuff going.
The article appears to be unavailable at the moment, but the issue appears to be a downward spiral. The reason all the enterprise features are there is because Linux is primarily used in the data center. This, in turn, would require Linux to have more enterprise features.
Like others have posted, my family has been using Linux on the desktop for the past three years, but the real question is "how do we break the cycle and place more priority on the desktop?"
"pr0n": An anagram of "porn," possibly indicating the use of pornography. - www.microsoft.com
That's what I do. A simple "make xconfig" and I pick the crap that I want and need, and leave the other crap out.
.config's around and just tweak a little. By the time you come up with everyone's hardware and everyone's desired feature set, and do it with on stock kernel+modules, so that everyone doesn't have to compile their own kernel... I suspect you've got a one-size-fits-all full of enterprise crap. (as well as desktop crap, this crap, and that crap.)
But then again, maybe I do have some "enterprise crap" in my kernels, as well. I suspect it's a little like MS Office, where people say that any one user only uses 20% of what MS Office has to offer - it's just that they all use a different 20%. The kernels on all of my various machines are configured a little differently, to fit that machine, though it's not a perfect fit, since sometimes it's easier to copy
By the way, I also run LVM2 on numerous machines, and XFS on my Myth machine - both potentially enterprise crap.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The only things linux has failed at on my desktop is my fault (I managed to completely kill Xine while trying to update it, and my motherboard has had some issues). Before that, everything worked perfected - audio, video, text, internet, etc. Everything that my computer has failed at has either been because of something I did (zine dying), or the hardware (built in ethernet connection dying, inability to watch media files on a old 500MHz celeron). In case you're wondering, I'm using the version of Freespire with proprietary drivers, which almost no one seems to know about - or at least almost no one who talks about linux's shortcomings seems to know about.
Everything is subjective.
I think the point is that he actually helped make *some* impact on that front so interactivity with your PVR churning away is better. Try running your PVR on a kernel before his and others scheduling efforts and see how interactivity behaves; I actually remember when playing an mp3 would skip when moving windows around even on a modern PC. It was really irritating.
But moreover, it is a shame to lose an advocate for desktop performance (yes, it can always be made better) because there just aren't that many in the kernel community.
I know, I know, Application X can do Microsoft applications right 99% of the time. But.... how come it seems that the 1% pops up often and it is always the one function the boss wants to use.
When a Linux distro can run apps meant for windows with abso-fucking-lutley no intervention on the user part, it will be ready for the desktop.
Until then, it is only for a niche market.
Your distribution is Mandriva! try it again for a new first time...
On my desktop, Windows recognized the monitor and was able to use the full resolution with its generic drivers. Performance was terrible, but once I installed the specific drivers, it worked fine.
With Ubuntu, it simply reported "sync out of range" and there was nothing that could be done. Safe mode generated the same error, and with no UI to interact with, that's the end of it.
Likewise, when I tried Ubuntu on a laptop, it recognized the wireless card and then refused to use it. (It just doesn't work - trying to set the WEP key does nothing, it just says "activating device" and then returns to not working.)
Windows on both machines just work. Granted drivers had to be installed, but once they were installed, it just worked. No additional effort. No "sync out of range".
Now this experience obviously isn't typical either, but it demonstrates the main problem with Ubuntu: when it fails, there's no way to get help. Your options are basically to whine on forums, and then get completely useless advice like editing configuration files on a read-only CD with an OS that doesn't display a UI.
With Windows, there's a support number you can call, or you can take it to a local computer store, or ask for help among the massive number of Windows users - in short, you're not stuck with snobs on forums who think you should be able to hand-edit configuration files without being able to see anything on the screen.
I know I am. The Gimp is decent, but will continue to be almost unusable for me until it has 16 bit support and adjustment layers. Cinepaint and GEGL are both supposed to take care of the former, but I've never been able to get Cinepaint to compile and GEGL is fast becoming the Duke Nukem Forever of libraries.
That said, I love the Gimp's interface. It's far more usable than the wretched stoneage MDI crap that Photoshop is still stuck with.
Con's _entire point_ is that the kernel developers are paying undue attention to the needs of the "3000 user company" and IT managers at the expense of the desktop users, when they should be giving top priority to the desktop users.
Some of it the fault of un-intuitive developers. Some of it the fault of hardware companies not sharing technical information with linux developers. I'm still extremely thankful to the people that have made a contribution. It absolutely totally rocks that we have what we have. It *has* to be possible to break the sound-barrier and iron out all those pesky wrinkles. Maybe the answer lies into creating a movement with enough political attachment, where hardware companies will be more compelled to share information in a format that's useful and more pro-active.
"At that time the IBM personal computer and compatibles were still clunky, expensive, glorified word processing DOS machines"
.. So why on earth is everything so slow?"
... for shame Zonk ... the headline is also misleading.
"Enter the dark era. The hardware driven computer developments failed due to poor marketing, development and a whole host of other problems. This is when the software became king, and instead of competing, all hardware was slowly being designed to yield to the software and operating system design"
"However, the desktop PC is crap. It's rubbish. The experience is so bloated and slowed down in all the things that matter to us. We all own computers today that were considered supercomputers 10 years ago
"I watched the development and to be honest... I was horrified. The names of all the kernel hackers I had come to respect and observe were all frantically working away on this new and improved kernel and pretty much everyone was working on all this enterprise crap that a desktop cares not about"
"Or click on a window and drag it across the screen and it would spit and stutter in starts and bursts. Or write one large file to disk and find that the mouse cursor would move and everything else on the desktop would be dead without refreshing for a minute"
--
Why Linux Has Failed on the Desktop
"Linux is burdened with 'enterprise crap' that makes it run poorly on desktop PCs", Zonk quoting SlinkySausage.
Quoting him out of context and making him say something he didn't say
davecb5620@gmail.com
I can agree to some of the things said by this guy, but all in all, it's rubbish. Sure, response times are one thing and I think they've been addressed very well by preemption features and configurable scheduler frequency, but to blame a slow desktop experience on the kernel is just stupid. Really stupid. If you wonder where all your megahurzes go, try looking at your KDEs and Gnomes first, your animated gizmos, your 3d desktop gimmicks and applets and your java crap.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Ease of installation and use is great these days, but that's not the issue.
With a large number CPU and I/O intensive jobs running concurrently, you get good performance, but the lack of responsiveness of the UI, not just the GUI but also of the command line, makes a Linux desktop 'feel' slow.
Choppy window rendering, a brief, but noticeable delay before the system responds to user input, especially poor responsiveness and battery life with powersaving settings on laptops, these are things where Linux lags further and further behind the two major commercial desktop OS-es.
The title section on the site says "Slashdot - Don't Fear the Penguins"; obviously meaning the Linux mascot, and implying the Free and Open Source Software philosophy. But almost every article that follows is full of fear, misinterpretation, sensationalism or plain untruths.... specially with respect to Linux and notable Open Source offerings.
In contrast, many articles contain positive spin about Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Oracle or other 'Closed Source' firms - who are very antithetical to the views and leanings of the founders of this site! Needless to say, these articles are 'spin' and again misrepresentations or wrong interpretations of the facts.
The very few articles that are even mildly critical of these Closed Source corporations are completely hijacked and taken-over by shills and fanboys; and even thoughtful, insightful comments get modded down - apparently the shills have taken over the moderation system as well.
****************
Coming to this article: Apparently the author has been involved with kernel development over a long time. That implies working with huge text files, and an intimate knowledge of hardware, and low level software. It is mysterious how such a knowledgable person should find it intimidating to use Linux on a desktop. There are millions of folks who have less than 1% technical know-how than this author - and who use Linux painlessly on the desktop, for several years.
The entire article is littered with FUD - there are numerous references to forum postings, and newbie reactions. If we judge the well-being of humankind based on the happenings in the Intensive Care Unit of a Hospital, we will think it amazing we even survived this long!
**********************
The author seems to be named Con Kolivas. Nice con job, but I guess he'd find any buyers for his views on this site. If Slashdot is sincere, that is.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
For the same reason that you'd have to do in on a windows machine and possibly even a mac; someone with no experience at all
will need some kind of assistance getting started.
As for failure, it's sad every time the kernel loses a developer but I don't think I'll say anything's failed until they've all packed up and gone home.
Evolution takes time. To get it right there's plenty of dead-ends to explore yet, and copyleft code is what gives you the time you need to get where you're
going and gives others the opportunity to pick up where you gave up.
The reason linux has failed on the desktop is because: * there is no easy way to install programs, create icon and program groups and uninstall them. * installing hardware is too difficult, even a printer driver can drive you mad * no easy programming language to create tons of apps with. Look what VB did for Win95. Instantly, tons of companies sprung up and tons of (mediocre, but useful) apps. Fix those three an you got yourself a desktop !!!
slackware is already up to 96? and here i thought the jump to 7.0 was version inflation...
Please don't lump all Christians in with the evolution-is-evil-the-bible-is-to-be-taken-literal ly wackos.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Mr. Professional,
What have *you* contributed to Linux, lately?
I think Linux is not as popular as we had anticipated because of the UI.
I think there is a fundamental difference to how Apple makes software and how Linux is made. Not sure where Microsoft is but probably somewhere in the middle. Apple software aims to not make user think or choose. It's very simple. When it comes down to it, while I appreciate the power and flexibility that Linux and many software that run on Linux offer, most consumers do not want flexibility, if that costs them ease of use. They don't want to have to choose.
This is a subtle thing and I think this is what makes Apple appealing to many, and even Windows now adays are going this direction. I've not used Linux lately but my experience in the past is that even though it has gotten way way better than the old X-window-and-do-everything-yourself days (much credit deserved here), it's still more or less a power user system, or requires a power user nearby (ie, my wife can use it if i am nearby).
This is not a rocket scientist kind of thing, just subtle differences in the UI, but these subtle differences are important. Linux are built by power users who want power user functionalities. Most Open Source projects probably don't have average users on staff to advise on usability. Try develop software with an average joe sitting next to you and the UI will come out very different. It's very hard to guess what average user will want, if you are not one.
Linux UI tries to follow Windows, which is also not good enough. Example: Apple Mail vs. Thunderbird. I tried to switch to Thunderbird just to give it a try, and ultimately went back to Apple Mail. Thunderbird is more powerful, but just a bit less user friendly.
All of these are just my opinions. I know others may feel differently...
...that he got frustrated and gave up.
I really don't think I am special, but, I have been using Fedora 6 since the Novel deal came out, and had been using Suse before that, on my desktop. I never had problems with the interface seeming slow (in fact I was initially impressed with how snappy it seemed compared to XP), nor have I ever had problems with audio skipping or anything of the like. It always worked great for me (yes, installing and configuring Fedora 6 was a pain...however...I knew what I was getting into when I signed on. I wouldn't recommend that distro for a non-geek, but I also didn't do anything uber-leet to get my system performing well).
Maybe it is because I am running on an AMD Athlon X2. Maybe Linux now requires fast dual-core 64 bit processors on one's desktop in order to perform well. That's ok with me, however. If someone wants to use Linux on outdated hardware they can go find a scaled-down distribution.
Anyway, if the complaint is "linux doesn't perform well on desktops" my experience has been otherwise. If the complaint is "linux doesn't perform well on old hardware" that may be the case, but I say "so what?"
As a Slackware, Debian user I'll agree that installing my versions of Linux is something that is probably out of the skill set of Joe average computer user. However, Ubuntu is approaching the ease-of-use zone for average users. It is now relatively easy for an average user to set-up up a dual boot with Ubuntu/Windows.
I'm very curious to see what happens with Linux in the next little while.
the title of the article is flamebait, of course people are going to respond to it.
:-)
And it's written by Con Kolivas!! Of course, people here detest Con Jobs and FUD
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
http://apcmag.com.nyud.net:8080/6735/interview_con _kolivas
I have lots of 'Enterprise Crap' running on my Linux desktop. It does just fine, thank you. It just happens that I need quite a bit of this 'crap' to get my work done. This involves testing s/w components prior to installing them on production (i.e. enterprise) servers.
One more point: With Linux, its possible (in fact quite easy) to configure one's system and disable the 'crap' one doesn't need. Or install/enable it if that's what you need. And all without having to pay outrageous fees to some money-hungry outfit for that privilege.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's not that it's failed, it works well in corporate environments.
It hasn't succeeded for home users for many reasons :
* too many distros, too little quality
* no preinstallation from HW vendors (changing)
the biggest one that people here forget is that MS is a small part of the Windows industry. There is a massive $billion industry of software relies on Windows by other companies. They could switch and support Mac OS X because it's one documented, supported, stable, non-GPL requiring OS and it works great for users.
Can they ever support Linux if they are required to GPL/open stuff? Nope, they just don't want too. Games vendors don't want to open the code, they need a reliable OS that allows commercial stuff to just work. They will not support 100 distros.
Until this is solved, Linux will never replace Windows. The best alternative for vendors sick of Windows is OS X right now.
Users want to be able just buy a game or software program in the store and take it home and run it. That works well for Windows and OS X. If Solaris x86 was chosen by all as the alternative, then that would work fine, it's one distro, stable and supported. But Linux is way too fragmented for anyone to fully support.
I simply don't want the active window automatically moved to the front.
:(
One situation I am often in: I have a big window where I enter some data and a small window with data I need to look at. In MS-Windows, when I click on the big window to enter my data it hides the small window and I have to switch forth and back. This drives me insane. Seriously. Unfortunately some of the computers in our lab have to be MS-windows, because we get them pre-installed from the vendor and they do not support anything else.
Still the only thing holding me back from using Linux, is that fact that I like games, and if I want to play them I need DirectX support... Linux will never have it, so I will never have any use for Linux. And yes I know some crappy games run on Linux, but I want to play current multiplayer FPS, and for that you need windows unfortunately. If someone finds a way to emulate directX 10 well under Linux, maybe I won't have to install Vista this fall to play Crysis, but thats pretty damned unlikely.
When Windows XP is based on the NT kernel, which was/is the enterprise OS from Microsoft.
I think it's going to be tough for anyone take take him seriously when it's a battle between a VMS work-alike as a desktop OS and a Unix clone as a desktop OS.
But honestly, I don't understand this "not ready for desktop" stuff that keeps popping up. What am I doing wrong, Linux has been my desktop for years now. What divides ready from not ready, and why can't I seem to notice the difference?
Windows isn't ready for the desktop because once I tried to install it myself and I couldn't get it to install. makes about as much sense as any of the other "desktop arguments" I've heard.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Virtual desktops, which another user pointed out. MythTV. I'm sure there's an analogue somewhere in Windows, but I doubt it's free.
It works. I had more trouble getting my current printer to work with XP than I did in Ubuntu.
I prefer the Gnome interface. I have a few panels with different purposes, and each one has a hide button (but no arrows). I keep them collapsed on the left side of my screen. It's become instinctual for me to click in certain places for shortcuts, the menu, virtual desktops, etc.
This one could probably be done in Windows with some work: The left Windows Key minimizes all windows, and the right one mutes sound. I know Windows+M does the former in Windows, but this is a single key, not a combination. Also, scroll lock opens a file browser, etc. Shift+Left-Win_key opens Firefox, Shift+Right-Win_Key opens Thunderbird.
In my experience, Linux IS more stable. And as I'm the kind of nerd who installed Slackware and spent eight months in it, it should be apparent I don't have a problem tweaking my system.
The thing is has over OS X is pretty simple: Linux runs on my desktop PC. I'm sure I COULD get OSX on here, but I COULD hack a boat engine to run in a car. It doesn't make it a good idea.
Who gives a shit who does the configuration? There's almost no grandma out there that would be able to install Windows herself and install all the drivers, that's why companies PRE-CONFIGURE computers.
People always say linux is impossible, etc. etc. I think the problem is that these people are too versed in computers for their own good. It's not that linux is too complicated. You could probably set it up so that grandma has everything she needs right now. It's a couple of other things:
Please stop beating yourself up about how hard Linux is or whatever. It's not that difficult for an average user to do web, email and whatever on Linux. You can even download pictures from your camera easily. The truth is that the OS isn't too hard to use, it's that people with some computer knowledge try to use the OS and use advanced features without knowing anything new. Grandma doesn't care how the menus are setup, she just wants to open her email. A lot of Windows users don't know how the start menu works, if you deleted a shortcut from it they'd think you deleted the program. A lot of windows users have no idea how a directory tree works even or the concept of a filesystem. These users don't care how these things work, as long as the little bit of crap they use works. They probably wouldn't even care if the icon changed from IE to firefox, they just want a couple clicks to email and a couple of clicks to anything.
Linux is not that much harder than Windows under the surface folks. If you've gotten into what makes Linux harder than Windows, then you aren't an "average" user anyway. The average user is just annoyed that his crappy proprietary software from his camera he got 10 years ago won't install. That's what they get pissed about. It has absolutely zero to do with ease of installation or ease of configuration. These people NEVER configure anything.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Another example of the problems caused by no longer having an unstable development tree of the kernel comes to the forefront. Ever since that development model ended, there has been a hesitation to try new things which this article brings to the forefront. There used to be little hesitation to toss experiments into the development kernel, as since it wasn't a stable tree it could be taken out a few releases later if it didn't work out.
Not branching a separate development tree this time was one of the worst decisions Linus has ever made.
Wrong! Can grandma configure the buttons herself if she's completely new to Windows? The rest of your post only proves you know nothing about Linux so please stop.
Who said anything about that? The entire basis of the religion can't withstand a logical argument. I don't have to cherry pick illogical parts from subgroups.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Agreed. I just setup my grandparents "new" xp box after they had been using a Tandy from 1989 ( I shit you not ) with Norton Commander. It still required setup and teaching them how to use it because they had never seen a modern GUI before. Period.
:-/
Reason I didn't install linux is because I wanted my cousins to be able to support them (they live closer) and it was before Dell was selling Ubuntu machines so I figured I'd take the XP license.
What ticks me off is that the person in the interview was trying to take FOSS to the next level.
He wasn't saying that Linux was a worse desktop than Windows. In fact the said that Windows had many of the same problems! He wants Linux to be the best that it can be. Not just good as Windows or not just better than Windows but the best that it could be.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Sadly such christians are the majority - for example roman catholics are required to believe literally in the resurrection and ascension of jesus or they are not catholics in good standing. That's a billion christians right there.
And users learn each in the context of the app. It's not an issue.
The issue is the lack of bare machines. Having different Window Managers available is what makes Linux into a viable desktop machine for me. If I had to use Windows, OS X, KDE, or Gnome I would simply ditch my computer; I don't need that sort of shit in my life, thanks. But there's lots of choice and I use WindowMaker. Which is good for me.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
As a nice parallel, have you ever tried have a logic-based argument with a Christian?
I'm perfectly capable of having a logic-based argument with someone who isn't an assumptive asshole. You just compared all people of a faith to the most zealous Linux nuts. That's not a logic-based statement. Not everyone is Pat Robertson, just like not every Muslim is going to blow themselves and a bus full of children up.
If you don't want to be lumped into illogical groups of people perhaps you should reconsider the logic of your faith. There are many, many rules which don't have any logical reason today.
Yes, you get modded Troll, then get modded underrated six times. Tada +5 Troll. :)
A number of customers choose Mac. It comes preloaded, and they don't seem to need any support at all. That says a lot for Apple. (But I still prefer Linux personally because I get to tinker with everything.) A large part of the Mac secret seems to be motivation. Users are so *enamored* with their Mac, I think the attention to the artistic side of the UI helps this, that they try much harder to look for stuff themselves before calling for help.
In my opinion, the only thing holding back Linux on the desktop is Microsoft's illegal preload stranglehold. We'll see if the Dell/Ubuntu experiment changes that opinion.
BTW, updating end-user Linux is easy. *Upgrading* to a new version is still difficult to do remotely. (I use schemes like copying an install image to a logical volume, and having the user test boot from that - but selecting an alternate grub option is scary for an end-user.)
God, yes. It always amazes me how Windows-only or Mac-only users don't grasp this fundamental UI restriction. I use this functionality all the time (as a sibling post explains) and I can't imagine how people live without it. (Much less fail to understand why it's useful.)
~ roscivs
What CPU are you using?
How much Ram?
I had an old PIII that I used as a server and backup desktop. Frankly It is SLOW. Yes it is an old box but the desktop was PAINFUL to use. It ran Windows2k just fine but Linux worked better as a server on it.
Why shouldn't an old and slow machine make a good desktop?
I tend to blame Gnome and KDE for the low speed and have yet to play with any of the light desktops but the person that was interviewed has some very interesting points.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This point here doesn't carry much weight: I've been in IT for almost 15 years now as well as supporting family and friends. Almost always, I have to setup the computer to make it easier for them. (MAC, WINODWS, or LINUX) Why, because the average user whether corporate or home can not configure a machine. Those who try usually kill their computers.
Windows is only easier because it's familiar... the above average user to the techie can thrive on linux... I can take anyone who has never worked on a computer and teach them any of the 3 major OS platforms equally.
Well the person that was interviewed tried to get a scheduler plug in framework mainlined. The idea being that you could tune the kernel for your application. It was turned down.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Interesting... You make a post saying how it works great for you. I write a post which I think was well thought out, pointing out problems I've seen, making it clear that it's my personal opinion. Nothing of it, I thought, was outlandish or uncalled for. You get rated +5 interesting. I get rated flamebait.
Glad to see the regular Slashdot slant...
I hoped people would have RTFA, arguing if the ck patch-set actually does something, kernel related stuff...
But no, what I read is people posting the old stupid not really true arguments why Linux has "failed" on the desktop. We already know them, STFU!!!
Stupid title...
You can replace the Explorer shell with a shell of your own. I dunno, I've managed to get some pretty nice looking desktops going on my Windows box, I even made XP have a similar interface to OS X (without the bottom scrolling icon thing that I never liked anyways) and that was just using XP's own theme engine.
You should take a look at BlackBox based shells or LiteStep (though I think development on LiteStep has all but stopped).
There are many other options as well to beautifying your desktop.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Me: 2 You: 0
Care to keep playing?
You're a smart guy, and I used your code for years, but you're dead wrong here. Just because some of the kernel guys are jerks and you don't have the patience to deal with them doesn't mean that Linux has "failed on the desktop". Nor is the kernel burdened with useless crap. And far from having gigantic performance problems, Linux actually kicks some serious ass in plenty of metrics that affect desktop usability. Note that that's the kernel only, of course; X is its own little problem. Linux has great soft-realtime abilities, a scheduler with great fairness characteristics and accurate accounting, tickless timers, the fast process creation and fast IPC that come from its Unix heritage, lots of great shit under the hood. And it's starting to get used. I'm not one of those guys who really wants to see "Linux on every desktop" but you've got to admit that from a usability standpoint things have also improved dramatically in the past few years.
:)
As for you, it's not that you don't get taken seriously -- obviously you've made a huge impact on things -- it's just that you're really good at coming at things from the wrong angle. It doesn't matter how loudly you make an argument if it's not the argument that someone wants to hear. It doesn't matter how well the code works if it's not the code that someone wants to maintain. It doesn't matter how well you can explain something if someone would rather read an academic paper, appreciate the algorithm, and write their own implementation -- and there are a bunch of people who do have that attitude. So, it was a rare occasion that your stuff won directly. But that doesn't mean you were ignored. Just that your little world of ideas had to filter through the right people before it saw the light of day. And when it did get merged (look at how much has, in time) it was generally much improved. How can you complain about that?
Incidentally, plugsched is not a good argument to continue to make. There's no reason for a proliferation of schedulers -- that's simply a sign that you couldn't do the job right once. And that is not the kind of place where you want the complexity of a plugin system
Okay, that makes sense. I rarely use Windows anymore only in VM's. Used Ubuntu for some time and dabble with various linux distros.
I also like to look at multiple windows so I usually have dual monitors, which I'm sure you do as well. I'm on OS X and I can still checkout what's going on in inactive windows such as when a file finishes rendering etc.
Working fine on my desk since January 95 when I replaced my SCO ODT 5 with Linux.
Thank you for your (surprisingly good) analogy. As much as I hate windows, I am a power user & can do 'bout anything with it. When I sit down at my linux box (except to surf/whatever) I feel dumb.
Again, this is OT, feel free to mod as such.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Funny you should ask that since I am a Christian. I even teach Sunday school.
The problem is that he isn't saying Windows is better then Linux. He believes that both systems are not working hard enough to be good desktops. He was a Kernel developer that offered patches that he thinks helped Linux to be a better desktop.
I do use Linux and like it. I even develop under Linux.
The problems the person that was interviewed where simply these.
1. Kernel development is driven more by Server needs than by Desktop needs.
2. It is hard to quantify responsiveness with benchmarks.
3. It is hard for normal desktop users to post bug reports to the Kernel developers list.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You hit the nail right on the head.
That said, Slackware rocks, though I admit to having used Linux for the past 10 years.
linux did not fail on the desktop. linux is moving forward one step a a time . ten years ago, linux wasn't considered an operating system, just a toy for hackers, five years ago, it wasn't considered to be good enough for average joes and grandmas, now they say it's not good enough for a handful of specialized applications (read something about 50-80% of the desired features). and in 5 years some guy will say that linux doesn't have good enough libraries for some high end quantum physics simulator. the number of things that "just work" on linux is ever so increasing.
even the fact that linux is considered to be a viable option is a clear sign of winning. the grapes are sour, for now.
funny pics
I've actually had more trouble with Thunderbird than Evolution. Especially since Thunderbird searching was dropped from Beagle, I've been favoring Evolution.
http://www.mhall119.com
Relax, your religious faith will survive my puny slight. Just tell your God to smite me or something.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Those are the reasons for the "failure" of Linux, OS/2, BeOS, and any number of other alternative operating systems.
Each has its own set of other contributing factors, of course, but the combination in the subject line is more than enough, by itself, to kill any competition.
Folks don't like having to make choices, they're more comfortable sticking what what they already know, and they won't start looking for something else as long as the software they're using works well enough most of the time.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
"Ubuntu allows me to easily install whatever I want with just a few clicks"
Correction...
Ubuntu allows me to easily install whatever I want from a limited list of applications/software with just a few clicks
OSX comes with Bash.
I remember a time when ck-patches for the 2.4 kernels made openoffice start in half the time it took with an unpatched kernel. In those days a Debian derivative distro called Libranet used ck-patched 2.4 kernels and Libranet was called "Debian on steroids", for a good reason.
I've lately used a source-based distro called Source Mage and they make it very easy to apply the most commonly used kernel patches (you can choose the patches you want from a menu when you start to compile a new kernel) and so I tested some current ck-patches on recent 2.6 kernels but I didn't notice any speed improvements while using desktop applications.
So I guess there's not much need for those ck-patches any more. I recall that the kernel upgrade 2.4 -> 2.6 made desktop apps a lot more responsive. Maybe the kernel developers accepted some of Con's improvements to the mainline 2.6 kernel. So long, Con, and thanks for all the fish!
You fail to realize that with a Windows machine, he probably *couldn't* have made it accessible for his grandmother. The fact that Linux even makes that possible to set up is a step forward in computing for the less-than-savvy consumer.
Think about it. If all the time and energy spent trying to emulate the MS libraries was instead spent on improving virtualization performance. This way people can run like a OS abstraction layer kernel that houses the 'real' OS kernels.
Imagine being able to tab between operating systems instead of only applications. This is where attention should be focused. Want to use some Windows only app? Meta-tab into Windows. Done? Meta-tab back to Linux/FreeBSD/whatever. Don't want Windows taking up that memory anymore, tab over and shut it down.
Someday it'll happen and the application lock-in will disintegrate and finally free us all. How come this isn't a huge focus? It seems like the current desktop class system would be able to handle this with ease. Perhaps not hardcore gaming yet, but we'll get there.
Give me OS abstraction!
I have Apt on OS X and it works well.
Virtual Desktops is coming, but I'm not sure if it will be implemented to the degree as on linux.
Beryl... I think think it's cool, but it crashed a lot on me, but this was a while back. It's nice eye candy and it would be great if it was part of the distro's and worked flawlessly.
Evolution.. Never used it.
Spotlight is good, but not great. It needs an update.
My biggest issues with OS X is the Finder. It sucks monkey balls.
Sorry you were rated flamebait. I was just responding to the blanket statement made by former kernel dev, as if desktop OS's were one-size-fits-all. It's a divisive statement (as if those of us who do use it don't understand what a mistake we're making), and gets people's emotions pretty high. People interpret things through that emotion. It's why we have to tag everything we say with "IMHO, YMMV."
A Desktop manager is nothing more than a GUI interface to the operating system command line prompt.
There is a whole population out there that have key company knowledge, and only use computers to get the job done. If the Desktop Creaters want to really go get more users, then make their Desktop configurable to look, and feel just like Windows 95/98/2000/2003/XP/Vista. If in doubt, make the look and feel a user option; That way, you always win the argument.
Once the User can configure the Desktop to behave like their favorite Desk Top, make all menu items Wizards that will figuratively take the user by the hand and guide them to their completed destination. And have the Wizard have an Audio of the instructions; Because there are 3 types of Learners out in the Wild.
I just wish I had the time to make this Desktop Manager.
Is it a problem with just the scheduler or is it a problem that has its tendrils everywhere?
I definitely agree with your point.
I love Linux, and I'd be using it right now, if it only had adequate accessibility features. Unfortunately, both Gnome and KDE fail at the accessibility game, and they're the only desktops that even try. Screen magnifier sucks, they don't support screen readers, and they don't support voice input. I can do without the first two, but I NEED the third. OSX manages to do all three to various levels of excellent, and while Windows doesn't do it natively, you can, at least, buy third-party apps like Zoomtext and Jaws that will provide screen magnification and screen reading, and Dragon will give you voice input.
So, right now I'm using XP, until I can save up enough money to buy a Mac. As soon as Linux has functional accessibility software, I'll be back into Linux fast enough to leave a sonic boom behind me, but until then, as much as I love it, I simply can not use it.
Gun control: The belief that a woman, raped and strangled with her panties, is morally superior to a dead rapist.
nice -n 10 totem
if that's your issue, then create a daemon that renices the priorities of pre-set programs to some given level - better yet tweak the module that starts programs to nice them as they start. Works better than blocking the background tasks by bumping everything that's happening under a users uid, while still providing the lower latency issue.
He never said he was a Christian. That was rather assumptive, don't you think?
Ever since I finished installing Yggdrasil from the 5.25" floppies I borrowed from my friend...
Which reminds me, I really ought to return them.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
If it's so easy, why did you have to configure those buttons? Why couldn't your grandmother do it herself?
.conf file [Slackware] to as easy as clicking some checkboxes [Ubuntu], even as you said, as easy as inserting a CD!(Knoppix and the like).
Because she did not need to do that! What parent showed is that Linux can be *very* easy to use, to do such specific tasks. My mother does not know how to "configure" the VCR! and she does not care, however after I have made the initial configuration it is certainly easy to use, similarly with the TV, after you have set up the channels (via automatic or manual scan) and after you have connected al the cables and whatnot my mother can enjoy her soup operas and my father can enjoy playing Wii!
Similarly, I am *very* stupid when talking about the inners of a car, a car is *very* easy to use (I use automatic) however all that oil, tyre pressure, breaks, sparkplugs, engine and whatnot "tunning and configuration" is something I just do not care to do, I just got it to my mechanic once every 4 months (or less if i "feel" its not running fine) and for a small fee he, the "expert" checks all of it and if something needs to be repaired he does it.
Easy is a relative term. What is easy for you or I is not easy to our parents or grandparents.
I completely agree with you, and, fortunately for all of us the "300 different distros" and "more than 10 different Window Managers" features of Linux make it possible to be "easy" to use for you, me and this guys grandmother!
Linux can be from as easy as editing a
And the best thing of all that is that it is free (as in free beer)! you do not need to spend hundreds of dollars for all that!
Your post is a textbook example of oldschool FUD and flamebait. And I hope you will be modded appropriately.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
You certainly made some valid points. However you as well as many others aren't typical computer users. You're experienced users who like to tweak your system. I know developers that can't tweak their systems well, they just want it to be stable and run well. I think this is essentially what the average Joe wants. Distributions like Ubuntu are stable and IMO work well, but there's often lots of tweaking to get things in a usable state. On laptops you may have issues with WAP or WEP. You have to download video codecs etc. Many people don't even know what a codec is.
Right now you have to be more technical to use Linux unless someone has set-it-up for you or is there to handle hold you through things. That's not really the case with Windows or OS X.
The story and the discussion should be about how the kernel devs traded for some code by using, abusing, and discarding a long-term asset.
If the atmosphere of Linux kernel development will exclude all but the most hardened individuals, then the kernel will die from cruft of ideas.
Or so I perceive. The point is that we shouldn't be talking about the software---we have ample opportunity to do that---but rather about the development process. It works in the short term, but is not caring one bit about the individuals as anything more than coding and debugging machines harmful for the future prosperity of the kernel and of the software ecosphere around it? And if so, is that acceptable to the community?
(Yes, I know this is flamebait. I needed to say it.)
In windows, there is the possibility to have some windows always on top like for the task manager (Options/always on top). It is just your application who doesn't use this possibility. Don't blame windows on this but the application you want to do this...
I give the guy credit for going in and working to solve the problem in the true FOSS way, but I really can't relate to his conclusions.
I have an old Dell Inspiron notebook, Pentium III, 128MB, 8GB HD, that I was about to throw away because the only thing from Microsoft that could run on it was Windows 98 (which is completely unacceptable for obvious reasons). When I put Fedora Core 6 on it, though, it ran like a champ. And I'm not exaggerating here, I was genuinely shocked at how really smooth and snappy Firefox and OpenOffice are on this almost 10-year-old notebook! I gave the whole thing to my 9-year-old and he's been able to figure out just about everything he needs, so ease-of-use is certainly there as well.
So, as far as I'm concerned, Linux has *already* succeeded on the desktop. In a big way.
for not switching : Mediamonkey (I like amarok, but mediamonkey is better), and i feel for many people that not switching is mostly the applications(did i hear someone say games?) they use on Windows;I don't say there are no linux-alternatives, because most of the time there are.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Oh hey, I'm absolutely not pointing a finger at you... I just find it kind of funny... On top of which, twice in my post I mentioned that it was "my personal opinion" and emphasized at the end that others might have had different experiences. On top of which I mentioned it was great for some things and that I use it myself as a firewall, file server, video editor, and a few other things. And yet, it's clearly flamebait because it's not 100% pro-linux. Just the typical Slashdot slant. Windows=bad, Linux=good, anyone who disagrees is clearly trying to start a flame war.
Oh, nice troll. In fact, you can get commercial support from Novell, Cononical, Redhat, and many other professional organizations. Pick one. No screaming needed.
Why bother, when one can write one check to GatesCo and be done with it?
You think one check is going to resolve all your Windows support needs???? Really??? In fact, a company just needs to resign itself to the fact that it will get repeatedly anal raped by Microsoft over and over. That first check to Microsoft is just the bending over stage... Now some people obviously think getting anal raped feels good, and for them MS may just be the best option. More power to ya!
Maurice Wilkes, debugging, 1949
Half way through the interview I slammed on the mental brakes. Linux is so famous for getting more from old hardware. My Debian distribution boots much more quickly than Windows. And waiting for me in apt-get an upgrade to a new kernel with a new "fair" scheduler. After slamming the brakes, I didn't get off the bus though. Con is a great guy, looking for 120% activity in his life. His insights are more to do with kernel development than Linux on the desktop. Con: Success with your further endeavors, and for sure you will find something related to computers quite soon. An Amiga user never gets that out of their system.
Okay, nerds can use Linux on the desktop. And they can set it up for their grandparents. But there's a large group of people -- let's call them "normal people" -- in between; neither expert nor clueless. Normal people use some specialized application that may not be available on Windows. Normal people like Outlook (tip: that why it's so popular!) Normal people buy computers with operating systems pre-loaded and never think to replace them. Normal people do some configuration of their desktop, but don't recompile the kernel. Linux on the desktop is fine for nerds and grandparents but still not there for normal people.
Um... I think you've got your wires rather crossed. All Christians believe that. Not believing that makes you... not a Christian, seeing as one of the fundamental points of the Christian belief is in Christ's divinity and corporeal ascension into heaven.
Roman Catholics believe in the literal and actual transubstantiation of the gifts of the Eucharist into the Body and Blood of Christ (and if you don't believe that you're not a Catholic). This is the bit which gives other Christian a bit of a headache.
Pirate Party UK
Which is why Thunderbird sucks when you *do* want integrated calendaring and contacts. It's clumsy at best. I agree as a mail client, especially with IMAP, Thunderbird is the best I've seen. But as soon as you try and do what Outlook does (with Exchange....Outlook without Exchange is definitely a sub-par anything client), you lose. We have a half implemented Outlook/Thunderbird solution here: we run an IMAP server, and us tech guys use Thunderbird. The CS dept uses Outlook and POP. Email is so much nicer on Thunderbird, but Lightning SUCKS for task management. If Outlook had decent IMAP support, I'd switch to that in a second. I'm actually hoping they get around to moving to the Exchange server just so we have the vertical stack thing going.
I will admit that parts of my faith have nothing to do with logic, and are quite illogical. However, I am still able to have logical arguments about many things, including many aspects of religion. There are many people who are unable to have any logical argument about their religion. I do not want to be lumped in with that group.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
But moderators, before you moderate READ THE ARTICLE! Please! 90% of what's been modded up in this discussion is OFF TOPIC.
Thank you. Rant-mode off.
(Ironically, I've got mod points... but I think this will do more good.)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
%80 of the reason we don't run Linux on our desktops is MS Office, another 10% is probably IE dependent software, and the last %10 would be windows dependent software.
...that Windows XP and Mac OS X are actually very good desktops in terms of ease of use by non-technie users. A lot of research, development and testing has gone into achieving that. Although your average /.er could come up with 100 technical, security-related and ideological faults in Windows - and very valid issues they might be - "difficult to use for everyday tasks" doesn't really feature.
Linux desktops give the impression that the designers know what a good desktop "looks like" but don't really "get" how it works.
Couple of examples typical of many distributions:
Menu structure - the system preferences stuff is scattered around several sub-menus - as a fairly tech-savvy person I can see that there is some logic to this, depending on whether settings are per-user, system-wide or related to the look & feel of the chosen desktop (gnome/kde/etc). This is lost on lusers - and on OSX/Windows they can find everything under "Control Panel" or "System Preferences".
Terminology - use generic names for options/applications, not the quirky and witty names starting with "g", "k" or ending ".org"! Windows can get away with "Word", "Excel", "Outlook", "Photoshop" etc. because they are household names, but "Openoffice.org calc", "Evolution", "Synaptic package manager", "k3b" are just greek to users. Have a control panel which maps "Word Processor", "Mail" etc. to your applications of choice. Most users don't even want to know that they're using the Gnome desktop...
Kill the "Just Doesn't Work For Anybody Except the Author Ware" - and recognise the work-around of "sudo apt-get -polarity-of-neutron-flow=reverse | forward sensor array" is a hurdle to some users... (I'd give an example of this but it would be unfair without half a day's research to see if the issue was fixed) - however, the inability of most distros' "browse network" tools to connect to shares on a windows PC that do anything unreasonable like, say, require a password is one candidate - of course, real men just edit /etc/fstab.
How about dual head support that works properly? I.e. the way Windows and Mac do it, with a "master" and a "slave" screen that you can pretty much plug&play - not the Linux choice of (a) two independent desktops which can't interact or (b) one big desktop with all the menu bars etc. and any new windows stretching across both (with dialogues popping up right on the join). P.S. - this isn't a specialist requirement - lots of lusers where I work have laptops + a big screen and/or use data projectors regularly.
Dump the shovelware - although to be fair Ubuntu has made some progress in terms of not installing five alternate versions of the kitchen sink by default and having a two-tier package manager. However, I've yet to find something that, by default, just installs a basic, working desktop (as opposed to a choice between a complete "office", "workstation" or "development" system or a minimal shell-only install). Choose one of each common application type, make sure they install flawlessly, appear somewhere sensible on the menu/desktop, have help files in the same place as everything else and (after installation) pop up a document to tell you where they are and what to do next... Its still Linux under the hood, so all the choice and diversity a techie might want is just a tarball and a ./configure away.
Of course - some problems are unavoidable, like jumping through hoops to install patent-encumbered codecs or non-free drivers. Ubuntu has probably gone about as far as they can to make this easy without compromising their legality or principles - but then you find that to get RhythmBox to connect to your iTunes share you have to go edit a .rc file...
Disclaimer - lots of people have put a lot of work into linux for free, and I really don't want to insult them, or dismiss the vast progress that has already been made. However, if Linux i
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I don't know if you can remember the Tandy 1000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000) but it was about 80% compatible with the IBM-PC and was considered PC Compatible. There were a lot of early adopters with the nerd crowd, and yet... If the whole compatibility issue isn't addressed, Linux will continue to be slow to make it into the enterprise mainstream as a desktop OS. If the enterprise doesn't accept it, desktop application development can't get the funding it needs to grow and the longer we will have to wait. How many times have I read others saying "If it would play my games, I'd dump M$ like (insert pithy saying here)."
If it doesn't work out of the box, without custom configuration, my Mom can't use it. Therefore, she won't buy it... Apple OSX isn't successfull because businesses don't use it... So, the moral of the story is - combine OSX and MS Office = gangbusters!
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
Grandmama has a user account and is not allowed to play with system configuration.
All her stuff will be in her home directory which she's free to organise how she wants.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Dont' worry about it. All of these "Linux Suxxx!!" stories are just planted PR pushback by Microsoft since Vista is a failure among everybody except those who are technically overcommitted or who have already paid.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
First, the Slashdot article is terrible. The article isn't about "why Linux is failing on the desktop", it's about why a kernel developer who was trying to improve scheduling performance quit.
The scheduling issue is interesting. I used to work on mainframe schedulers, I've done real-time work, and I'm familiar with the issue in game implementation, so I know how hard this is. We could do better than what we have now, but not by some magic fix to the scheduler. We have to look at interactivity as a real time problem.
It is, too. Alan Kay used to say that there is no more excuse for a delay between pressing a key on a computer and having something happen than there is on a piano. We haven't been faithful to that, and it subtly drives users nuts.
One useful idea from the real time world is explicit "sporadic scheduling". Some real time operating systems have this. A process can explicitly request that it wants, say, 10ms of CPU time every 100ms. The scheduler must reject that request if the system is overbooked. If it does accept the request, the scheduler has committed that much resource to the process. If the process overruns its time slot, it loses priority and an overrun is tallied.
This is what an audio or video player should be using. This is how you get audio and video that don't pause or skip. For this to work, the player must be able to calculate, for each system it runs on, exactly what resources are needed to play the current content. This may take more analysis and benchmarking than many programmers are used to doing. It's worthwhile to make overruns visible to tools outside the application, so that users can detect broken applications. To a real time programmer, overrunning your time slot means "broken". You have to think that way.
On the interactivity front, it's useful for a thread to be able to request a high priority for a short period after an event, with a priority drop to follow quickly if it keeps the CPU too long. That's how you get the mouse cursor to track reliably. Of course, the thread that handles mouse events has to pass off all the real work to other threads, not stall the thread handling fast events.
It's also probably time to end paging to disk. When it works, paging at best doubles the effective RAM. But paging inherently results in long unexpected delays. If you want interactivity, don't page. Real-time systems don't. Neither do game consoles. RAM is so cheap that it's not worth it. (1GB starts at US$56 today at Crucial.) Paging devices maxed out around 10,000 RPM since the 1960s, and haven't improved much since. Give it up. Today, paging is in practice mostly a means for dealing with memory hogging apps. (Hint: open "about.config" in Firefox and turn off "browser.cache.memory.enable". so it doesn't save screen dumps of each page for faster tab switching.) It's probably time for Linux to not page interactive processes by default.
This implies an operating system that says "no" when you put on too much load, instead of cramming it in and doing it badly. Open too many windows of video, and at some point the player won't open another one. There's nothing wrong with that, but most Linux/Unix apps don't handle resource rejections from the operating system well.
Ubuntu and others(?) provide a low-latency kernel if you wish to install it, with increased kernel timing. Audio and video work much better, and computer is more responsive with this kernel. Why not have a low-latency kernel as the default for a desktop distro?
of changing their operating system, most people I know who are not computer savvy think that windows is a hardware part of the machine (seriously!).
:P )
To them, changing OS's would be like changing engines in a car (too many car analogies but hey
Anyways,
I have a XUbuntu box running on an 800mhz with 256 ram, and I can browse, chat, and watch a movie with no lack of response whatsoever....
I think the biggest problem in desktop linux is the windowing systems, perhaps if the distros would auto-detect or ask what speed your computer is and installed a WM that was fitted to the task, noone would have a problem with linux.
That and we need to educate people and let them know that windows is no different from any other software on their computer (also that pushing buttons will NOT "break" the hardware hehehe).
Yeah, we all know Window's list of software is completly unlimited...
Seriously, Debian has more apps than you can use in your entire life...
A failure would require a decline. You could talk about a failure if Linux had some noticable share in the desktop market and is in decline now.
This is not supported by my observations. The penetration of Linux on the Desktop is still low. Granted. But to me it seems it's on the rise, not decline. Slow rise, but rise.
People finding Vista appalling, given its data hunger and its noseyness, trying something new. Finding that there's quite useful tools that can easily replace Outlook, IE, Word and Excel. Gamers that find out that WINE is quite stable and compatible and that it surprisingly crashes LESS than Windows itself (and if, WINE is restarted faster than Windows is...). Add in the Malware flood that plagues Windows and (at least for now) spares Linux almost completely, and the news about yet another bank phishing attack, and you can easily see why people start to peek over the fence to Linux.
So when I look around myself, I see quite a few people who start to take a look at Linux, at least as a dual boot option. And it's far from "geeks only".
So I wouldn't call Linux a failure. It's slow on the pickup and it has no marketing goons behind itself to push it to the front, but people talk, people read and people want their privacy back. Sure, that's not 50% market share, not by any measurment. But it's coming. Not going.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sorry, you've just proven otherwise. You are the one who are retreating to name-calling here, whereas the grandparent was the one who were discussing rationally.
Actually, it is. Both groups are unable to look at a certain issue (their faith) using logic instead of indoctrination. Comparing linux zealotism to religion is perfectly adequate
And your point is what? That christians who aren't Pat Robertson or terrorists are still rational about issues surrounding their faith? Sorry, you've just failed logic.
About 3 years ago, I moved away from Linux on the Desktop. This was after years (since Redhat 5.2) of using it almost exclusively. Eventually, I go _so_ tired of things breaking after updates -- things I'd spent quite a bit of time to get working in the first place such as video cards, network cards, etc. -- only the get the excuse of "Well, you should have read the release notes!" Please. So I'd get things working again, and several weeks or months later I'd go through it all over again. It got old, and I moved on.
However, in the last few weeks I have moved back. All I can say is "Wow". Wow, wow, wow.
The install was smooth. All my hardware worked (had to fiddle a bit for WiFi) as if by magic. OpenOffice -- massively improved. I can connect to Windows shares with no trouble whatsoever. My pectoral muscles have doubled in size! Ok, that last part was an embellishment, but you get my point. The improvement in useability is tremendous.
Coming from somebody who used it on the desktop for quite some time, moved away for quite some time, and has recently returned, I completely disagree with the premise that "Linux on the desktop has failed."
-B
Linux hasn't 'failed' on the desktop... it hasn't succeeded yet. Things are still getting to the point of Linux being (average-)user-friendly in general.
It seems to me from this that it is pretty clear (and no surprise) that Linux mainstream kernel development favors the server over the desktop. However, there are various real-time kernels available.
Might development in the real-time arena ultimately be a closer fit to the desktop than the mainstream kernels? I realize that real-time may not currently be targeted or completely appropriate (at least in its current form) for the desktop, but I would think a more real-time approach to the user interface is what is necessary for optimum user experience. Even Microsoft has "server" and "desktop" versions of their OS and options you can set to tune it for one use or the other. Wouldn't a completely alternative kernel or distribution that you could select at install time that is designed for the desktop be a good idea-- and possibly this might grow out of some of the real-time efforts?
I've been using Linux sporadically since 1991 (Slackware 0.9), but primarily my UI there has been svgalib. I never found Gnome or KDE or any of that very compelling-- these are great in a *server* environment as remote-desktop style capabilities where you are willing to live with less-than-optimal performance, but on a non-server desktop I expect something that performs more like running on one of those real-time kernels from the link above. I've tried to use the Linux desktop, many times, but always give it up ovar a dual-boot to Windows because it just ain't impressive enough to counter the relative lack of compatibility or availablility of relevant applications. It could be mind you (IMHO), but that's simply not the focus of the mainstream developers.
Leave the server optimization to the current mainstream kernel developers, they're pretty good at it and obviously have little interest in trading off any of that for better optimization of the desktop-- not necessarily a bad thing, IMHO. Not only that, they're too wedded to some form of network-connected GUI which again, is fine for what it is but not what I want to work on when the machine is sitting right here in front of me and I'm wanting it to run my user interface. I look to other sources for a bleeding-edge user experience, it's clear that the core developers are either uninterested or inexperienced in this regard. And that's not a slight, I've never believed in a one-size-fits-all solution, the nice thing about Linux distributions, is there are so many to choose from (to paraphrase Tannenbaum).
I'm still a little bitter that A/UX wouldn't run on my Quadra 605, the only Mac I had at the time. (Due to the lack of an FPU in the 68LC040. Why I never swapped the CPU out for a real 68040 I'm not sure...I think I was saving all my money for RAM.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm also a developer in the Windows sphere and I've also set up an Ubuntu machine at home. However, my experience was the polar opposite of yours. I had to tell Ubuntu what resolution to use, Windows just figured it out (yes, I needed to upgrade my NVidia driver manually). I had to jump through many fiery hoops to get Ubuntu to use my wireless card, Windows just figured it out for me. Installation of software on Windows is a breeze, installing anything not on Ubuntu's list is a pain. Most Linux software is online by necessity since brick & mortar locations won't carry it. Microsoft can keep all Microsoft software up to date, if they did that for competitors' products, they'd get sued by the DoJ again.
Linux and Ubuntu in particular are good products and it's great that you've had such good experience with it. But your experience is not typical and will definitely not be the norm for someone who is not an amazingly technical person like yourself.
Schnapple
I have 4 computer shops with 45 minutes of me that build linux boxes. All of them are quite capable of restoring one that didn't install properly. Also that support number you can call for Windows is usually a waste of time and money. Every time I've called it's been a 20 - 45 minute wait followed by:
I think once they actually gave me a MS Knowledgebase number to resolve my problem.
As for asking for help among the massive number of Windows users - I almost pissed myself when I read that. I am almost certain that the number of people who can & will tell you how to hand configure your /etc/fstab to register a HD that the system didn't recognize on install is greater than the number of people who can tell you how to go into the registry & reset it to do the same.
As for snobs on the forums, the few times I've gone to ask questions, I have seen people asking for additional information - often with very specific requests & exactly how to get that information - only to be rounded on by the original poster claiming nobody is willing to help them. If expecting you to be able to follow directions to provide the detailed information needed to solve your problem is snobbery, then I guess there are a lot of snobs on the boards.
Unfortunately I guess there just aren't as many people gellering on the Linux boards as there are on the Windows boards. Oh wait, on the Windows boards they tell you to check the MS knowledgebase & if the solutions not there - reinstall.
What kind of steps could the LKML folks take to reconnect with the average user? What steps could Linux communities take to connect their average users with the LKML?
Desktop users are stupid?
I'm a Book
On the Bookshelf
He's disgruntled and I can understand. I also understand him bickering about the large gap between the kernel developers and users. He's got some points that seem valid. However the issues he mentions have little to do with the desktop performance of Linux overall. If Desktop Linux sucks to much due to bad kernel performance and scheduling a lot of people will notice (including Linus himself) and start fixing it. It's open source people. The real stuff is mostly problem, passion and technology driven and hardly marketing driven. If things get out of line to far OSS tends to fix them for itself. No need to be so fatalistic. Desktop Linux is doing perfect considering the recent improvements as seen on Ubuntu 7 and its (for instance) excellent hardware detection. When Firefox performance is our only issue left we'll actually be in a lucky position.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I never said have a christian god smite me. How's your turn making assumptions going?
In the article, he expressly states that the sort of intensive number crunching you refer to is fine. The concerns he IS expressing are related to interactive responsiveness. I, for one, sympathise with these concerns. We should not need cutting edge hardware to smoothly re-position a window.
n/t
you had me at #!
All or nothing. Winner take all. There can be only one.
Is it okay if Linux and Windows and Mac (and the rest) just go along and play their part in the big picture? And over time they'll shuffle around a bit, too? Can we get over worrying about who is the top dog?
> sync out of range
try Ctrl+Alt+minus to cycle the resolution to a lower one , then press Alt+F2 for a run box , then type gnome-display-properties to get a gui to adjust your screen res.
ok so thats not so intuative but if you had googled or asked in the ubuntu irc channel on freenode you would probably have got the same answer.
> With Windows, there's a support number you can call
They will either send the police round to bust you , tell you someone has already activated your copy and you need a new one or just tell you to wait for a patch
which will come out at some point cost you more money . Microsoft phone support is a myth but you can buy support for ubuntu from canonical.
> Or you can take it to a local computer store
Have you actually asked your local computer store about linux ? i bet they are just itching to start supporting linux.
I haven't found the ubuntu forums to be snobbish to polite users, i have however found some users to be down right rude and they understandably don't get
answers or only get negative responses. If you have a problem with this then you should probably avoid human contact in future.
If you feel you are genuinely being victimised then i believe you can complain about the invdividual user in question , if you have a case then you will be listened
too , i suspect however you just like a good whinge because you do not include the facts of your situation.
Given that most devices are built with to run with windows its not suprising that lots more devices work with it , most of the devices that don't work with linux
use hybrid hard/soft designs that are built into the windows subsystem or custom driver structures. I would be more inclined to say that you have some ropey
hardware but if you won't mention what it is then you will have to forgive me for ignoring your request for help.
For me the real problem here is that microsoft and apple are creating the expectation that computers are easy to use and simple to grasp , they are not , it
takes time to learn anything , if you don't put in the time dont expect the rewards.
Toodle-pip
Amias
[site]
well, yes and no; it depends on the kind of audience you are talking about. there are two categories of "users" who are happy with the linux desktop. first, some businesses that only need certain software to run on their machines. second, developers and/or tech-savvy users who know where to dig answers to their questions when something doesn't work as expected -- and find that rewarding.
but for the rest of the world linux is not an option. that rest of the world wants videos and audios to play out-of-the box, when you double-click on their icons. they want the powerpoint presentations to look as intended, not with weird fonts. they want the web pages to show as intended by their creators, rather than struggle with cnn.com videoclips that won't open. they want wireless cards to work in WPA-PSK mode without having to manually edit configuration files. they want their cannon flat-bed scanner, sony digital camera, and logitech webcam to work out-of-the-box.
linux is the heir to the unix world, which was created to serve different purposes than windows. it still serves those purposes better than any other OSes.
and an antique version of it, too.
I hear a lot of people complain about the finder, but nobody ever says why they don't like it. I have never had any issues with it and actually enjoy it.
I applaud his attempts to improve the desktop experience. Too often in the past I've had the GUI freeze or slow down greatly just because I'm trying to do a compile in the background. Or a grep on a large file causes a highly interactive program to bog down horribly.
We do need people working for the desktop end user!
Linux ensures privacy. On Windows Vista you have a DRM nightmare with even the hardware manufacturers being "drafted" into Microsoft's DRM lock in mechanism--lock in meaning that once you invest in that hardware and the content for that hardware you will be forever locked into Windows. Those 47 programs that Microsoft put into Vista to collect your personal data and send it back to them is another example of the violation of your privacy. The very fact that they are looking at your computer and tracking your activities and reporting them back is just obscene. Do automobile companies do that? Do developers of land and of homes do that? Do the police do that? These things aren't done by those companies because it is a violation of your privacy to track and maintain that information. Microsoft is doing it because they are a monopoly and the vast majority of users don't know that they have a choice or even that Microsoft is spying on them.
How would you like it if a Walmart employee showed up at your home to inspect your belongings in your home (a computer, BTW, is an extension of your home) because you are a regular shopper at Walmart? You would not like that. No more should you like that than allowing Microsoft to put hidden cameras in your home nor hidden program on your computer. It is your computer, your home, and your privacy they are violating.
Microsoft has also locked you into the OS through other technologies such as DirectX. That's a failure to create closed proprietary technologies to lock you in. They have created closed file formats to keep you from moving to other Office suites. They have kept certain APIs hidden to keep other developers from creating programs with the ease and key features with more rapid development (not having to resort to hacks to accomplish the same thing)--video format are an example, network interoperability is another example.
There's quite a list of things that Microsoft has done which though have given them a monopoly status in the end will bite them and create market share loss and ultimately will have failed on the desktop. Linux and OSX has not had these problems.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
If people chose their OS based on looks, OSX would have to win.
I use ubuntu, and I really do like it. The aesthetics/UI aren't _bad_, mind you, but they are also nothing to phone home about. In fact, I think (and of course, this part is purely subjective) that Windows (XP and Vista) looks more professional. Not necessarily better, though, just more polished. Compared with OSX, both are turds: one is just polished a bit more.
For me, a problem with Linux is that many of the applications use different UI conventions (placing of buttons, fonts, widget spacing, etc) and it looks kind of hodgepodge. MSFT apps, since they have the advantage of coming from one vendor, tend to have more consistency in the UI elements. And that is important not just because it looks better -- it makes for better usability. Consistency is a cornerstone of usability.
Things like Beryl are cool, but they don't really fix the real problem. I think that the Linux dev community could use more UI experts. The folks making all this F/OSS stuff are clearly brilliant programmers, but a brilliant programmer does not necessarily imply brilliant UI design skills. I am sure they are UI design standards are documented somewhere, but there needs to be some sort of UI/usability certification or review process before an app gets included in the Multiverse.
blah blah blah
20000+ packages (including unsupported repositories) is too limited for you? Dude, get a life!
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
of course, only 1 or 2 of them are ones you'd ever want to use, but hey, what does that matter?
Where has Linux failed on the desktop? It really shows a lack of thought.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Novell released a desktop version on linux and the media said everyone hated the idea. I like smaller linux (dsl), but know that there needs to be different versions to match purposes. I read this as Microsoft marketing genius (meaning exceptionally stupid) response to pyro desktop. I'm just glad to see that there are more comments on linux desktop than the Microsoft related story.
i am glad to see that we are still in agreement with the central committee. a few ragamuffin 'users' cannot dissuade us from the ultimate goal of freedom! round up 100 kulaks, and hang them from the highest tree you can find. use your best people for this.
Oh, and "always on top" is quite a bit different (at least in my daily workflow) from "send currently focused window to back" or "put currently focused window down a layer". If you're switching back and forth between which you want on top and which you want focused (and in most cases don't want the same window focused and on top), it would be really annoying to have to set and unset the "always on top" setting, especially if it's in some Options menu.
p.s. all this is not to say, of course, that I think every user, or even every power user, should use a window manager in exactly the same way I do. But after using these particular features for years, I'm simply addicted to them. I can't imagine myself functioning the same way in a WM without these sorts of abilities.
~ roscivs
I know the fanboys are going to kill this, but I had to have my say. Linux is way too complicated for the average PC user. First, there are too many distros. Then, you have to pick a desktop. KDE or GNOME or other? That's just too much. To make matters worse, Linux is made by thousands and thousands of undirected tinkerers around the world who do everything their own way, so things only work worth a damn for them. When people giving Linux a try look to the online community for help, they get told how stupid they are and asked why they even have a computer. I wouldn't be surprised if the Linux dorks were doing The Church Lady's "I'm Superior" dance while berating the n00bs. Don't agree? DON'T MOD, RESPOND!
How ya like dat?
One of the many reasons Windows has failed on the desktop for me *as a user*, putting software freedom issues aside for the sake of emphasising this particular point, is its inability to compete with GNU/Linux in terms of software available just after you install the OS. To see this for yourself, get a Windows XP or Vista disc as distributed to end users and a Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 etch DVD set as found on the Debian servers. Make a desktop-oriented installation of each on two of your computers, and then try to list every piece of software present in each OS: Windows have calculator, notepad, a command-line ftp client, and not much else; but Debian has everything. Windows give me Paint, but Debian includes the powerful Gimp. As for productivity software, Windows includes WordPad and no spreadsheet, while Debian gives me OpenOffice, KOffice, Gnumeric and AbiWord. Carrying just a set of Debian DVDs around with you is enough to make any computer you come across generally operable and actually useful, while in order to do the same with Windows you need either other discs with the application software or an Internet connection to download it (if free). This is of course not the most important reason to choose GNU/Linux over Windows, but I think it's a reason that every end user would understand easily no matter their experience with PCs. The bundle of OS and applications on the same distribution is a big advantage of GNU/Linux, and a hindsight on Microsoft's part. Of course there are ways to make similar bundles with Windows, but most end users don't have access to such solutions.
Slashdot has thrashed X many a time, so I'll focus on the kernel's hangups. To the best of my knowledge, the PPS patches bit-rotted and nobody wrote a new implementation. This limits the timer resolution Linux can handle. The kernel burns cycles on polling. The kernel context switch and userspace-to-kernelspace copying are damn expensive, which matters a lot if you're making lots of calls to the sound and graphics layers. Anything that could reduce that would help. (Intelligent graphics cards are obviously faster, but most desktops don't have GPUs, let alone GPUs of the kind of power you'd want.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Was allways wondering why there hasn't been a kernel only for servers or desktop, just optimized for it task. Don't need megaraid, etc... for my desktop. Yup, i know i can make a custom kernel, it's source, but it is not optimized for it task.
>if that's your issue, then create a daemon that renices the priorities of pre-set programs to
>some given level - better yet tweak the module that starts programs to nice them as they start. Works
>better than blocking the background tasks by bumping everything that's happening under a users uid, while
>still providing the lower latency issue.
Here is what they average computer user will think of your solution:
1) What's a daemon?
2) What does "renices" mean?
3) What are priorities?
4) What is a pre-set program?
5) What is a module?
6) What does it mean to block a task?
7) What is a background task?
8) What is a UID?
9) What is latency?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The most informative interview I've read in a while, good to see the Amigas mentioned. I'd like to hear that story told.
It has always bothered me that an old, simple PC can load up Windows 95 quickly and not feel any slower running software of the era.
Inefficient bloatware seems to be the achilles heel of all the RAM and processing power increases.
Slackware back in...97 - Couldn't recognize my ethernet card. Couldn't get online Linux.
.xls Files. Couldn't play any games worth playing.
.xls files. Trouble playing many of my video files. Oh, and terrible performance from my video card.
Red Hat back in...~2002 - Couldn't recognize my MP3 player or my digital camera. Couldn't open my countless
Ubuntu back in ~2007 - Couldn't recognize my wireless network card (couldn't recognize SEVERAL of my wireless network cards). Couldn't get online. Games are still lacking. Still can't open many of my
Linux still isn't particularly user friendly and it still isn't particularly pretty. Those are things (most) people care about.
I'm pretty sure I'm running it on my desktop right now... I could be wrong though.
Rubbish.
My Grandma installed a stage 1 Gentoo by herself, but only after she constructed her own motherboard. She was walking uphill, in 6 feet of snow at the time. And apparently the Soviet army was hunting her during the process.
In Soviet Russia Ricer Grandma bootstraps Gentoo uphill in the snow, without Natalie Portman or any hot grits.
When you navigate, sometimes if you go from list view to another view it takes you out of the directory your in. Also, some images aren't viable. In list view some of my JPEG's are viewable and some not. It bugs me.
Many times a day I find myself wanting to look at one window while typing into another. Either I'm working on some data analysis and want to plot things, or I'm writing and need to look back closely at something in an online paper, or I'm using a cad program and feeding it numbers from an email or scratch paper, I'm thumbing through photographs and wand to jot down notes on a scratch terminal at the same time.
Sure, if both objects happen to be text one can do the same in screen, emacs, or your multiplexor of choice (and I do, when appropriate.) And, if you're going to be doing it a lot with the same objects you can resize your windows and tile things. But, in practice, it's always a one-off minute long task involving random graphics for which resizing windows would be a pain.
When it comes down to it, UI configurability is among the biggest drivers in my OS choice. If you ask me why I like linux, I'll give you a long, meandering, philosophically charged answer that won't convince anyone. If you ask me why I throw a fit whenever I'm forced to use a non unix-like system, the answer is a lot more pedestrian: X can be easily configured to fit my needs, and every task can be accomplished from within a well designed shell.
What do I personally need in a UI?
- multiple virtual desktops
- focus follows mouse
- no raise on focus
- per-user key remapping
- fully functional, fast keyboard control over window placement/size
There are plenty of other little window manager tweeks that I like a lot, but that's the minimum I need in order to not hate integrating with a desktop. In windows, some of it kinda sorta works if you install lots of random third party software. (Although I've yet to find a no-raise-on-focus or a per-user key remapping option. Would love to hear about one if it exists.)
In X, it takes a minute of setup time and works on every machine, everywhere, and it doesn't screw up the UIs of all the other users.
Most of your rant is about Microsoft and I can't disagree with you. However Windows XP is not a bad OS. I have no opinion on Vista. Only tested for a short while.
hmm, I wonder how many times this has happened at Microsoft?
Actually, knucklehead, I was the exec editor of an open source enterprise magazine. I also know how average users go about things.
I grew up using the command line (both DOS and Unix) and while I like linux, it was not designed with the average user in mind. No Unix or Unix-like distro has been and they've been around a heck of a lot longer than windows. That's part of the reason why it won't truly catch on in the desktop market for "normal" people.
I'd say the trolls are you and the one who claimed he would teach the world how to do it.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
That's a plan for success: have all apps implement a simple feature which belongs conceptually to the window manager. That way, you'll get one implementation per app, withs its peculiar interface, location in the menus, keyboard shortcuts and quirks. Great!
I feel like an idiot. I've been using Slackware for ten years and KDE for five, and I'd never even heard of Krita. At first glance, this looks really, really good. Real adjustment layers, 8, 16, and 32 bit support for all kinds of colorspaces, a plugin that uses dcraw for raw images, and has all of the usual useful day-to-day filters. This looks to be a great photography app.
Now my question is why isn't this more well known? The Gimp seems to have all the name recognition, but does barely half of what Krita can do.
Although this is not a failing of the OS, per se, is that hardware developers and application developers don't typically target Linux as a platform to directly support for retail products, and most consumers buy products through retail channels.
I can count on one hand, actually two fingers, how many retail commercial products are on my Linux box that the option of purchasing it for Linux even existed.
In what is a wonderful example of a catch-22, major developers won't tend to support Linux until a significant percentage of their target market is using it, and most people won't use it until it's supported respectably. In at least some sense, that's a failure... and can be shown to continue to be so indefinitely by simple induction.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
As to your "complaint" that "all the examples show a specialized setup" I'm guessing you've never done support for anyone that wasn't computer savvy. I've done setup (all windows systems) - as a living - and all but a few of the customers requested "Email, Internet and IM" icons on the desktop. That's "specialized setup" - same as the person you decided to yell at did - and its not Linux.
Now ask yourself the same question: If it's so easy, why did you have to configure those buttons? Why couldn't your grandmother do it herself? But phrase it as "Why couldn't the clients do it themselves?" The answer is simple - they could have. But they felt better having someone else do it for them. Why couldn't his Grandmother do it for herself? Truthfully, she probably could have. If he hadn't used WindowMaker. WindowMaker is a WM for the more "computer literate" - if I'd been in his position I'd have used KDE. It follows the known windows paradigm and is extremely forgiving for the new user. It does, however, consume a lot more resources than WindowMaker and that might have been the reason he didn't use it.
Except the
KEEP READING
part about
KEEP READING
splitting the text
KEEP READING
into multiple pages.
Amen. The best example is a web browser underneath, with a set of instructions. Have a shell on top to do your work and just use the scroll wheel over the browser to scroll... Focus doesn't change. I love it and try to do it all the time on OS X and Windows.
Technology tips and tricks.
Coral cache in case it loads too slowly: 7 35/interview_con_kolivas</a>
ahhh yes... now I remember. I hate those things too, but for what it's worth I have the same issues on Windows and Linux, not so much on linux, but I've seen it.
I can't make up my mind between Thunderbird and Evolution, bight I like them both. But I much prefer KMail from KDE over everything else.
I'll (try to) answer the responses to my post here.
Yes, I know his patches address interactivity rather than thruput, which is precisely his complaint, that all the effort has been to increase thruput rather than latency. I also know that some people think linux has poor latency. My own servers, when configured as servers, do have poor latency, and I appreciate his patches.
However, to blame it all on latency is wrong. Microsoft didn't get their monopoly by playing fairly, and they didn't get it from better latency. If latency were so important because of perceptions of the response time destroying the user experience, then Microsoft would have long since lost market share for their shoddy programs, hard to use GUI, phony security, constant crashes, general bugginess, and for any number of other user-visible deficiencies, not to mention the continual forced upgrades and restrictive licensing.
If users don't give up on Microsoft because of all that, what makes you think latency matters?
As for OS X, I have a MacBook, and its responsiveness is not at all impressive to me. About the only non-Apple software on it is Firefox. No, holding up OS X as a leader in responsiveness is a like holding up Microsoft as a leader in happy user experiences.
Infuriate left and right
LOL. Nice. I know what you meant, and you know I knew what you meant. Nice try, though.
"Enterprise" users != "average user". IMHO, most PHBs should be given Etch-a-Sketches.
That's part of the reason why it won't truly catch on in the desktop market for "normal" people.
Funny, people go ape when we tell 'em that they can get their OS for free, so they can word-process, email Granny, and surf the web. Lots of PCs here go out the door with Ubuntu. Few come back.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
"He's saying that someone afraid of their computer can't do it. And until Linux can be used by people afraid of their computer, it won't appeal to the majority of the desktop PC market."
Can't imagine why they're afraid of their computers? It's not like it raped them during childhood or anything.
We need the equivalent of Godwin's law for /. The Troll law, invoked as soon as somebody mentions something not positive about Linux.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
APC: How did you get started developing for the Linux kernel, did you enjoy it, and what's the passion that drives you?
Normally this would be a straight forward question to answer. However at this time, I've had the opportunity to reflect on what really got me into kernel development, and I'll be able to answer it more thoroughly. So if you give me the latitude to answer it I might end up answering all your potential questions as well. This is going to be my view on personal computing history.
The very first computer I owned was 24 years ago. I've been fortunate to have been involved in the personal computer scene since not long after it actually began. In the time since then, I've watched the whole development of the PC, first with excitement at not knowing what direction it would take, then with anticipation at knowing where it would head and waiting for the developments.
In the late 1980s it was a golden era for computing. There were so many different manufacturers entering the PC market that each offered new and exciting hardware designs, unique operating system features and enormous choice and competition. Sure, they all shared lots of software and hardware design ideas but for the most part they were developing in competition with each other. It is almost frightening to recall that at that time in Australia the leading personal computer in numbers owned and purchased was the Amiga for a period.
Amiga 500: cheap, cheerful, unique and immensely successful.Amiga 500: cheap, cheerful, unique and immensely successful.
Anyone who lived the era of the first Amiga personal computers will recall how utterly unique an approach they had to computing, and what direction and advance they took the home computer to. Since then there have been many failed attempts at resuscitating that excitement. But this is not about the Amiga, because it ultimately ended up being a failure for other reasons. My point about the Amiga was that radical hardware designs drove development and achieved things that software evolution on existing designs would not take us to.
At that time the IBM personal computer and compatibles were still clunky, expensive, glorified word processing DOS machines. Owners of them always were putting in different graphics and sound cards yearly, upgrading their hardware to try and approach what was built into hardware like the Amiga and the Atari PCs.
Enter the dark era. The hardware driven computer developments failed due to poor marketing, development and a whole host of other problems. This is when the software became king, and instead of competing, all hardware was slowly being designed to yield to the software and operating system design.
We're all aware of what became the defacto operating system standard at the time. As a result there was no market whatsoever for hardware that didn't work within the framework of that operating system. As a defacto operating system did take over, all other operating system markets and competition failed one after the other and the hardware manufacturers found themselves marketing for an ever shrinking range of software rather than the other way around.
Hardware has since become subservient to the operating system. It started around 1994 and is just as true today 13 years later. Worse yet, all the hardware manufacturers slowly bought each other out, further shrinking the hardware choices. So now the hardware manufacturers just make faster and bigger versions of everything that has been done before. We're still plugging in faster CPUs, more RAM, bigger hard drives, faster graphics cards and sound cards just to service the operating system. Hardware driven innovation cannot be afforded by the market any more. There is no money in it. There will be no market for it. Computers are boring.
Enter Linux. We all know it started as a hobby. We all know it grew bigger than anyone ever imagined it. It would be fair to say that it is now one of the most important of the very few competing pieces of software/operating system
What he does mention is much more interesting. The problems of measuring UI-responsiveness, the ivory tower that is kernel development and lkml, and the fact that our computers have gotten slower (for desktop-users) over the last 10 years. A great read and an interesting look into those ck-patches everyone seemed to be using a couple of years ago.
Thanks Con for all that work you put in, and I hope you find Japanese more fulfilling
This sig is intentionally left blank
I had a similar experience, with a not-even-close-to-new NVIDIA 7800 video card. I couldn't get the Ubuntu (Feisty, AMD64) GUI installer to boot, and ultimately just tossed it aside as useless.
Were there alternatives I could have tried that would have gotten Ubuntu installed? Sure. But the fact that it couldn't even install properly on less-than-remarkable hardware spoke volumes of its readiness for the desktop environment.
First impressions matter, and Ubuntu failed it big time.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
It's a shame that it came to this and I'm not talking about the article.
Cons pet baby project the staircase-deadline (SD) scheduler that aims at improving responsiveness on the desktop more or less got made redundant by Ingo Molnar's completely-fair (CFS) scheduler. Cons lengthy failure to get SD into mainline only to see the much newer CFS get quickly picked up seems to have been the straw that broke the camels back. Con announced that he would no longer keep producing his -ck tree as he was disgruntled with the way that the kernel development was done.
IMHO he should have stuck at it and proven his code superior instead of walking off bitching about it.
1. The file system is recursive and quite confusing at times.
2. There are very few bits of hardware that support the OS out of the box.
3. Everything is stored in a seperate configuration file for each program, unlike Windows which provides a pre-made registry and nice GUIs for changing them.
4. Some desktop distros are nigh on impossible to use without Internet access - mainly due to the fact that there's no way when downloading a package from Debian's site to download all the dependent packages too.
These problems don't stop Linux from being a great OS, but the reason I'm typing this on Windows (albeit using Firefox) is because I can't find a single WLAN adapter for sale in the UK that I can be dead sure will support Linux. Distros should offer more 'click and forget about it' methods of installation. And perhaps a registry (one of the only pros to using Windows).
And TBH, using C:/Program Files is easier and less confusing than having to search for the bin or sbin directory that new app you installed got saved in.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
I could never go back to a situation where some company decides for me ahead of time what I can or cannot do with my data and my hardware. Many people who use Windows or Macs have no qualms about DRM and their reliance on proprietary software, more power to them, but for me it is just the wrong choice.
STFU about slashdot bias.
Others have pointed out other ways of dealing with this, but I could point out -- you can force Ubuntu to give you a VGA console (boot with video=vga or something), and you can hit ctrl+alt+f1 to get to it -- and this will work on just about anything.
Then, it's going to take a bit to fix the problem, but I bet you're not the only one with that problem, and I bet there's already a fix. The best thing about Linux is, once you figure out what that fix is, you will never lose it. It's so much easier (at least for me) to back up all of the configuration for everything, and then selectively restore the fixes that worked -- on Windows, registry hacks aren't always as portable, and I really don't have an easy way to pull up the registry for a fresh Windows install side-by-side with the registry from the old one (that had all my tweaks).
For my part, the worst problem that I had with Ubuntu was trying to install on a machine with about 64 megs of RAM. But there's always the alternate installer, and other people make other rescue disks that work. Still, I am going to suggest that the next round of Ubuntu install CDs have the option to boot without X.
Probably something else you had to install.
Let me guess -- it's a Broadcom. For those, you have to download firmware from the Windows drivers, because we can't legally redistribute that. It's legal for you to download it, just not legal for us to put on the install CD.
Try IRC -- at least that way, when there's a misunderstanding like this, it gets cleared up quicker.
In the first place, ctrl+alt+f1 will give you a UI, it's just a commandline one. In the second place, the CD is read-only, but the OS isn't running off the CD. It's running off something called "UnionFS" which combines the CD and RAM -- so any changes you make to the CD will actually be stored in RAM, and anything you don't change will be read from the CD.
That hasn't been my experience.
My experience is, the support number generally wants you to have a support contract. Canonical sells Ubuntu support contracts too, so that buys you nothing.
Local computer store -- you win here. But asking for help among the massive number of Windows users is as likely to make your problem worse as not -- those snobs on the forums generally know what they're doing. And they won't charge you for it -- I swear, half the time I Google for the answer to a simple Windows question, I land on "Experts Exchange", which will happily show me the question (so they get the Google hit), but wants to charge me to see the answer.
And again, if you're willing to pay for support, you may as well buy commercial support from Canonical. $250/year will buy you 9-5 desktop support. Or buy a Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed, and these installation issues go away -- AND you get support (from Canonical) bundled, the way you would with a Windows computer from Dell.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As the FTA said it's easier to configure nice on the server enviroment than on the desktop
Why didn't I, or the average Joe Sixpack, thin kof inputting "Nice -n 10 totem" to prevent video playback from being interrupted. I mean, with a clear and not at all obscure command name like that, how can anyone like Windows and it's arcane "Just fucking click "Play"" method?
I do something similar on an el-cheapo 1.4Ghz pentium 4 with 512 mb of ram and an ATA-100 hard drive that I bought refurbished for $199 about 3 years ago. It is a combined MythTV front-end and back-end, as well as an occasional desktop (when no one is already using it for TV).
STFU about slashdot bias.
There is NOW just one reason and that is pre-installed systems are not readily available. Yes, if you LOOK for them, you can do it, but ther reality is that as long as you do not specify, you get a Windows machine and even if you DO specify, you often do not have a choice.
Now after 15 years, people have been brainwashed into using Windows.
Another is that change costs money and managers have three issues about changing. The first is that they need to admit that they were wrong the previous years. Second they will need to train/hire new people and thirdly, it will not look good on their budget fr the next year. Perhaps great over a 5 year period, but not many companies are intersted in 5 year plans.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Actually, knucklehead, I was the exec editor of an open source enterprise magazine.
Right, and flamebait is insulting people just because you're an asshole. And I don't mean "you" in the general sort of sense.
No Unix or Unix-like distro has been and they've been around a heck of a lot longer than windows.
I know several people on Ubuntu who struggle with Windows. Plus, saying Unix has been around a long time and it's going nowhere is like saying, in 1994, that the internet has been around a long time, and it's going nowhere. The initiative towards a widespread Linux desktop has been around a few years, max. OSS movements take a while to rev up, and this one's doing quite nicely.
Be quiet, be schooled, thank the nice man as he leaves.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Enterprise users ARE normal users. In fact, in a large enough Enterprise, you will find a greater diversity of users than anywhere else. Enterprise organizations employee people who barely know how to check email. They employee people who have their own domain name that they got off of Yahoo. They even employee /. readers.
Enterprise's are the reason why the majority home computer is Windows. It is easier for the average or normal user to only have to learn ONE OS. Not the half dozen different OS's I multi-boot into.
That really is the whole point of why Linux has trouble on the Desktop. The average user doesn't understand how to modify the Windows Registry. Why would they understand the 'nice' command?
Yes, you are talking that CPU intense background tasks are running nicely. Good. Exactly the same thing that the guy has complains about (and so do I).
.5% reduction while your downloaded vc1 movie transcodes to H.264 for PSP - who notices or gives a fuck?
Now, just fire up some basic stuff you need to interact with. Or, gasp, do anything that involves some guaranteed delivery time to any particular IO pipe...
Remember BeOS? Niftly little thing. By firing everything interaction-related to insane priority they somehow nicely managed to convey that they rock. And if it cost you a
I know you'll say you shouldn't have to do this, but I very rarely have Linux hardware issues anymore.
Why?
Because when I get a new machine, I research it thoroughly. If I can't be sure that everything will work at least as well as it does on my old one, I don't buy the new machine, or I buy different hardware. Generally, by the time the hardware I want is supported, it's half the price anyway.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The simple reason Linux has failed on the desktop is the arrogance of the geek who unix "makes sense" to. The arrogance of thinking everyone who didn't agree with them on Linux's "user friendlyness" was stupid.
Linux never became elegant or truly user friendly (Unix is very user friendly, it is just very picky who it becomes friends with). For something to be adopted deeply into the world it has to have basic elements that work with the lowest common denominator.
Yes, it has to be "dumbed down". But all those ignorant users are only ignorant in understanding this type of system, and that doesn't make them ignorant, it makes them users/customers of something else.
LOL - my Ubuntu on this laptop is fine, and in fact does far better than windows with respect to nearly everything the author tried to trash linux for. I think these articles challenging linux on the desktop are so 2002.
-- $G
Powertools allow you to configure things that way, but apps (especially MS Office apps) steal focus regularly. Middle-click paste you may be able to get to work via special mouse drivers and such, but it won't be a X-Windows style copy via highlighting and middle-click pasting.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Just get over that fantasy already. At the bare minimum Patents and DRM guarantee that in the long run Linux will never function as a drop-in replacement for Windows or OS X for Joe User. Certain font settings can't be turned on by default, most audio/video codecs are patented and designed for Windows/OS X use, hardware vendors want to keep their secrets and still don't care about providing drivers for Linux, and worst of all Windows and OS X work well enough to make justifying the move to Linux a difficult proposition. Personally I'm OK with all of this, I just wish people would stop beating this dead horse.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Talk about bloatware, Just get yourself a copy of Windows latest operating system - Vista. Wait! First, buy a new computer so it will run! This article is BS in my opinion. Why do they have Microsoft reps writing articles on the Linux section of Slashdot I'd like to know.
I have used Linux since -93 and the only time i have been irritated about performance is when non native code is in the picture. Openoffice, Azureus, Firefox and other apps thats not written specifically for Linux is the only snails i know of. Sluggish performance in for eg. nautilus cant be blamed on the kernel either. Plenty filemanagers for Linux is fast so its doable. All in all i think the kernel is the least problem for the desktop.
HTTP/1.1 400
When I started out, you edited your x-config *before* launching x for the first time, to make sure it wouldn't fry your monitor.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
So stop using crappy hardware. If you buy a Winmodem, do you expect it to work on your Mac? It's not hard to check whether your hardware is supported under Linux, and if you spend a bit more and get quality components rather than Broadcom wireless cards or laptops and video cards with broken ACPI implementations, you'd have a much better experience. My laptop works flawlessly from the get-go with Linux, as do many, many others. I know you expect Linux to replace Windows, but it won't completely. It requires non-broken hardware to run.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
A new desktop that someone will care about has to be as revolutionary as the Mac was in 1984. When that comes along, when its a game changer, people will notice until then yawn.
Sammy at Personafile
I have an opinion on Bestiality. It's bad. I've never tried it, though. You don't need to use something to have an opinion on it. Just read some of the reviews and it'll become clear that you don't need to test it to see if it's "good". Simple answer is that it's not.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
and shame on us users for completely misinterpreting the article. I saw very few responses talking about the real point of the article: the kernel developers are completely out of touch with the desktop. Instead we take the flamebait from the article summary and go running off with it.
Andrew to this day remains unconvinced it helps and that it 'might' have negative consequences elsewhere. No bug report or performance complaint has been forthcoming in the last 9 months. I even wrote a benchmark that showed how it worked, which managed to quantify it! In a hilarious turnaround Linus asked me offlist 'yeah but does it really help'. Well, user reports and benchmarks weren't enough...
Personally I hope that this can change, I hope that the mentality of the kernel developers can change. Developers testing bugs with quad core machines with 4 gigs of ram, and multiple hard drives running raid!?!? Let the argument never come up, whether Linux is ready for the desktop.
And there are all the obvious bug reports. They're afraid to mention these. How scary do you think it is to say 'my Firefox tabs open slowly since the last CPU scheduler upgrade'? To top it all off, the enterprise users are the opposite. Just watch each kernel release and see how quickly some $bullshit_benchmark degraded by .1% with patch $Y gets reported. See also how quickly it gets attended to. .1% with the latest patch.
Now we know, that Linux isn't even aimed at the desktop, and won't be for the foreseeable future. Not with such developers, and not with a scheduler aimed at the enterprise, and not when the only people submitting bug requests whine about how their benchmark lost
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I believe my statements are mostly accurate, but if I'm wrong, please let me know so that I'm not going around spewing ignorance in the future.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
You have to wonder if any of these knee-jerk fanboys actually read the article. I like Linux a lot but it's not perfect in *every* aspect and desktop performance/features is one of its weaker areas. I also love how everyone seems to think this guy is some dumb troll as if they know more about how Linux works than a guy who hacks the kernel for performance.
(lordtoran answering as AC because the MS astroturfers modded me to karma hell)
You are lumping together 35 years of operating system history as if there were no progress during that time. Yes, Linux (the kernel) has inherited from the big old timesharing systems, was adopted by hobbyists and tinkerers and conquered the server space. Nevertheless, the Linux kernel has a lot of attractive configuration options that can be tweaked to optimize runtime behavior for very different target platforms.
Linux runs on phones and set-top boxes and is used in this function by "normal" people. It runs on business and government desktops, where non-savvy people seem to have no problem using it. It runs on my desktop, and I haven't seen a command line in 2 months.
Contrary to what you say, there are Unix-like distros, like the one I use, designed for and targetting computer-illiterate users and also offering technical support.
What the problem is for sure, I don't know, but I'd certainly like to see it fixed.
:).
I do: OS X runs with backing store by default. That is, OS X uses a boatload of memory in the server to store all the bits making up your windows, and the server uses those bits to give you the appearance of responsiveness even when the application is not responding or poorly written.
X11 has had the same feature for 20 years (occasionally, I have enabled it), it just deliberately left it off by default, hoping that application developers would fix up their apps.
As a user of all 3 (and a few more), I must disagree. EVERY operating system has it's little pauses like you describe, but Linux in particular drags the whole time, just in small incremements.
As a user of all three operating systems (and a few more), I have to say, you're wrong. OS X, in particular, doesn't just have "little pauses", it has annoying fainting spells during which it doesn't respond, lasting from seconds to minutes. Of course, it looks cool doing so: the windows still look alright, and you get a colorful beach ball to entertain you (sometimes).
Linux is where it's at for programming enthusiasts. It would sure be nice to be able to use it for more than that though
The X11 desktop developers have finally given in and desktops like Beryl now effectively have backing store on by default, because it's clear that application programmers aren't going to clean up their act, that X11 will have to put up with shitty software ported from Windows and OS X for years to come, and because it's needed for visual effects anyway.
Actually the wireless card was a very common Linksys card (can't remember the model off the top of my head) and was known to work with Linux using NDISWrapper. Still couldn't get it to work for months until someone in the Ubuntu community figured it out. Also - how is it that so much of the Linux community pisses and moans about how much Windows costs and yet your answer is to just spend money on hardware? Especially since the card I had was "known" to run on Linux already.
Schnapple
As I sit here on my iBook, I have to defend MS on this one. Microsoft invented the PC as we know it. Before windows, the PC world was a compatibility nightmare stuck in neutral. MS created a unified PLATFORM from which people could be creative. You might not LIKE that windows is a "standard" but developers do. I can write an app once and 90% of the world's users have the technical capability to use it out-of-the-box. (Number made up) This IMHO is a primary failing of Linux.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
The caveat here of course is that there are still things in Linux that are impossible to pull off without a console, and a lot of the settings for KDE and GNOME are placed in unintuitive locations or have misleading or useless names. This has been getting a lot better lately with Ubuntu and whatnot, and a lot of it is distro-specific, but I think it's still a problem. I've seen people move from Windows to Macs much more smoothly than to Linux, and that's why Apple's investment in its UI pays off. Microsoft's defaults are not exactly hot, but everyone is used to them so they're not a problem.
Linux needs to be a hell of a lot better than just the "good enough, close enough" and DIY attitude it currently has to really succeed on the desktop. It needs to be better than Windows and Apple. Normal consumers don't care about the religious "you get all this freedom" bullshit enough to drop Windows, and if they do drop something they'd rather pay $$ for a Mac than tinker endlessly with Linux.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The future of Linux is in Ubuntu's hands. I don't care what your favorite distro is, that is the case. OSes like PCBSD are showing how the focus on the complete package (not just a kernel) is where it is at. OS X has proven this, and Ubuntu is a step behind in this regard.
Save the flames, I've heard them all before and could care less, when we finally get enough people to wake up and begin to work in this frame of mind Linux will be unstoppable. You need a solid foundation, and at least a basic blue-print to build a house worth living in and adding on to. Feel free to disagree, I just don't care after seeing the same issues for over 12 years.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
That's all right, I get a subscription to Experts Exchange at work, possibly one of the better Windows support areas (if you pay). A user has bluescreens happening randomly, at least every day. All the hardware checks out.
He's told to install a driver verifier, set up special pooled mode and reboot. Then the machine bluescreens, he uploads a minidump, and the inclusive result is a driver is breaking (maybe an old printer driver). In this case he was led through as much techie hell as any Linux problem I've seen, and the result is either reinstall or remove drivers one by one and hope for the best. As they still aren't sure which driver is the problem, a reinstall isn't guaranteed to fix the issue anyway.
I can't say that this is typical, but with Windows, if the standard scan for viruses doesn't work, it all too quickly degenerates into this, which is as complex (maybe more so as the logs are unreadable without special tools here) as any Linux troubleshooting.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
But it takes top down leadership to run things.
Clearly, Con Kolivas wanted to participate because he felt Linux could be and should be improved on the desktop and set out to do that. However, from his account, he appears to have run into indifference and outright rejection of some of his solutions. Now, if Linux was run like a company, say Microsoft, would this happen? maybe, if it wasn't his main line of work. As a hobby, most suggestions are simply that. But if he is asked to work on the kernel and he doesn't work well with his boss, whether or not the code is good, most times he will be let go or reassigned to another department.
Yes, Linux does have leadership and a hierarchical structure. But it isn't run with investor supported, or market driven shareholders. If anything, Linux runs on donations. And here is where I think the problem lies twofold. first, people participate and then leave citing burnout because they feel that since they volunteered their time, then the things they do must be worth their effort. And when their effort isn't acknowledged (or used), ego play sets in and causes ill will.
How to mitigate this issue? Leadership needs to take an overall view of progress from a homogenized as well as server and client distro view. Clearly, there are incompatible things going on between server and desktop that warrant separation. And too, recognize that some things may slip by and just recognize not everything can be perfect. For the individual, this is harsh, but fork it and build your own distro if you think they are wrong and you are right. Time will tell and then perhaps it will unfork and then everyone can kiss your ass.
The second problem that occurs with this issue is business do not want a product that has been built with love and sideline passion. That want a product warranted by wage slaves and a company driven by profit. Companies are outright scared of using and investing in a product that someone built in their spare time and only works on it when it suits their own schedule.
So I am ahead? Then maybe I should continue criticizing Microsoft, fanboy.
You need to learn to argue better.
Infuriate left and right
You sir, are a raving asshole.
Oooh, you used to be the executive editor of an open source magazine. So what?
You say you want a revolution....
I would blame linux, not X :)
While the difference isn't nearly what it used to be, FreeBSD has always had far less of that on the same hardware and the same version of X.
Back on a 486 (and even my K6, iirc) linux could freeze for seconds under loads under 4, while at least the mouse kept working at 20 and up.
The last time I compared on the same hardware (a couple of years ago), Linux was merely "annoying" under load, rather than the older "unusable"
hawk
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
I read Con's "history of the personal computer". I don't know what distribution he's talking about. I'm using Ubuntu on both my home machine and work machine and they run great! In fact, I have them both dual booting Linux and XP. When I switch over to the XP partition the drive starts chugging away like it's trying to push a donkey up a hill. When I'm running Ubuntu Linux it's much faster. I even see my wife using it some times, and if you asked her whan OS she was using I'm sure she couldn't tell you. It just works quickly and does what it's supposed to do. Huzzah for the Linux Desktop.
I guess it's sort of ironic I got modded troll, you asshole moderators
*becomes AC*
It's so nice to see "editortroll" in the tags on this post...finally, a way to degrade the obvious trolls of the admins directly on the front page.
Guess the whole Digg rip-off wasn't so bad after all!
oh really? lucky you... if i install the latest Ubuntu in my laoptop with a ATI X700 there is no X at all!! My screen goes totally blank! I have to find an obscure page in the internet saying that i have to put blabllbla in the Xorg.... WHAT THE HELL??? i don't need to do that in windows! I install it, get a crappy resolution, but it works! Then i go to www.ati.com, get the driver and voilá! In Linux i must do a million things just to get the graphical interface working.... it's a nightmare... and i'm not the average Joe...
Wait, you are saying how the windows work *isn't* the job of the Window Manager? Why should this be duplicated for each app? Heck, there are small applications which do add a pin to the top functionality, so it isn't/shouldn't/doesn't have to be app by app.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
That and two bucks gets you a ride on the Chicago El.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I love linux as a server. I encourage people to use it.
I use it often as mi desktop computer too.
I agree, however, about linux failing at the desktop.
Many things have been added through time, but, some I found useless, while simple, very useful things have been left behind.
I mean: I do not want my desktop to spin; I just want it to let me copy/paste between applications.
Copying from dia to OO, for example. I'd love it.
I'm in the same boat as you. My computer consistently was slower than Windows at doing regular tasks, no matter what I tried to speed Linux up. :(
I tried distributions (Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Knoppix, Mandriva), windowmanagers (GNOME [sawfish & metacity], KDE [KWin], ratpoison, fluxbox, xfce, e16, ion, afterstep, blackbox, fvwm, icewm, probably more), kernel tweaking (-mm, various smaller trees off the gentoo forums, other/beta io schedulers), filesystems (ext3, fat32, reiserfs, reiser4, and even xfs and jfs) XFree/X.org configurations aplenty, and complete stripping down of runlevel/init.d spawned process, but none of it was to any avail.
Video would take enormous efforts to work as fast as it did on Windows; stop using GNOME, switch to current super-low-memory-profile WM of choice, stop any server process but ssh, start mplayer as root with nice, and pray.
Day-to-day use of any windowmanager wasn't up to snuff; windows would tear when moving, resizing would feel sloppy unless I had window outline resizing on, Firefox would take forever to start, tabs would have large delays on opening, as did menues, page rendering sucked balls, and in XMMS/BMP/amaroK/rhythmbox/kaffeine sounds would regularly chop with high CPU load spikes, there was a palpably long load whenever I opened an application in another widget toolkit that had me acting GTK1 zealot just for memory concerns, and more.
I mean, I ended up using Dillo and mp3blaster (a console music player) for day-to-day use!
Screw using Eye of Gnome, I had to use tiny, featureless or distro-included media viewers!
Unless X started COMPLETELY BRINGING DOWN my machine again, regardless of what user it was running in (damn you suid!?) in which case I'd just use lynx on a console window, and become a pure coder-monkey because I had nothing else to do...
And even then, I'd keep using Linux exclusively, for a period of a few months, until I switched back to Windows. I'd be shocked at the responsiveness, and how multimedia and (god-forbid) 3D rendered applications actually worked, until I got so pissed off with everything else that I'd switch back to Linux after a month or two, and restart the miserable cycle.
I ended up doing so little stuff on my computer that I ended up getting a Mac, for god's sake, and fulfulled my *n{i,u}x needs on a headless FreeBSD server on an ancient discarded UltraSPARC, all that I could afford!
Yup, that's my life on Linux. It's been about a year since I seriously usd it, and I'd switch back to Linux in the blink of an eye if I had any indication that someone finally tracked down the speed-killer patch that SCO or Hitler or Steve Jobs comitted into every X11 implementation ever.
The ability of system 7 to go to a file in a window by typing was a nice touch.
And there was something else useful, but it's been a few years.
Come to think of it, there was probably a cheap extension for that keyboard navigation . .
hawk
There are many places you can turn to if you want commercial support for Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/support/commercial/marketpl
My desktop preference is basically any Unix/Unix-like system with X Window System (note that I don't consider OSX as one because its graphics is not really based on X11). I don't really care about the underlying operating system that much since all Unix-like systems offer basically the same services. I usually prefer BSD, Debian and Slackware but basically any Unix, e.g. Solaris or AIX will do.
I have used all kinds of windowmanager/desktop environment configurations, such as: FVWM, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, CDE, KDE, GNOME, etc... Only about six months ago switched back to my old favourite: FVWM and I haven't looked back. Finally things work exactly the way I want them.
The features (which mostly do not exist on Mac/Win (or any clone such as Gnome/KDE) environment) I use on my own desktop are:
That line succinctly summarizes the typical FOSSie "can't do" mindset. He can't get Lunix up to the quality and ability of the venerable Windows 95, but it's somehow Microsoft's fault. They have no skill, ability, or creativity, and desperately NEED to find someone else to blame. Win95 is TWELVE years old, guys, and you are STILL chasing it's tail lights!! Need another decade or two?
THIS is the REAL reason all the FOSSies are up in arms about MS not releasing the Windows source code: they have absolutely NO idea how to get Lunix to auto-detect and auto-config hardware, so they are incredibly desperate to see how MS does it.
Maybe he means MS crushes innovation by Lunix and the other third-tier operating systems, since it seems all the new and innovative desktop OS developments in the last twenty+ years have had Microsoft leading the way. But it's not MS's fault nobody else can keep pace. He should just admit they are way too good for him to compete.
I look forward to reading about his next project: a new and exciting text editor for teh Lunix!!!
Not if your plan was to kill 100 million people?!
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Apologies for not reading the article or even any of the comments. Linux has "failed" with desktop consumers because it hasn't been consumer-centric for very long (and may still not be for many people). Let's look at the facts:
Windows:
- Ships with nearly every PC
- Designed for dunces
- Runs 99% of the software consumers pick up off the shelf
Linux:
- Has only recently begun to (optionally) ship with desktops
- Was originally designed for tech-savvy nerds
- Runs a bunch of apps consumers have never heard of and have never seen on the store shelves
Duh!
Linux developers are disconnected from users, period. I've seen dog shit that would leave any linux distro spinning in its wake. As a server Linux is good but certainly not great, if you want great you need a commercial (ehem, free) OS like Solaris. As a desktop pc operating system it is outright fuckin embarrassing. Ubuntu included. Again, the developers are not the users...........look it up! A ground up is in order.
Every time I read that Linux has failed on the desktop, I check my Linux desktop. Nope. Working just fine here.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
But you are last generation, do you think that todays generation are "afraid" of computers. And what is "normal" when it comes to people? You only have to go out on the freeway to see how abnormal (not of any common standard of character or knowledge) people really are, including yourself.
I have installed and used a large variety of OSs and I am not a computer geek. Actually installing Ubuntu is easier, and takes less time than XP. Also it is just as easy to use as XP, now with all the MS "you're a thief" and I am going to make it difficult to use the software you bought crap. It is only a matter of time before that attitude turns all customers off. It is already turning off the business and enterprise customers, "this software is mine, mine, mine, and you are not allowed to change it to suit your needs". A really good customer oriented business model???
That's not the "enterprise crap" Con is complaining about. He's complaining about how enterprise interests have resulted in the kernel but optimized for throughput at the expense of responsiveness. Con claims (and I fully agree with him) that if Linux is to succeed on the desktop, it must make responsiveness its main performance priority, not throughput.
I can say 2 things about Linux in general, and you had all better listen closely.
1.Linux is too hard for a casual user to learn to operate. Even a somewhat advanced user, such as myself, gets completely confused at times. You literally have to be an industry expert to use this on a daily basis. It's too complex, and not at all user friendly.
2. Apple will have a PC OS within 10 years, probably less. You'd have to be a retard not to see this coming. Cash in the coffers from the iPod/iPhone. Porting iTunes, and now safari to windows, for God's sake they use Intel processors on their native hardware now. Apple can only hold so much of the market only running on Macs. It's inevitable at this point.
If Linux is going to be commonplace on desktops, it needs to do something about it's GUI, and do it now, or face the same fate as BeOS, and so many other projects.
how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers.
/etc and .rc model of Unix.
There are many people responsible for this. Aside from microsoft, we have a large part of the OSS community which takes the approach that Unix is the word of God, and cannot be improved upon. On top of that we now have some of our best programmers (hackers, in the old sense of the word) busy trying to match what Unix has in the commercial side on the internals and what Windows has on the UI plane, so this leaves darn little time left for innovation. Even so Linux has pushed the state of the art forward in Unix, but ever so slightly. It is time we start dreaming of a better OS than a unix derivative, of a better UI than X11 (that shouldn't be hard), of a better interprocess communication model than sequential pipes with no naming scheme. Sure, the Windows registry sucks rocks, but so does the
"And we do not see people fighting to get this or that car (beer, TV set) brand to dominate the market because of an eventual technical superiority, better taste, features, etc... The only difference from that to computer Operational Systems is that the collaborative culture brought by the microcomputer "revolution" make people expect a level of interoperability and interchangeability between these different branded machine that they don't expect in other ones, like cars, for instance."
I disagree. With standards wars, such as Beta vs VHS, HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, that's exactly what we've seen. If the two sides appear equally balanced, the consumers however wisely steer clear of the entire market until a winner appears.
There is a basic level of interoperability that people expect in *all* products. You expect a car to be able to take petrol, tyres and run on roads provided by third parties. You expect a media system to be able to play any media you buy. You expect your mobile phone to work with multiple providers in multiple places (this is why GSM rules the world outside the USA). And when that interoperability isn't there, choice becomes a negative and not a positive, because you run the risk of being on the losing side of history and wasting your investment.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
employee is a noun. employ is one form of a particular verb. Learn the difference. Apply what you have learned. Thank you.
1) Do not cache anything in RAM. Ever. Use it for running applications only.
2) If physical RAM isn't full, treat the swap partition as if it doesn't exist.
3) Only swap out entire applications, not parts of them.
4) Allow applications to be set as un-swappable. If the system needs to swap something out, it can swap something else out.
5) Strict disk activity quotas on the swap partition. If disk activity on swap hits a certain level, have oom-killer blow away a significant fraction of the running applications (maybe even kill apps until everything that's still running can fit in physical RAM). Swapstorms will not be tolerated.
I'd like to completely ignore the fact that you've dismissed the hard work hundreds of volunteers do each day helping people use and get the most out of Ubuntu and all other community-supported distributions based most likely on a single personal bad experience which certainly does not reflect the attitude of the user base as a whole and instead point out your other false assumption.
Commercial support is in fact available for Ubuntu through Canonical and, like with Microsoft, you pay for what you get.
My suspicion of the audio skipping issue is that the fundamental problem is that it goes through too many layers in userspace before getting to the kernel, and that, if you're playing audio through something like arts and also have bursty system load, you'd likely to have something in the audio pathway not get enough time.
Your mythtv boxes are relatively simple to schedule, because there's a certain constant load, and the programs are designed to sacrifice quality as needed to keep up. Furthermore, the tasks that take a lot of processor take it all the time. That's a far cry from using openoffice and firefox while playing music through arts, where obviously interactive tasks ambush the CPU suddenly after being idle for a while. Consider: you do a bunch of data entry, requiring a tiny bit of CPU time whenever you hit a key to update the view of the cell of the spreadsheet. Then you hit recalculate in openoffice, switch to firefox, and reload CNN while you wait for the huge spreadsheet to go. The kernel knows that firefox needs quick responses, and that openoffice needs quick responses, but they're suddenly using a ton of time and the programs in the music pathway get pushed out until the kernel reanalyzes openoffice as a CPU hog and firefox as not about to be idle any time soon and pushes down their priorities.
Personally, I think that "desktop environment" audio handler programs uselessly make it really difficult to schedule things acceptably, and 99% of skips due to tricky loads can be avoided by just using alsa. But that's just my experiences based on the computers I've used and the more workstation-like workload I have (i.e., the CPU hogs are tasks that are always CPU hogs, and the interactive tasks stay interactive).
A PVR is actually very much unlike a desktop, and, in some ways, closer to the enterprise access pattern that gets a lot of performance tuning and benchmarking.
...and for the scenario I outlined in my original post, why would they NEED to? A good percentage of cube-dwellers need email, web browsing, and word processing software, and that's IT. Does my boss need to know how our Samba server works? Nope. He just "clicks the drive" and has access to "his files." He doesn't CARE that he's using OpenOffice; he just needs it to WORK...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Actually, I'm from the current generation, and I can still tell you that not everyone is as tech savvy as you seem to think.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
The chance of being modded up is miniscule, but anyway I'm Con Kolivas. There is only one thing I'd like to point out about the whole interview. Ashton (the interviewer) chose the title that says why linux failed on the desktop without consulting me. If you actually read the interview I never once say that linux failed on the desktop.
I admin about a dozen amd x86_64 workstations where I work (along with some sparc enterprise stuff and some ultras and blades). The Linux workstations replaced some aging Blade 2500 boxes. The only apps we run are (on KDE) Unigraphics NX, firefox, tbird, kopete, openoffice, acrobat and Citrix. Oh and UT2004 (demo). I can't say enough about how stable these boxes are. Initially, we had driver issues with the Nvidia fx1500 cards, but Nvidia worked out the bugs and things work really well. We installed ProE Wildfire3 last week, so the guys run that too now. It's really nice not to have to deal with all the problems that plague windows. We looked into macs, but we could build two amd 6000 boxes for the cost of one mac. Linux has been a perfect fit for us on the Desktop. The only time the boxes are down now is if they toss a hard drive or power supply. It's too bad more people can't make the switch.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
All this guy is asking for is a snappy desktop.
Given the hardware advances of the past 30 years - you'd think that wouldn't be too much to ask.
Personally - if he said he wanted to break out his own distro, customize the kernel, optimize the whole experience for "responsive GUI" - I think he'd have a good thing going.
However; I'm betting that the trade-offs he'd have to make for functionality we all take for granted now (network connectivity, indexing, virus/spyware scanning, software firewall, bleh bleh bleh) would make such a system a very different beast than what we're used to now.
Functional? Who knows.
Some of the other threads here also make some good points about video drivers. There's only so much we can do here until the video card manufacturers also put this "responsive GUI" item on their priority list. (yeah - both nvidia and ATI provide drivers that are way better than the default OS drivers in terms of performance - but they still leave me with the impression of; have we really come anywhere since 1994?)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
An old version (2.0, bash is at 3.2) with absolutely no command line completion other than primitive file name completion. I'd much prefer to install zsh or at least the latest version of bash than use that outdated package.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Windows certainly isn't about performance.
This guy should spend time with real users and get some clues.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Broadcom makes the chip and whatnot inside that Linksys wireless card. Linksys doesn't make any actual wireless chipsets; they just assemble them and make a usable product.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
How did this get marked troll? I completely agree with everything he said. Fucking MS astroturfers...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I can't believe this interview. Con's assertions are absolutely ridiculous.
To say that Windows is limiting PC architecture is only a half truth at best. Before Windows, when the PC hardware architecture was more fluid with new hardware types coming out all the time, new ways of doing things, it all seemed pretty great to a computer user like Con was at the time. I was perfectly happy with using my computer back then as well. But, Con was not a developer back then... He doesn't see the real need there was by developers for good hard standards to code to. Remember installing a game back then? With the 10 or more different sound cards alone to choose from? No auto-detection? Man that was tough to code for. Developers had to write code for each and every different type of sound hardware there was available at the time; no coding for Direct Sound and going back to just making a good game. Thank GOD for Sound Blaster winning out as a standard back then, and helping to simplify. You see, Con's problem really is he does not like Standards in general, not just Windows... This is because any Standards inherently limit adding additional functionality or radical changes in design, BUT..... Standards also allow developers of all types of software to code far more effectively.
Imagine today trying to write a graphically intense game such as Doom3, but without standards on how all video, audio, and input devices have to work. Yes, Windows limits somewhat how we can add future functionality by only supporting certain features within DirectX (same goes for supported functionality of OpenGL by the way), but the standards do allow developers to actually work on developing the GAME itself instead of focusing on writing in game drivers for every piece of hardware in existence! Windows or some other "limiting" OS with standards on how hardware needs to function at a basic level was absolutely necessary for the development of the ever complex applications in use today. I'm not a GO MS guy, but come on! I want to see Con write a video game that supports all hardware types directly, but does not use a "limiting" standard to address the hardware. Ya right...
As for his complaints that Linux is driven by server related business interests instead of the desktop... No freaking duh! The server market has been Linux's best success yet! Without the success of Linux servers there might not be a viable Linux OS today. In fact, even though the desktop is a back burner issue, the money coming in from the server market is pushing Linux development faster than ever. With the embedded Linux market (mobile phones, etc) coming as a close second. When a majority of Linux users are of the server and embedded type, with the desktop the least used, doesn't it make sense that the Linux kernel be at least somewhat optimized for those markets? Sorry to tell you Con, but if the Linux server and embedded markets somehow disappeared, there would hardly be anyone left to code for Desktop Linux... Certainly there would not be enough development going on to keep up with Windows or OS X development, no matter how much you hate either of them.
Get a grip Con, and stop being a baby. Stop biting the hand that feeds you. Without Linux servers success we would not be even discussing Linux as a viable Desktop.
Mod parent up.
:)
Parent might have a relevant thing (or two) to say about the story
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
At our company, we use a heterogeneous setting: Windows XP and Linux (Kubuntu that is).
The XP machines we set up for development purposes (Eclipse, PHP, XAMP) are now, not quite
7 months after their first installment, at the bottom of usability, so to say. Everything
on these machines takes longer and longer, with nothing having been installed in-between
except the required updates for the development platform.
On the linux machines it is different, quite a few update to the installed development
software, upgrades to the system and installation of a few gadgets and still everything
works fine and most of all responsive.
And, what is more, yesterdays I received a notification by XP (professional taht is, based
on the proven NT platform), saying that the MSDOS driver would not function properly
after inserting a certain CDROM... remember that this is a off-the-shelf installation of
the system.
To my account, Linux is more desktop ready than any other platform, except perhaps the also
Unix based Mac OS X environment.
Just my 2
Regards.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Are developer egos a problem in the open source development model in general?
Con Kolivas: Just trawl the normal support forums. I'd love to tell them all to suddenly flood lkml with their reports of failed boots with various kernels, hardware disappearing, stopping working suddenly, memory disappearing, trying to use software suspend and having your balls blown off by your laptop, and so on.
That might have persuasive value.
I agree with you, and agree there's a ways to go. Codecs are one of the big issues right now, IMO. Codecs and video card drivers (but my experience with VC drivers is bad in Windows, too).
One GREAT advantage I just remembered:
apt-get, or more specifically, a program like Synaptic. You instantly have access to free programs to do almost anything. You can search. Want a mail client? Type "mail" and it brings up programs with the word mail in title or description. There's no real analogue for Windows of supported applications.
Claiming someone can't discuss something logically is basically the same as calling them illogical, and doing so in a derisive way is basically the same as name calling.
Perhaps if the OP didn't come out the door treating people like illogical morons, they would be more receptive to his points.
Also, God/Allah/whatever can't really be proven to exist or not to exist, so there's no real logic in arguing it, either.
I stand by my original post. If someone doesn't come across as an assumptive asshole, I can argue with them just fine and stick to logic.
I never said your slight would hurt my faith. If I believed that, then it would be rather illogical to believe the same deity created the universe. I mean, what does God need with a st- wait, wrong line. What kind of God is harmed by /. posts?
I was just pointing out that there are people perfectly capable of logic based arguments that believe in God -- if you don't come off as an asshole to them from the get go.
Also, I don't know what the evangelicals are telling you, but as far as I'm aware, God doesn't smite. Christians who think otherwise need to perhaps reread that about God loving everybody. (Gandhi said something about "Christians are so unlike their Christ." For the most part, I agree with him. That's a WHOLE 'nother argument, though.)
Poor linux guys. the only thing for which Microsoft is not being blamed is invasion of iraq!! The opensource has been cheering everyother guy who tries to standup to MS only to see them biting dust. latest fad is to tom tom apple. But as the figures of appple iphone sales show having nice idea is different from executing them. This is not to berate job's achievement. But you guys in ur enthu to play two minutes fame under the sun contest forget the realities of business.
Apt-Get is great. No argument there. Sometimes an application isn't up to snuff for a novice, but it's there and installs effortlessly.
I wish some of the apps, especially for the K desktop environment, had better names. With KDE it seems like K this and K that. Like Kb3. Great app, but what's with the name.
Just to let you know, as someone who uses an 8600GTS in Ubuntu, you need to remove the Ubuntu official nVidia drivers and download the latest ones manually. Whatever nVidia released that was blessed into Ubuntu flips out on cards newer than the GeForce 7 series, and are thus useless. I also ran into the sound not working on my nForce 570 board, but I just plugged in my "crappy, old" Audigy 6.1 from 4 years back that's 100% supported by Linux (certain X-FI cards are actually Audigy inside, same chip, etc, and 100% supported -- they're also cheap, being around $40-60 for a card I paid $150 for).
I'm surprised that Creative doesn't follow a hardware-API standard like AC'97 (+... for multi channel) on their new chip designs. It'd make their driver support costs less, and thus allow them to focus on the main money by reducing a cost centre.
Sorry about the AC post, I haven't got my login with me.
"If there is any one big problem with kernel development and Linux it is the complete disconnection of the development process from normal users... I think the kernel developers at large haven't got the faintest idea just how big the problems in userspace are."
If Con Kolivas has desktop computing on that awesome brain of his, then he should join the Haiku project, which is focused on the desktop with great simplicity in mind. Linux will eventually get there with the desktop (with Ubuntu leading the charge), it may take longer than most probably predicted.
An XP user could probably move down to win98 or up to say vista without too much difficulty
Vista is a move UP from XP?
While the article correctly observes a massive slowdown, unfortunately it blames it on enterprise crap without testing that assumption.
...) all your web browsers except lynx. Or prefereably build a new Gentoo or Slackware or LFS or DSL system from scratch without any of that "modern crap" installed.
....
... :-)
It's easy to show that that theory is flawed, because anyone can easily prove to themselves which factor should carry the blame, as follows:
1) Get rid of Gnome, KDE, all Gtk+ apps, all Qt apps, and (people will love this
2) Replace your X11 window manager with icewm (ie. no docks, no icons, no Windows-type desktop). Install xv for playing with images, and mpg123 for playing music.
3) Now play. What happened to all the sluggishness? It's all 10 times faster than before, wow! But that's not the end.
4) Kill X11. Make sure that GPM is installed, and get acquainted with the text-mode mouse. Log in on 6 VTs and get used to working across all of them as you would across a pile of xterms, switching VTs as needed. Observe responsiveness
5) OMFG!!! It's 1000 times faster! In fact, everything is instantaneous on a modern CPU. Admittedly it'll probably be a culture shock to work without graphics for 95% of current Linux users, unless you're one of us old timers who did our Unix hacking very productively that way for over a decade
The point of the above isn't to suggest that we should work like we did in the 80's. It's to highlight that everything has slowed down because we have tied up 99% of our vastly faster CPUs into driving our fancy graphic user interfaces. Slim the GUI down and you get an immediate speedup. Get rid of the GUI altogether and the slowdown goes away entirely.
So the blame does NOT lie with enterprise crap, primarily. It may have a contributing effect, fair enough, but the main culprit (by a mile) is vastly and pointlessly over-elaborate, multi-layered, and highly inefficient graphic user interfaces, which really do nothing terribly useful. Eye candy doesn't come free.
My advice for those wanting responsiveness: restart Linux GUI design from scratch. Remember what the Amiga achieved with an 8 MHz 16-bit CPU and near-zero RAM compared to what we have today. There's a lesson there.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
OK, I follow CK's thread and he may very well be right from a theoretical standpoint given that he is/was a kernel developer after all; however, let's look at this from an end-user perspective.
My Gentoo Linux box (AMD64, 1xGB RAM) boots in 30 seconds. My Windows XP box (Intel Duo, 1xGB RAM) takes 11 MINUTES. Yes, you read that right, 11 minutes. That's how long it takes to load all of the crap that you need to run an XP box in a corporate environment (Norton Antivirus, Black Ice, domain authentication, etc). 11 minutes before I've got a usable desktop on Windows vs. 30 seconds on Linux - oh, and I'm not just loading the OS on that Linux box, but also apache, mysql, bind, dhcp, ntp, and a host of other stuff.
Now let's talk about the desktop. My Linux desktop of choice (XFCE) is fast and responsive. I can simultaneously surf, compile code, and record an HD broadcast to disk (PCHDTV-5500 card) while the kernel also does DNS, DHCP, IPTABLES/NAT and web server for my home LAN. But here's the best part - I get to choose my desktop experience. If I want eye candy I can run Enlightenment. Full features - KDE or Gnome. Bare bones - Blackbox. You have real FLEXIBILITY. You can match your software to the hardware you've got to work with.
Compare that to Windows. My corporate XP paperweight blue screens about every 3 days. I get one GUI and it does ONE thing at a time (try burning a CD and surfing the web and you'll see what I mean). Now M$ is pushing Vista on us and it will run even SLOWER, not to mention forcing us to throw out perfectly good hardware because XP is unsupported.
So while Linux may not be the fastest desktop that could theoretically be coded, it's a helluva lot better than the M$ alternative. IMHO, the question of desktop dominance has a whole lot more to do with corporate IT departments unwillingness to (support) change and a lot less about whether the Linux kernel's scheduler is good enough.
I think the headline is a bit ridiculous, I don't think we are at the point were we should say "Linux has failed on the Desktop". However, if you read the interview, it is hard to deny that he is right. We have seen desktop performance continually undervalued on the kernel side and the work of somebody passionate about fixing these bugs (yes, bugs) should be encouraged if not embraced by those who aren't involved in it.
Here we have someone with talent, passion, and who has invested a huge amount of time in the kernel giving up after being ignored and undervalued for years. It is reasonable, understandable, and a big loss for all of us that he has left.
I am also sad to see that most of the comments on slashdot are arguing over the semantics of the headline and not valuing/discussing/disagreeing with the criticism contained within the interview. We are all desktop users, why are we so defensive when someone suggests that we have ignored desktop performance in the kernel? The proof of that lack of attention is in front of every person running linux to view the article.
For a moment I thought I was reading about me. Spooky.
Anyway, I also like to play with customized XP CD's, or live ones like PE, xp embedded, CE or even tweaked 9x for various purposes.
The point is I don't really mind because there is Perl for Windows, and it feels like home.
My issue with your posting is that you are complaining about how hard Linux is to install. However, that is because you did not buy a Linux computer. You bought a Windows computer. With Windows-specific components. Dell sells two different Linux laptops; you can buy either laptop and Linux will be a non-issue to install. There are no Winmodems or Winwireless cards that are not Linux-compatible in those products.
It is not Linux's responsibility to make sure all hardware works with Linux. People should stop blaming Linux for their wireless card or whatever not working with Linux. It is the hardware manufactures who do not make specs available to Linux developers, much less make Linux drivers, who are responsible when a given piece of hardware is not Linux-compatible.
KB3 is better than my least favorite OSS name:
The Gimp
Okay, I get the Backronym there, but it's just not a good or marketable name. You don't see someone calling a program something like, say, for the Linux Kernel: Free Unix Clone Kit.
Anyone mention the GPL yet? I honestly believe that if Linux had a BSD license it would be successful.
Why can't there be a BSD fork of Linux? The GPL insures that people's innovations stay "open" and "free", but also means that someone who wants to try to put real effort and time into the project it means they can't ever make money from working on it.
People have the wrong perspective of money. Someone might want to innovate "linux" and potentially sell their innovations for a few bucks. The purpose isn't always to become rich, but think of it as an opportunity to not have to work every waking minute of their life. To have to work a full time job to pay the bills and then work at night 'innovating' is a disaster. Not a healthy way to live. But just think if you could work full time on innovating a product that you believe in and want to make better (think linux) and then sell it for a few bucks to pay the bills, that would be optimal.
I dunno, that's a lot of words, but the GPL is annoying for anyone trying to actually pay bills and do something with their lives other than stay a student and contribute to a code base that is completely rogue.
Now here's a conundrum. Using BSD-derived code as proof of the superiority of OSS, and on the desktop to boot. But when we have a GPL vs BSD discussion. Suddenly it loses it's luster.
I work as a programmer and use a linux server at work. I like a lot the idea of an open system where I can modify whatever, make scripts to control the behavior of the system, etc. So I try it at home and here's what happens:
Mandriva 2006 worked on a friend's laptop so I try to install it at home. Works fine for a few hours until, for some still unknown reason, the headphones suddenly emit ear-jarring static at the maximum possible volume no matter what I'm doing or what settings I use. I try reinstalling. The problem repeats.
A few months later Mandriva 2007 comes out and I give it a try. Installation finishes and on first boot-up the system freezes on the "setting hardware clock" step. Ridiculous. I try reinstalling, same problem. Try again, this time updating from Mandriva 2006. It works, but random stuff is broken. I trash it.
But it's fine since there's this great new distro called Ubuntu that everyone's praising, right? I can't stand gnome so I download kubuntu and proceed to install. I live in Japan so I tell the installer to set the system language as Japanese. First thing I try is surfing the web, but the text is all monospaced and is hard to read. I try messing with firefox and the system settings, no good.
Ok moving on, I need wine for my japanese word processor, so I go to the system admin menu and click on the wine icon. Tells me it will install it for me. Repository linking and such and such stuff. Result? "it appears you don' have wine installed on your system". I try installing it from the package manager gui and the command line. It doesn't even know it exists.
Well, let's look some videos. I open them with MPlayer but an error message window pops-up intermittently non-stop telling me "cannot find PCM audio controller" eventhough the audio is fine. Ok, let's try finding help on the net. Only one forum post describing the same problem and the answer is, he knows how to fix it, but he won't bother because it's in the the man page. One hour later of messing with the program's config files the error message is no longer plastered all over my screen. Fine. Hey, how do I display this file's subtitles? not supported?
Well, let's try Xine. Um, why is it that when I press the scan forward/backward key it moves like 2 minutes? I just want it to skip 5 seconds! shouldn't that be the default behavior? I dig into the config files. One hour later I find the key, but it will only give me 7 seconds. Fine. I'm content watching anime until weird artifices appear. Whole parts are covered in random green pixels.
I try moving files around with the file system gui, konqueror. I can't move it because I'm not root. That would be fine, except there's nowhere I can give a su command to this thing. While doing whatever, I get random application crashes, a window with a kde gear with a bomb inside appears.
I incorrectly shutdown the system and reiserfs won't start until it's rebuilt the tree or something. 2 hours later it's done. It once ruined one of my directory trees. NTFS wouldn't even bother me with any of this.
Linux is slow to boot-up. Maybe Linux is fast but X is damn slow and clunky. When windows xp is done, Linux is just starting X, or finishing mounting the file systems.
System display on kubuntu irritates my vision. I install the nvidia driver, set the refresh level correctly and yet I can't look at the thing for 15 minutes without starting to feel bothered. Mandriva was fine.
Conclusion: Linux works well running things that have had a lot of work and testing in them, like apache and websphere, but in the desktop it's a mismash of poorly coded apps with an even more poorly integrated system beneath. Oh, and it wont't work with my tv card.
Are you James Hollingshead - the James who writes articles for O3 Magazine? As in http://www.apac.o3magazine.com/
First off, thanks for writing "Intro to Open Source" in issue 1. Funny story, I forwarded it to our CEO about a year back. He actually read it out loud verbatim at the officers' meeting about a week later and, if anyone didn't know before, all of them learned what open source is. Nice one!
O3 Magazine is now serious required reading at my business. Let me tell you, you saved our tail with that article in issue 2 about Rapid Web Development (we were considering non-rapid development techniques at the time), needless to say your article was extremely timely. Once we went rapid (with the model) and viewed the controllers, everything was aces. I mean everything. I've never seen a project go so smoove.
Then, you did it again with "Leveraging Open Source for Business" http://www.apac.o3magazine.com/articles/ Ohhhww! Home run, baby go!
Now that you have stirred my company's interest in open source - if I can be frank here, Matt, I think it's high time we leveraged it in our solutions. Being frank again here, I think it's absolutely silly not to. I am very keen on this Matt, very keen.
has this been discussed on Slashdot?
I'm making living by 3d programming (OpenGL, DX, pattern recognition) and I got the feeling Windows is way too complicated for me too. That is, if I try to change something in it. I got a new shiny Dell XPS M1710. Removed some crap and partitioned the drive. Run chkdsk. Ooops chkdsk caused crush. After couple of hours research found that my old version Nero InCD caused it. Updated Nero. Chkdisk don't crush any more but report error. Repeated chkdsk don't help. I didn't want to reformat everything (and Dell helpfully *don't* provide Windows CD) so I decide to live with it. Oops, CD/DVD driver crushing system now on the CD insertion. Ok, I rerolled to the previous restore point. Now CD work, but all installed applications - VC6, .Net Studio etc. etc. completely screwed - all exe files disappears. I had to reinstall everything. All this took something like like one and half working days. And all this just because I wanted to have disk D:. You may say I'm stupid, or I did everything wrong but that is exactly my point - Windows is a way complicated for me. BTW most helpful tool was SystemRescueCD (Gentoo Linux) which was quite easy to use after reading readme.
I just entered that at the command line and I got
/usr/bin/vim: cannot execute binary file
;-P
vim:
Hmm. I guess you meant that as a list of tools rather than as a command line.
This is plain rubbish. You still have access to the command line: which despite the fact it is "scary", there is nothing stopping you fixing your computer with it.
You can buy support for Ubuntu: for about the same price as a Windows licence. Or you can go get yourself a copy of Red Hat Enterprise, and get support and a phone number to call. Or you could take it to a local Linux User Group. Or try a different forum.
From your post you seem to not really understand the command line. The road to linux isn't learning-free. Learn the CLI.
kill all the fucking niggers
And now you are one more statistic in the report that Microsoft is writing about how Vista uptake has (finally, phew) surpassed Mac OS X uptake.
Breaking the cycle of abuse requires courage.
Linux failed to penetrate into Wall Street firms desktops.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Uh, do you know who the author actually is? He's the guy writing an alternative scheduler to make Linux more responsive. I think he does know a fair amount about setting the kernel to be responsive.
Unless I've just been *whooshed*
What the f-prompt are you talking about?
Creativity can be entirely out of the blue. And it's nothing to to with 'looking at alternatives' and 'trying to make them your own'. Do you know what the word means?
I am not so bothered about how an app is designed, I don't make much use of office productivity type apps, but you're right that consistency helps people to be able to use apps. I think it must be the rendering engine or something in X that just gives it a more solid feel than Windows, for things like moving windows around.. OSX is great from a consistency point of view, though the actual basic Mac theme isn't that nice looking to me.. I preferred when the close/max/min buttons were all a single colour. In fact I prefer the original Classic design to brushed aluminium! =P
which is totally what she said
I used to have this impression that the kernel developers were all working for big corporations and
each patch sent to it was the result of extensive testing and review. And like Con says the kernel mailing list
is hardly a friendly place for casual kernel tinkerers to ask questions about, and having used many of his patches,
I had no idea he was a hobbyist.
This is refereshing in the sense that those of us on the fringes , undecided on whether to send in those patches that seem to run smooth on your hobby machines, can in fact contribute to the mainstream kernel.
So if Con can do it , so can I , and so can you.
I hope this puts to rest all the nonsense about all the big OSS projects being no place for newbies...
Cheers !
To me at least, all software with enterprise in its name is evil (ok, generalizing a bit here... ;-) ). Most of the time there is no answer to the simple question what problem it actually solves. In a way the enterprise bit is just a marketing term. Most of the time enterprise software just adds unnecessary complexity to existing systems.
because you can't put the number of people who use PS but instead the number who use PS and NEED the features PS has exclusively. That's a damn small segment of the small segment that use PS.
We're talking about the people who don't need CMYK (almost everyone except those who use lithographics for large print runs: for smaller print runs, RGB is accepted on most lithographic printers too), people who don't need 48bpp images and people who don't need the latest "foowiiz" PS effect plugin, etc.
It does amaze me that we need 2ghz clock speed and 4GB ram to barely achieve the performance of decade old Amiga.
..
was: Re:the desktop PC is crap
davecb5620@gmail.com
It's flamebait because the number of directories is irrelevant. Under what circimstances would this be a problem? In those circumstances, why isn't it a problem with Windows or Mac?
.... "H" driver and your CD/DVD appears as your "I" drive and depending on what you've plugged in, your USB hard drive and memory stick can turn up as "J" or "K" drives? Unlder linux, you just have "/". When you plug in your USB attached driver it comes up as "/media/FREECOM" for the Freecom USB hard driver. "/media/iRiver" for your iriver device, etc. You never plug in your Freecom drive and see it turn up as "/media/iRiver".
Why isn't Windows not ready for the desktop because you have a "C" drive, "D" drive
People being arrogant pricks about what is wrong in another system without working out why it might not be (or is a problem with the basic idea of computers) cause people to treat you with the disdain you so richly deserve. And if that stops people like you from becoming Linux users then I have no problem with that. It won't stop me using it.
Dear Linux Community,
i love you guys, but seriously. If you want to play in the big leagues you have to start acting big league. Instead of making 30 someodd half ass distros, make ONE distro that is a viable competitor. By viable competitor i mean an OS that will run all my games, my video card, my peripherals and without me having to learn command line or having to compile stuff. My XP machine is largely plug and play with all the programs and hardware i have. When the linux shelf at Best Buy is as big as the Windows shelf, then we'll talk. Until then, linux is a novelty and a hobby for nerds.
i'm writing this on a machine that has ubuntu installed, but i'm using the XP install. Why? Because i know how to use it. Because MS Office runs on it. i use OO.o at home as much as i can. But if i want to SHARE something, i do it in MSO.
Nothing would please me more that to see apple and M$ crumble into a bad memory, so please, POOL YOUR EFFORTS.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Your experience is not universal. I have a pretty common monitor (Samsung SyncMaster 940bw) and an NVIDIA video card. No amount of in-Ubuntu configuration would give me the default 1440x900 resolution, nor would it define the sync on the monitor correctly. Thankfully for me, I've used Linux enough that I was able to edit the X config files and get things working right. My father, mother, and anyone else I know wouldn't last that long.
Hello, I'm parent and I still can't post logged in because I have horrible karma thanks to these idiots (which limits me to 10 posts per 24 hours).
In fact, nearly all my posts in this article forum were modded troll, and none of these posts was meant that way. Later in the going I had to post as AC due to the karma issue, which is very inconvenient. There MUST be some paid, very bad mods here who mod postings down without much selection.
Could someone with mod points please look at my posting history and mod me a bit more approppriately where applicable? Thanks in advance.
By the way, my captcha is "unjustly". It hits the nail on the head.
"Personally - if he said he wanted to break out his own distro, customize the kernel, optimize the whole experience for "responsive GUI" - I think he'd have a good thing going."
Maybe but it would be just another distro. It would be a LOT of work and frankly a whole distro just for a patched kernel seems a bit much. He did matain kernel patches for a long time but just got tired of doing all that work. I think a Distro would be even more work.
One person posted that a lot of the problems are with X. He said that it is single threaded and a reference design. IE it really isn't optimized for performance.
Well single threaded in the land of many cores will become a worse problem over time. Then you have the problems with the Linux sound system our should I say Linux sound systems
I always thought that IBM really missed a great opportunity when they didn't release OS/2 as open source back in the day. If they could have managed it I think it would have made a great desktop and a good companion to Linux on the server.
I use Linux everyday. It makes a good desktop for me but I know it could be better.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Zonk did not make all these folks post 9 pages of off-topic comments.
How about a button, accessible to anyone signed in,
that could vote a comment "off topic"? Or Blah blah blah? or "my grandmother"?
This would not affect karma, but would simply hide off topic tangents?
Could this be due to the default processor scheduling setting for Windows XP / Vista? It can be found at:
System Properties -> Advanced tab -> Performance button -> Advanced tab -> Adjust for best performance of:
(*) Programs ( ) Background services.
w00t
You make some valid observations regarding file sharing with your friends and colleagues on MS Word and hardware working out of the box as being the blocks to widespread desktop Linux adoption. But here's the part you're not getting: When you ask, "If EA wanted to make a game for linux, for which of the 30+ distros should they build it?", My answer to that is, it doesn't matter which distro they test it on. I should be able to run it on my distro (and probably I can). If the linux community is complying with some standards for interoperability, then it won't help for them to pool their resources. In fact it would be counterproductive. Working on separate distros, they compete with different approaches to solving problems. The best solutions make it back into the mainstream distributions. It's an evolutionary process of ideas, (memes), rather than a centrally controlled selection process. The video card driver problem you mentioned: The answer again, should be just one version of the driver. And for that matter, Invidia wouldn't even have to write it themselves. I'm sure there would be volunteers in the linux community who would write it for them, if they open the hardware specifications for them to do it. In reality the standards are also evolving. So to be practical, if I were writing some Linux programs, I would test them on a few distributions. If it works on Debian, Redhat, and Slackware, then it will probably work on all of them. But this is not more costly development than the various versions of Windows would require.
and as someone who is rather obviously a linux user i'm supposed to care about this why ?
Toodle-pip
Amias
[site]
oops!
That should read that *under FreeBSD*, the mouse remained usable.
hawk
That's funny because I don't ever remember this being a problem on my 486.
One thing that impressed me with Linux at the time was how I could rip and play mp3's at the same time without either task being negatively impacted. The WinDOS of the day couldn't manage the same thing.
"moving windows around" certainly was never a problem.
If you're going to trot out stuff like this, be careful not to do it around those of us that have been tormenting Linux since before the 2.0.0 kernel.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It doesn't really matter.
I used to torture 486's in the same way.
The nice thing about Linux is that I can scale down the bloat if it comes to that. If I wanted to run on a 32M 486 again I could do that. I'd just change my window manager.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, my cpu intensive background tasks run "horribly".
That's the way they're supposed to run. That's what time sharing systems are generally about.
The nice thing about batch jobs is that they don't have to run well. They just have to run and not fall over. Eventually they will finish. They can do the celebrity deathmatch thing with each other with the crumbs of the system that aren't being used for interactive tasks. It really doesn't matter.
One WinDOS network app takes a dump and the rest of XP goes with it. Nevermind load.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
not everyone is as tech savvy as you seem to think.
Boy can I agree with this. *shudders* I've seen people who should be perfectly capable who had a horrific lack of computer knowledge. I've also seen people that, no matter how much you try to teach them, just don't get it. I don't consider myself very tech savvy for my generation, yet I was usually the person in my office who got shoved at people for computer help. It's enough to make you want to pull your hair out.
But even somebody like me isn't overly keen on switching to Linux. Lots of the other stuff on my computer is open source. Yeah, free is awesome, but if there's something better I can pay for that is suited to what I need, I'm usually going to fork over the money for it.
For example, GIMP has been an amazing tool for me while I'm half-broke but still wanting to do digital art. However, someday I still want photoshop, because GIMP has its limitations. As somebody with an interest in professional photography among other things, GIMP just doesn't cut it as a business solution to me. The controls aren't as fine-grain. It's a subsitute.
Not saying everything open source is that way, but you go with what suits your needs. And in offices where you've got people who, when put in front of a computer, turn into drooling orangutans who have to ask how to do every little thing, every time they do it (I wish I were exaggerating, but I have worked with people like that), the more user-friendly and mind-numbingly simple it is (which includes being *familiar* - and at the moment familiar usually means MS, though I know that sort of puts it into a cycle based on precedents but if you haven't noticed the world often works that way), the less likely you'll have to worry about Joe Idiot calling your tech guys 500 times a day to ask how to change his font.
Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil.
Every extra layer between the app and the soundcard doesn't necessarily
mean extra latency but it does provide for an opportunity to misconfigure
something. Unix is nice in that it will do exactly what you ask of it when
you ask it. That can also backfire on you if what you asked for was not a
good idea.
OTOH, it's pretty simple to slap around OO or Firefox and keep them in
their place.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yes, in the 486 era, the BSD kernel was more mature than Linux; it had been hacked on for so many years. It had the best scheduler around and probably better drivers and some other parts were better too.
But that was then, and this is now. Over the last few years, Linux likely has had more interactive usage and more man hours invested in it than BSD over its entire history. I think if you want to claim that BSD is still better than Linux, you need to provide a bit more compelling evidence than you have. Hint: these things can actually be measured and quantified.
This is about *one* specific issue: responsiveness. There's nothing in there for a claim of "better."
However, a year or so ago the difference was still noticeable to the user; I really couldn't tell you if it is now (and I've heard that tuning the linux kernel can alleviate the problem, too).
hawk
Out of curiosity, what triggered the BSOD? The only one I've gotten in Vista since release was caused by an extremely unstable nVidia driver - "Experimental" I think they called it. It gave nearly 50% better framerates and the control panel was actually good for something (at the time, the official control panel was garbage) but the user-mode code would crash every hour or so - usually switching in or out of the secure desktop, or when logging in - although only in Windows, almost never in EVE Online (the most graphically intensive program I run). It only crashed to bluescreen once, even then - I guess even the kernel-mode portion was a little too experimental - and I've been running Vista on this machine for roughly 9 months. My card is a GeForce Go 7600, incidentally.
Two quick side notes: To reduce disk thrashing, try using a ReadyBoost device; most USB 2.0 flashdrives or cardreaders are good enough. At the current prices for 1 or 2 gigs of flash memory, it's cheaper than a RAM upgrade that you can't use anyhow (without going 64-bit). You'll notice that lack of intelligent prefetch in Linux, incidentally; although the SECOND time I start a program it usually starts right up, the FIRST time (after rebooting to my openSuse partition) I load almost any application I must sit and watch my mouse cursor turn into its bouncing icon for a while. On Vista, even large programs like EVE load instantly.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You might as well make a new account. The bad mods will probably get caught in metamod (M2), but that won't fix your account now.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Hey, pick any Linux users community and check out the complaints by the new users . How many are about performance? IMHO performance is the last of the reasons Linux is not accepted on the desktop, and others are more important... (For those who don't want to look, app compatibility is the main complaint, *gasp*)
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I am part of a start-up company, and before we got very far into building our business, we had many long discussions about our computers. It seems all of us had Windows machines, but we all felt like Microsoft didn't care about us, other than their forcing WGA on us, and making us prove we are not pirates. That atmosphere of suspicion did it, and we are now in the process of switching our entire operation over to Ubuntu Linux 7.04. Ubuntu looks and feels enough like XP that most of our people have found the transition to Ubuntu almost painless. There were, and are, a few rough spots, but on the whole, we are glad we have decided to dump MS.
The most painful part of our transition (which is still in progress) involves Open Office. While OO is close to MS Office, it is enough different that the folks making the transition are complaining about features that do not work EXACTLY the way MS implemented them. But, after some initial grumbling, they get down to work with OO, and after a while, the grumbling seems to have quieted down.
My guess is the real problem involves people learning new habits. After they are past the steepest part of the learning curve, their pain subsides, and their real work gets done, just like before.
But there is a really big plus in our conversion to Linux; we don't have to deal with the likes of Microsoft when we want to add new software or hardware, trying to convince them that we aren't pirates. There is nothing equivalent to WGA in Linux. And we probably will not be forced to "upgrade" just because someone snaps their fingers and says, "I think it's time we collected some more money from our customers."
An analog gray hair frantically clinging to the trailing edge of technology.