Slashdot Mirror
Linux on the Desktop Doubles in 2007
00_NOP writes "According to a report on Softpedia, citing Net Applications, Linux usage on the desktop doubled in 2006 — 07: though from a miserable 0.37% to a still not brilliant 0.81%. Given that Linux is free, is based on peer reviewed source (and so inherently more secure in the longer term) and that hardware support is now pretty good, how long are we going to have to wait for the big breakthrough?" Of course the focus of the article is that Vista is kicking butt over Mac/Linux, which is not particularly surprising.
I used to develop a GPL app, the GNUstep-based character map Charmap. It had a few dozen users, and I'm pretty sure none of them ever took a single look at the source. Only the very biggest applications get attention, and very often quite uncritical examination at that.
Try again, that's a 5.2% increase in a month...after more than doubling in the previous year. That is huge. If adoption doubled every year as a percentage of the marketplace, Linux would have 100% of the market within 7 years.
Hey Softpedia...I'll give you $100 a day for a month, if you give me 1 cent on the first day of the month, 2 cents on the second day, and so on, doubling the amount each day for the 30 days.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
that Linux is practically non-existent on the desktop. I say who are you softpedia? An encyclopedia of free software downloads you say? For linux too? Really, well we have apt-get, emerge, etc. No wonder your statistics suck.
Not to surpassing, the fact that people upgrade their computers, they will get the latest version of the OS.
Being that the average turn around for computers a new computer every 5 years. About now we would expect Vista
to be double what TFA said Vista is. Vista Right now should have close to 14%, not approaching 8%. Anyone who think
Vista will not be a leading OS is hopeless lost in the realm of Fanboyism. But what the data does show that Visa is not
growing at a rate that would statically be at. But looking at the Data... Somewhat distorted by the fact the graph has
Power PC OS X and Intel OS X as different OS (Keeping the Market share artificially lowered where combined it would be just
under Vista). Seriously the path to least resistance would be buy a new computer, with the latest OS, and use that OS that
comes with the computer no matter if you like it or not. Macs are only one platform while Windows and Linux allows you to
choose your hardware. If you switch to Linux it is the path of most resistance, Still unpolished compared to XP/Vista OS X.
Requiring you to install the OS separately, for only a couple of Major advantages (Security mostly), at the cost of loosing support for most of
your products and services, less software availability, Websites that don't work, and joining a user community who is notoriously unhelpful
towards people who just started, tricking them to deleting their drives and other things. So yes people will stick with XP/Vista if they are that
annoyed they may switch to a Mac, if their budget allows them too (with Macs having no Low End equivalent), otherwise they will just stick
to what they know. Most people really don't care about the politics they just want to get the stuff done.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Here is the problem: you can't convince people that "Peer reviewed source, therefore more security, and oh it's free" is a good reason to switch to Linux.
Most people don't understand what peer reviewed source means, have no idea of the security of their PC (and not a care in the world anyway if they can just drop a virus checker on it and "solve" it) and, Windows and MacOS came with their system anyway, so are ostensibly free.
Linux has to actually expose a feature people want and do it so that it increases productivity and feels better than Windows or MacOS X. There was a podcast on The Register the other week with Mark Shuttleworth - the basic premise of part of it was that Compiz is cool, but useless, and it's the hope that enabling it by default means developers will turn it from a cool whizzy 3D smooth suave thing into something that improves user's experience, and their lives.
And that's why MacOS X and Windows win, because MacOS has Genie Effects (this is the carrot) but it also has Spotlight, and iTunes, and iPhoto, and Quicktime, and all the other stuff people want and need every day (this is the stick). Where MacOS has a soft, warm and inviting stick, brandished by a really hot chick in leather and a penchant for candle wax, Linux's stick has a poo on the end, and is brandished by a 300lb atheist liberal.
When my wireless isn't working, my delete key does weird unexpected things, and there is the most offensively named program ever (The GIMP), I can take solace in the fact that my operating system source is peer reviewed.
Their article, and to a greater extent the inflammatory Slashdot article, incorrectly portray these statistics as some universal truth handed down from the gods. In fact, if you look at the article, you'll see that they're merely talking about their own browser user-agent statistics. In other words, they pulled them out of their ass last time they stuck their head up there (perpetually about one minute ago according to the site).
Ubuntu is king of the Linux desktop, and Ubuntu users get the vast majority of their software through Synaptic, a genius piece of software which if introduced in Windows would put "Softpedia" out of business within a year. In fact, I can't think of any reason for a user of any major Linux distribution to need anything from "Softpedia's" website. We have our own more community-centric sources in every case.
Fuck Softpedia.
Given that Linux is free, is based on peer reviewed source (and so inherently more secure in the longer term) and that hardware support is now pretty good, how long are we going to have to wait for the big breakthrough?"
What is holding Linux back from massive adoption is software. Very simply, it's just not as good as the proprietary stuff found on Mac/Win. This is NOT to say that the stuf on Linux is BAD, but it's just not equivalent. OpenOffice is very very good. But not as good as MSOffice. GIMP is very good. But not as good as Photoshop. And so on down the line.
The strength of Linux and FOS is also its weakness - having a volunteer developer army. Herding cats isn't as effective if you don't have a big sack of kitty kibble for incentive, or the ability to cut off the kitty kibble as a goad.
Perhaps this will change a bit now that China's getting more involved with Linux - perhaps they can come up with dead-solid apps that are absolutely equal to, or even exceed the abilities of the following applications that are (for me) essential:
1. Photoshop
2. Ilustrator
3. InDesign
4. MSOffice suite
5. FinalCutPro
6. Ableton Live
7. Propellorheads Reason
8. Soundtrack
9. iDVD
10. Flash
11. Dreamweaver
12. Contribute
That's what I use, and I use all of the above, all the time. Some are Windows, some are Mac. I am not a programmer, and I don't have the time to do that. So, it's A: Not My Problem and B: Someone else's job to come up with these apps.
Until the above are developed, I will have little use for Linux.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
My problems with closed source:
No guarantee the software will always be available. This could be because the development is stopped or because the price is raised to the point I cant afford it. With open source this never need be the case.
The people who develop open software are not inherently motivated to try and force users to 'upgrade' to new versions. They are not inherently motivated to break compatibility with previous versions or other software.
Closed source software tends to become tiered with highly desirable features costing more. Open Source has no such issues.
I work with closed source software every day. I have for years. And I'm always annoyed with the crap I have to deal with. I hear comments like yours all the time. It implies that the only advantage to open source is that each individual can themselves modify the code. This couldn't be further from the truth. There are many, many advantages that extend out from the openeness of the code.
An advantage open source has over closed source is that advances made in one project have the potential to aid and further any and every other open source project. Rather than hiding new ideas and technology, it is proliferated to the benefit of users.
I could go on for a while, and a lot of smarter people than I am have done so. It's not hard stuff to find. But I think this is sufficient for now.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Where do these people get their statistics from?
If I buy a branded PC I buy windows, if I then download and replace windows this doesn't get recorded. All that is recorded is the sale of Windows.
Market share is hard to analyse, I would imagine the Windows share is less than people think, purely because there's so many extraneous Windows licences sold.
My installation of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn a few months back went flawlessly and was very simple. Linux has the install sorted, no need to keep on working on that part okay? It was good 5 years ago. People are obsessed with the install process for some reason.
.gtk-rc file - yeah, that's user friendly. NOT. This is a stupid retarded and backward attitute. I approve of not installing 25 text editors by default, but don't remove options from the one you do provide.
However Flash doesn't work in my browser because I'm running a 4 year old architecture - AMD64, and the creators of Flash haven't deigned to recompile the Linux version for 64-bits. Maybe if Linux had Mac OS X-like Fat Binaries people would be encouraged to create cross-platform binaries, rather than just create a simple IA32 version.
Installing the graphics card drivers was hell. For 4 months the graphics card was not supported in Linux anyway, so I had to run in VESA mode. However nVidia finally decided to release 8600GT drivers for Linux, and I thought "Hooray!". The install was hell. Due to idealogical beliefs that border on religious extremism you can't just install the drivers. Oh no, you have to recompile the kernel headers and then do wizardry. Not a problem for me, although it took some time because for some reason I don't like spending my free personal time doing sysadmin stuff, so I try to avoid it as much as possible. I tried many forms of instructions online, but they were either for a previous version of Ubuntu, or incorrect. After hours of searching, I finally found a tool called Envy. It worked. Many thanks to the author of Envy. I now have desktop effects - some pointless, some useful.
However the system update mechanism now tells me that I have updates available for the kernel headers and other things, and I'm petrified that by installing them all that hard work would be undone. So I'm now ignoring the updates.
Let's not talk about how many configuration options Ubuntu removes from applications like gaim and so on. Want to have a listing with small buddy icons? Well fuck off, we've removed that possibility. Oh, but there's a plugin for editing the
Until there is a Linux distribution that is simple, yet has the power available for those that want it, Linux will not gain a lot on the desktop. There needs to be a mechanism to install essential third-party drivers that is as painless as Mac OS X and Windows.
And just to be sure, it isn't about catching up to Windows any more, it is about catching up to Mac OS X. It just works, it's simple yet powerful, it's a full Unix, it looks nice, the desktop effects are very useful and accessible, and drivers install easily.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
...how long are we going to have to wait...?
.deb, really) in the hope of covering a sufficient user base, while hoping it won't completely break next time some distro upgrades to libwhatever.so.52; or you can try to get your software into the package repositories of all the major distributions (and thus become entirely dependant on the goodwill of each distro for access to your software); or you can try to package the software your own way and hope for the best (that's what Loki did for their games, for instance), which is still vastly suboptimal because it's a lot of additional work for you and you still have no guarantee it'll work well, due to countless issues, the least of which not being that ELF has real, real issues where it comes to binary compatibility. Oh, and yeah, you can also just ship the sources in a tarball, hereby reducing your user base to the demographic of Linux geeks.
.debs | use .rpms | fork your own distro?"
Well, it's something I've been thinking a lot over the last years, and I'd like to share my thinking with you lot:
At this point, I don't think we're going to have a major breakthrough until Linux becomes third-party friendly.
Let me explain.
At the moment, the whole experience of using a Linux distribution is balanced between two parties: the user, and the developers of the distro. Linux distributions in general have come a LONG way in minding the user's convenience, but I am still not sure this will suffice.
Because the success of other platforms (well, Windows, alright) doesn't boil down to user friendliness, I think that much is clear by now. No, what made its success is that it fosters a rich environment of third parties -- entities that are neither the OS maker nor the user, yet benefits both.
Something that is still a long way from penetrating the Linux culture, I think.
At this point, let's imagine you're a third party (and as such, not particularly involved in the Linux world as such -- to you it's just a platform among others) and you wish to ship your software for Linux. What are your options? Well, and that's assuming you're even going to bother trying to figure out the whole mess, you can: try to ship various packages (.rpm and
Compare with Windows: just put the binaries in a ZIP file or an installer. Done.
And let us not mention the issue of drivers. At this point, shipping a driver for Linux, when you're a neutral hardware maker third party, involves either sending the kernel maintainers your code and hope they'll consent to include it in the main kernel tree at some unknown point in the future, or ship some manner of hack that will try to compile your driver against the installed kernel, which will simply not work if the compiler, or even the right kernel headers, aren't already installed. (To be fair, the initiative that was recently spoken of on Slashdot, about some company developing Linux drivers for third parties for free, is interesting and might improve the situation lots.)
In short: when you're a third party, supporting Linux is generally not worth the pain.
This is a very bad situation for us, because we need hardware makers to support our platform, so there isn't an ongoing gap of weeks or months between the release of bleeding edge hardware and its support on Linux, and there is just plain not enough of us to reproduce the functionality of all the software third parties are making for other platforms
Admittedly, projects like Klik and Autopackage are a step in the right direction, but isn't it too little and perhaps even too late? I don't know.
Because the main, the core issue here is not technical.
The core issue is that when you discuss something like Autopackage, the response typically amounts to "Why don't you use
And this, my friends, is why I've lost hopes of seeing the Linux desktop go mainstream.
Hopefully the future will prove me wrong, though.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
I'm just gonna post the following each time someone says its the year of desktop Linux:
GAMES GAMES GAMES
Most of the top 25 requested apps for wine are games - http://appdb.winehq.org/votestats.php
(Also note these are games that seem to benefit the most from a mouse)
I know I can do everything else under a Linux based OS (e.g. Ubuntu), but the only reason I have windows OS on my PC is because I enjoy playing games.
And buying an MS or Sony console seems a bit "Meet the old boss same as the new boss".
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Honestly distros are not a right of passage. They are tools that should either do what you want or should go away (Ubuntu had some regressions with IDE polling and I didn't want to deal with their proprietary modules when installing my own kernel, so I replaced it. Might go back when 7.10 comes out but I doubt it). It certainly isn't about who can be the most elite though, frankly irrelevant and the only people who care about it are usually those who aren't quite as elite as they think.
Linux will always be a niche player on the desktop.
I believe Linux will become the definitive commodity desktop and Windows will gradually be regulated to a niche player and compete with Apple for a limited pool of users with specific software needs. And that commodity desktop will be, largely, the Linux we know today.
Perhaps from the perspective of a gamer your perspective would be true, but when you look across the corporate enterprise it's a different picture. The level of effort to keep a Windows enterprise running in any sort of decent shape is staggering. Running it securely requires a level of effort that borders on the insane and limits user production so severely it sometimes seems the users are serving the machine, ala Metropolis. I have a customer doing...trying to do...that very thing. It's an ongoing disaster that challenges users to find ever more creative ways to skirt the restrictions.
The byzantine license requirements and ever escalating costs merely increase the market pressure to a shift away from pure Microsoft environments.
Never underestimate market pressure. 5 to 7 years ago the economic pressure in the film industry started to shift toward video over film. I remember discussions on video forums there would be a lot of "not in our lifetime" comments about the demise of film. But the film empire in entertainment production has been crumbling ever since at an ever increasing pace. A shift in projection delivery coupled with a push to retrofit film projectors with digital projectors, and you'll see film processing equipment in the museum next to punch card readers.
I think you'll be surprised how fast the sea change can take place. Strangely, I don't think they'll be surprised in Redmond. They see it coming.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
These days, linux is playing a catch-up game with the UI and its going to be a slow game, but i really dont think its a game MS can win in the long run given their lack on innovation.
But they have won it in the long term. Linux is 15 years old. 15. In computer development time that's an eon. Linux has been around for half the lifetime of personal computers in general, and it still hasn't taken off. Now I've been using linux off and on for about 11 of those years, and while I really do like it, it's lost a lot of the huge lead it had over MS in stability, and performance. It still beats out Windows of course on those fronts, and like you said it even fell behind on UI, but even the advantages it has aren't that huge nowadays.
And honestly, about the innovation part, has linux really been that innovative? It's a clone of a 1970s-era operating system, and most of the "cool" aspects of modern linux were first done somewhere else.
I can't speak for the grandparent and his problems with Windows, but for me it's much easier and faster to be productive using Linux.
I suppose if Microsoft someday comes with with a truly brilliant version of Windows I might try it out if I've got extra time on my hands, but until then Windows just isn't worth the hassle.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
People don't know what a fucking OS is. How the hell do you expect them to choose?
To be fair, he has a point. Far too many Linux people (especially here...) are also Microsoft-haters. They don't give a flying fuck if Windows does what they want, they'll say it doesn't, and use a tiny, almost unnoticeable snag as their excuse (eg: this app won't let me configure {minor behavior x}, thus it sucks, and is unusable!!). This isn't all of them, of course, just like not all Mac users are Jobs cultists... but in both cases, there are enough to give the group as a whole a horrible image. Bad apples, and all that.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I've been trying yet again for the 4th time in 5 years to give Linux a go to see if it has matured enough for it to go mainstream desktop, and though I can say that it has improved tremendously over the years, it is sadly still not ready for primetime ordinary folks desktop. It is most certainly good enough for the fanboys and geeks here, but coming also from a geek but not really a fanboy, it is just not ready yet. Let me qualify:
... this is a stability issue.
... these things should be idiot proof - but in Linux - they still are not. You just still have to drop down to a terminal to do many things, despite the nice glossy UI these days.
..., and for what its worth - for something that's free, Linux is pretty usable and a good bang for your buck. But if you ask if I'll pay US$300+ for something that's a lot more cohesive, has a lot more apps (and not free rip-offs), 'stable' and most importantly user-friendly ... yes I would.
... //
Stability(!): Yes, I know there's a big gasp amongst some of you, but my trial installation of OpenSuse 10.2 on my Gigabyte 965P-DS3, C2D E6600, nVidia 8600GT was actually not stable. Although things run solid on XP, I kept getting hangups after just a few minutes of use. So in my book, (due probably to drivers as usual)
Drivers: What more can I say - try getting your peripherals, cards etc. to work without being a hacker.
Control Panel: In Mac or XP, everything is easy and self-explanatory. Try navigating (if you're not a geek) through the 'control panel' in Gnome or KDE (KDE is better but still...). "Should I use YAST or should I go to 'Internet'?!" "How the hell do you connect do a PPPoE?"
Fonts!: Sorry dudes, fonts in Linux just look horrible when compared to Windows or the Mac. And this is one of the biggest reasons that keep would keep me away from using Linux Desktop. Linux is fine for backend stuff and does a great job at it - but on the frontend, despite the nice eye-candy in current Gnome and KDE - the font engine still sucks! As I type this in Windows, everything appears smooth due to ClearType. On Linux sometimes I get non-aliased fonts and most times, the fonts just appear bad.
Names: Yes, it is a great tradition in the hacker culture to come up with cool sounding names for apps - but that's not something that will draw ordinary folks to use Linux. I mean, how would any ordinary folk guess what 'YaST2' is at the menu? Getting the ordinary folk not intimidated by all these weird names was and still is the whole point of Apple. Windows followed and though may not have the style of Apple, it sure is a helluva more usable than Linux.
OK - some may argue that I didn't set things up properly or I am not competent enough to set things up the right way - but that's the point! I shouldn't need to be more competent than being able to press a few mouse-clicks to be able to get what should be a minimum base in a modern computing environment:
* Beautiful fonts rendered as if it was printed.
* All programs appear in a menu (and not hidden deep inside some mysterious command).
* Cohesive presentation of applications (Look at YaST appearing all over the place in KDE).
* Plug and Play (no this is not the 90's but Linux implementation of this is not usable - I buy any peripheral and I still have fear on if there's a driver for it.
I guess what you pay for
Now if only ol' Steve will finally let OS-X run on any x86 hardware
Well, the densely populated U.S. cities could have been done. Still could be done. Still are not being done. I suspect the size of Japan isn't the only factor. There might be plenty of blame left over to assign to shortsightedness.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
People always point to sophisticated software being unavailable on Linux. But the majority of users don't use photoshop. I think the problem is that even basic system services are still flaky, so that even if all you want is to use a browser and basic office applications (which work, in my opinion), linux is still too much of a hassle.
My latest example: I can't get VPN to work as documented on Ubuntu 7.04. When I asked about this on the Ubuntu forums, I got the response that "yeah that's broken, but you can do the following on the command line..." Suspend/hibernate doesn't work reliably. There are too many of these rough edges in the basic plumbing, forget the advanced applications.
The good news is that Linux edges closer every year. Things like sound, TV tuner card, and remote support that were a hassle two years ago now work out of the box because of improved support in the kernel, alsa, and lirc. So it's getting there, but IMO it isn't there yet.
Once the interface to the plumbing is working cleanly and correctly, I think we'll see a big uptick in adoption.
'Think its a coincidence that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro, and it just happens to be the most dumbed down?'
I think you are giving Ubuntu an unfair shake here. Yes Ubuntu simplifies most common tasks and has very sane defaults for most applications out of the box but it manages to do that without sacrificing flexibility and utility anywhere. It's crazy to me that people are still using plain old debian when Ubuntu does everything Debian does as well or better, it is basically a debian superset.
I have used many distributions, Linux from scratch, gentoo, redhatian, debianish, and of course slack. I am comfortable performing any administration task in any of them. Using Ubuntu leaves me the flexibility to change or customize anything on the system but allows me to get from fresh install to fully configured system in dramatically less time than other distributions. People are using Ubuntu mostly for desktops but I use it for servers as well.
I have no interest in systems that are difficult or hard just for the sake of being so. In a system like Ubuntu you keep all the strengths of Linux as a platform and gain the advantages being able to quickly and easily configure most aspects of the system (or in most cases, not having to configure because the system uses sane defaults that more or less match what you would have set anyway).
Windows and MacOS are systems that have been dumbed down at the expense of flexibility and configurability, Ubuntu is not.
Sorry, but the simple truth is that Linux is, generally speaking, not a good platform for playing games on. There are a handful of native games (mostly either old titles or FPSes), there are a few games that are quite playable using emulation if you don't mind losing most of the modern graphical effects, but in general if you want to play a given specific game, and it's not Doom 3 or World of Warcraft, you're unlikely to have a satisfactory experience.
That said, for me this has nonetheless been the Year Of Linux On The Desktop With Windows Dual-Booting For Games, which isn't such a bad solution really.
That's completely backwards logic. No one is screaming for that because we've already got native applications that do the job. Therefore, Linux on the desktop is relevant now.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
The argument that Microsoft gets the make up "standards" and everyone else must follow them de-facto is so tired and ridiculous I'm not even going to bother. Perhaps the method is broken, or infringed on patented methods, or there is some other good reason for not including it in the distribution? Perhaps there is a better, standard way to handle things and the distributions favour that. Perhaps the distributions have decided, rightly, that there is nothing to be gained from chasing your competitors "standards"? There are any number of reasons, all good, why it's just not going to happen.
There are plenty of technologies out there, both standards and de-facto standards, that Microsoft do not support for one reason or another. Linux does a brilliant job already, and already supports far more hardware and configurations than any other OS out of the box. It supports more filesystems, more hardware platforms, more configurations and more technologies out of the box than any other OS ever. Even with all that, people still winge that their FooBlort Nixdorf Wigetator X1400n doesn't work perfectly when it's configured to use AFJ compression, and the "Linux developers" (Who they?) should damn well fix it right now! Of course they invariably forget to mention that only four FooBlort Nixdorf Wigetator X1400n's were ever manufactured, no drivers are available for anything newer than Windows 2000 and that no one uses AFJ compression anyway because it was deprecated over a decade ago in favour of ZDN compression, which works perfectly of course but they want AFJ compression damn it! Winge winge bitch moan etc.
It is simply ridiculous to expect anybody to support every possible configuration or scenario you dream up. Get over it.
If you want to run Linux, you run it on compatible hardware. If you want to run Windows, you run it on compatible hardware. If you want to run OS X, you buy a Mac. This is not shocking news.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Really? I'd say the numbers were pretty accurate in my experience, at least in the sense that Linux on the desktop is about 1% of installs. Three - four per cent just doesn't ring true.
I think the key point here is that the growth rate is high.
Here's where we finally get to the nub of the matter. What it really depends upon is your definition of "get it working 100%". By several of my criteria, gettings Windows working 100% is an unachievable task. There are some things I don't much like about Linux, either, but even the worst of these could be fixed on the order of a few tens of man years. I happen to rate a few dozen man years as less than infinity, the expected cost of addressing my worst grievances with Windows.
My choice to view several dozen as being less than infinity might seem obvious, but in fact, it is not the popular perspective. If you read thinkers such as Danny Kanheman you will recognize that for the most part people don't think the way they claim to think. By the reflex of learned helplessness, people tend to discount the impossible, exactly as my parent poster has done. Subtracting the impossible, one can get Windows working 100% in a fairly short time period, with respect to a learned helplessness definition of 100%.
Learned helplessness wouldn't be so deeply embedded into the human psyche if it wasn't pragmatic.
It's a fairly substantial investment of time, energy, and talent to buck a mainstream trend. For any professional, I think you can only open so many fronts. My LH relative to IT is quad-CT to zero (that's an APL joke, to thoroughly date myself). On the income tax front, my LH would be closer to 7/10. I'm not motivated to win every possible battle. The last thing any nation wants is legions of empowered individuals, so the barriers are substantial.
The general public tends to constitute 100% largely in terms of instant gratifications: can I watch the newest YouTube video straight out of the box? Terms such as "will I still be able to access my personal data ten years from now after all my current software is obsolete?" rarely carries as much weight.
Nor do people stop to think much about why it is that media formats are directly tied to running specific operating systems, as if OS capabilities has much to do with it.
The other point to note is that engaging in LH has a tendency to also invoke the psyche's PR department, which isn't keen to admit any such thing, so people who have the deepest investment in the pragmatism of LH have the strongest rhetorical reflex to promote their choices as "the one true way".
Apple has historically been very good at exploiting this reflex. They do a great job of enhancing the pragmatic value of LH, and correspondingly their infinities are more infinite than most. With the brutal cooperative multitasking and virtual memory subsystem, no Apple OS prior to OS/X was within orbital radius of "100%" by any criteria I've ever accepted. The LH retort: well, you don't need that. But this PR philosophy leads Apple to more truly embarrassing reversals than most, such as their recent concession that the technical advantages of RISC over CISC in the era of 100 million transistor CPUs are commercially negligible.
One of the main terms that holds Linux back is the instant gratification bondage. Full technical disclosure of video card internals would constitute one large step toward playing iNextSonyGoobTube videos right out of the box. If the college age demographic would simply refute their instant gratification ways, and refuse to view any video encoded in proprietary media encodings, this battle could be won in less time than a Peter Jackson post-production cycle. But it will never happen. Public empowerment? Who needs that? Maybe 5% of college age people include public empowerment in their personal definition of "100%".
BTW, I'm quite conscious that posting on slashdot values my time at $0. It's less of a detriment than it might appear.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
The phrase "insignificant african tribe" rubs me the wrong way. Indigenous culture is getting trampled by ignorant mono-culture all over the world, so I don't think of any indigenous tribes as "insignificant". I think you meant "unfamiliar from my subjective point of view" rather than "insigificant".
Freedom is free.
APK Could it be - and this is just a casual observation after getting a headache after three of your posts - that people ignore your posts? You post AC, plus your written language is not very reader-friendly. Tou might think that it is "neat" using & instead of 'and' and @ instead of 'at', but in reality, it's really annoying.
Given the rest of the content of your posts, I don't think that you are uncapable of writing properly, it more or less seems like you have decided to not do so. Also, stop typing so much in caps.
Good luck.
If I had to go back to a 333mhz cpu and 64mb of ram, I most certainly would go back to slackware or maybe debian, but I really just want to USE my computer effectively, which is all the general public wants to really do, and is exactly what ubuntu is made for. It is in no way an inferior linux distribution, however.