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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.
... now we have 2 installations :)
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
People talk about there being a breakthrough, but no one has ever defined what that is. How will we know when it happens?
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)
When netcraft confirms Windows is dead?
Background: I am a sysadmin for a 300+ node Linux shop, and have fairly lengthy experience in Solaris, Windows, and AIX as well.
I still run Windows XP as my desktop of choice. I only run it because it came with the laptop that was provided to me by IT, or I would probably still be running Windows 2000. Very simply, I use the OS as a tool to get my job done, and Windows 2000 was doing the trick. Windows XP is now doing the trick. When there is something I want to do that Windows XP can no longer do, I will look beyond. If Linux starts to pioneer in new features and areas that Windows and the Mac OS cannot answer, then I will certainly consider it for my desktop OS. Meanwhile, I deal enough headaches from users at the server level that I don't feel like battling with my Linux wifi drivers, sound card strangeness, or having to jump through other hurdles to just stay productive. Of course there are patches and ways around most/all of the issues I have seen, but that doesn't mean its acceptable to me.
Now, cue over to the server arena, and Linux is certainly replacing Windows boxes for all standard day-to-day servers. It does what I need, it does it well, and even offers features and ease of use that the Windows boxes simply cannot match. That was a compelling reason, with cost also being a close secondary, that we now run so many nodes.
Meanwhile, who really cares. If _XXXX_ does what you want, use it.
I have my new and old machine dual boot linux, and take a bootable DVD with me if people ask for computer help (usually to fix Windows). So that's 2 1/2 more installs.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
FreeBSD costs even less to buy then Linux? No? Then how is that a reason to switch to FreeBSD?
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
"Market share" only counts MONEY, not "free" installs. If I download ubuntu and install it on my laptop, how do they know? They don't - and they don't care, because there are no beans for the bean counters to count.
Likewise, bootleg installs. I have not yet had a single person seriously inquire about "upgrading" to vista. Many people have, however, brought in spanking new machines to be retrograded - either XP or linux. Many more come in with Vista licenses on the box and unregistered XP installs on the hd.
emachines, gateway and all are now shipping with vista and yet the users are still screaming abou tit and doing everything they can to undo the damage. These folks can spin numbers all they like, real world surveys provide ample proof of the suckitude of vista.
I work with Oracle running on AIX. I was given a Windows laptop for work. I got really tired of all the crap I had to do to simply work with my servers. I scrounged up an old optiplex and installed Linux on it. Work is so much easier for me now. The windows laptop sits on the side - I don't really need it any more.
If I'm off site - the wi-fi thing is an issue. But at work, windows really gets in the way of productivity.
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?
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.
Shitty website, low quality news. Just as an example, the same site has a different article that doesn't favor Vista: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Vista-Is-Nothing-Compared-to-XP-Move-to-Mac-OS-X-and-Ubuntu-Linux-65786.shtml
Excellent, and my point exactly! You found the tool that works best for you. And to come back to the topic question, do you feel a genuine concern over why others don't do the exact same thing or for some big breakthrough?
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.
Don't forget that the stats for Vista include all those PCs sold with Vista where the buyer had no choice. If you were to limit the samplings to only the cases where the buyer had a genuine choice of OS, including no pressure by the sales people to go with one over another, then the stats might mean something about market preference. Even if it was just a choice between Vista and XP, then the stats would at least be indicative of the true preferance of the market for a particuler version of Windows. Instead, what these stats tell us is more about the financial benefits to Microsoft and Apple (or the lack thereof in the latter case), since this is based on actual sales (however it is coerced), rather than actual choice.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
I love the application manager, I love the ability to switch desktop workspaces, I love how I can update everything from one spot.
However, one thing has kept XP on my system (dual-boot)-- drivers. I can't find drivers for my printer (Lexmark x7350), or newer ones for my webcam (Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX). I can't use my printer at all, and my webcam is using some way old drivers and is very blurry-- looks much better with the newer ones on XP. I've looked around, but not found anything to help me out... and I'm not even close to being talented enough to write my own.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
The day MS releases Office for Linux is the day that will happen. Which I figure will be never. I'm certain the only reason that MS doesn't offer Access with Office for the Mac is specifically because they want to provide barriers for Apple in the business market. If MS had been split into OS and applications companies, there might be some chance of that port getting done. But not the way things stand now.
No - I don't feel a concern about people doing things the way I do. I would like to see greater adoption of linux so that some of the issues you've brought up are more likely to be resolved more quickly.
At the same time I do feel a level of concern when Linux is presented as being incapable of being productive, especially in an environment where it has such great advantages, like a shop using Unix, Linux or some other *nix. I'm wracking my brain trying to think up a scenario where that really makes sense.
If I want to surf the web over the free wireless at Panera and watch a dvd - I can see some advantages to windows. If I were working in an all windows environment I could see some possible advantages. But as an admin in a non-windows environment, I can't see what windows brings to the table that is meaningful.
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?
What is the error here? I wonder if .4 or .8 percent are both essentially zero in the context of measurement accuracy.
However most IT people I know have a linux box or two in addition to the Windows boxes that they have bought and use for their main office-type work. I imagine a poll like this would not have captured those.
In the end though Linux and Apple are missing a huge window of opportunity - Microsoft has rarely been so vulnerable as they have been in the last year with this botched release of Vista. You can be sure they are aware of it and are closing that window as fast as they can.
Right so 1 reason used for switching to Linux can be used to switch to FreeBSD from Linux, while 1 reason can't be used to switch from Linux to FreeBSD. Now you get into the muddy issue of whether or not there are applications and/or features that meet a Linux user's demands on FreeBSD. That is a personal question that everyone has to ask of themselves. Its also a reason many don't switch from Windows to Linux.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Because the market itself is growing very fast. Even if the market share for Linux on the desktop would remain the same it would mean lots more Linux desktops out there.
;-)
Also have you considered that 0.81% is more than twice as much as 0.37%? If Linux on the desktop can keep up that growth rate another 5 to 7 years it will end up at more than 120% market share
Why bother with 'the OS X kernel is based on BSD?' most of their system is unix & unix-like programs with a shiny face.
Mac had always pinched, prettied & pawned well, ever since they pinched their first gui from Star... These aren't parallel efforts.
thx e
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.
We'll get there. And when we do, it's because we have the better product.
We already have that you say?
Well, I am inclined to agree, but we are willing to learn something new, to tinker with it, make it our own. The same cannot be said about the rest. They will come around eventually.
Gamers! This is the group we should capture. Compiz candy, working drivers and a finished Wine that works with whatever game they want to play. Needless to say that the potential for improvement is evident.
With doubling every 12 month, Linux should take the market in 7 years with 103.68% desktop share (you can have more than one desktop per person, right?). Hey, what do you mean it's not a valid application of Moore's law, which is no law?!
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They do try to illustrate the idea that people have migrated from XP to Vista but the rate is pretty damned poor. I wonder where they are getting their data and if any of it reflects new PC purchases? I particularly like the way they throw about words like "Loyalty to the Windows brand." People don't use computers out of loyalty. Many, if not most, were initially pushed or forced into it in some way... at least where professional use is concerned. And the human reality from that point on is not "which to choose" but rather "to change or not to change" and 'not changing' is what we all find to be the easier solution. It's human nature... and it takes an angry human to choose change over staying the same. Looking at the numbers, I'd say it indicates a growing force of angry Windows users out there.
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.
I tried to install Kubuntu on the striped drives of my windows xp box in a dual boot configuration, but linux didn't see the stripe. Turned out it doesn't recognize SATA drives that are striped on windows installs. Many searches on the web for the solution kept saying how SATA raid is not REAL raid so why not use Linux's built in software raid. Because I have windows on their and want to dual boot since I need the windows install for several things. And to me when it runs on windows when I start the machine, it is a 'real' raid. It is a very common configuration. I found out that there is some method to make it work but like many of these situations in the Linux world it is too much of a pain in the ass for me to bother with any more. At one time I had the energy to do this. Not any more. I am more like John Q Public. I just want to use the tool that is my computer. I no longer want to build it. Windows XP works fine for me on this box... it is my only dual core machine and the one I want to use the most as it is fastest.
So not to totally give up, I installed Kubuntu on the machine my xp box replaced. Still a pretty good, though single core machine... with no striped drives. It installed nicely, except that I could use my wireless card. A Linksys (I don't want to hear about what I should have bought... I can go to any damn computer store and buy a Linksys, it is a market leader. Those are the cards that should 'just work' when you install them... the market leaders). I use WPA encryption because it is the more secure choice. Except I find out that wireless encryption in Linux 'is like a box of chocolates', you never know what you are going to get. Except that the box of chocolates are always edible, and Linux it seems has a huge problem digesting WPA encryption without have to read half a dozen 'how-to's and again spend hour building the tool. I caved in and hard wired it to the router.
I like the idea of Linux. I like the idea of someone pushing a thorn in the side of monopolies. I have had, and continue to have Linux installed on at least one machine at home for something like 7 or 8 years now. And I do use it for certain tasks... usually programming related. But I am older and just would like to use the tool and not have to build it every time something changes. Especially with important items like disk striping and wireless. I am sure that it is this sentiment that keeps it at less than 1% of the market. How about less 3D desktop frills, as cool as it is, and more functional stuff like being able to use WPA encryption on my wireless card, or recognizing my windows striped raid when I want to set up a dual boot install.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
There's like -200- people using it now?
Yep, at least that many at Microsoft have a Linux desktop.
I'm sure a downloaded/compiled Linux wasn't counted anywhere.
While a pre-installed Windows which was quickly erased was counted.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
most users are not computer geeks who have time to install/learn/ test drive/reinstall operating systems for fun. For instance, my wife is a biology professor who uses a Mac. There is something seriously wrong with her Mac Book. There is a perceptible 0.5 sec. lag between when a key is hit before it appears on the screen. However, it STILL works good enough for her that she doesn't want to reinstall OS X, because that will lead to down time. (it would drive me insane, but she is a slow typer so it doesn't affect her). She is a smart person obviously and given enough time she probably could learn to run a Linux laptop (e.g. Ubuntu), but why would she want to do that? It would be counterproductive. She already has a laptop that does everything she wants.
:) granted I haven't looked at Linux in a few years but back when I tried it, the learning curve was way too steep. I gave up and went back to XP so I could get work done instead of trying to configure the X server to work right with a scrolling touchpad.
I use Windows XP because I hate Macs, but I hate Windows slightly less
For most people, there is nothing wrong with Windows and Mac OS. They may be crappy/non-free operating systems, but they're usually good enough to get some job done.
NO CARRIER
Whenever i see discussions like this i always think to myself, "look to the past". (I use the word linux here alot, but in reality i mean a whole host of things like apache and mysql, etc).
If you go back and look at the past, you may see the future spelled out for you.
The one known constant in the software industry so far has been almost-0 innovation from MS except in the area of the user interface. Everything they've done has been driven by someone coming up with an idea, MS taking it, putting a more usable UI on it and then (ab)using the market to kill off competition.
But go back not too far and you'll see linux as the dominant player in the (small-fry) server game with MS playing a very big role of catch-up. Linux didn't have the desktop by any stretch of the imagination and MS was simply in the right place at the right time. So they (ab)used their desktop dominance to steal the server role. But it doesn't really change much. MS still doesn't inovate. MS Live is a good example of that.
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. I dont think there will every be a big break through, but we've already seen a few medium sized ones. People are shipping linux as a desktop OS on blackbox computers and thats a huge step like it or not and it can only get better with time.
But the point im trying to make is linux does innovate significantly (or at least, the players in the OSS industry). What you can do with linux on a server still far out-paces MS in many many ways in terms of functionality if not in terms of usability.
But that will change.
Apple will always be a bit-player tho, they're a hardware producer and they might as well stop producing an OS and start spending their efforts doing something useful (though they really dont seem to understand that at all which is a shame).
This year we picked up a couple new laptops. Needless to say they count as Vista. There wasn't much else on the shelf pre-configured with the manufacture's warranty. On the other hand, my Core 2 Duo homebuilt and the converted PIII and P4 machines are probably not reported and counted properly.
Just how are they counting the Linux installations. I hope it isn't just from browser User Agent strings, or from sales figures of new hardware. If Linux is such a small showing, then why is VMware stock doing so well? Somebody is interested in it.
The truth shall set you free!
This is a copy/paste troll, don't feed the trolls.
My Babylon
...here is that MS Vista GETS bundled with OEM machines. Users who don't know better just get it, and in most cases think a computer is MS Windows (sad state of affairs really - shows the real level of intelligence of the average person).
If a GNU/Linux distro was bundled with the machine, the user still wouldn't know any difference, but GNU/Linux sales(whatever they are!?)) would be up.
Fortunately moves are being made to stop the 'bundle MS' (i.e. MS Windows tax) with new computers, and allow the purchaser to select an OS. That at least makes them aware that at least there is far superior OS than the MS offerings.
I thought Vista was a huge butt by itself, with multiple orifices !
Vista doesn't have any 'feet' to even outpace XP... this news is surprising.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
i like Linux, the *BSDs do not support the perifrials i have, ever try to get sane & xsane to run a flatbed scanner? or how about a digital camera that wont mount like a usb mass storage device and needs gphoto2? and setting up a parallel port printer takes a few extra arcane steps, and rebuilding the BSD kernel is years behind in tools compared to Linux = what? no menuconfig? you mean i have to open DEFAULT with a text editor to make my adjustments and save as /root/MyKernel? hey the 1980's called and wants their OS back...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Linux doesn't have fear on its side. There is not nor have there ever been choice in computers. What keeps people using Windows is what will happen if they stop. I for example, against my will will have to install a Windows Server 2003 machine in a VM because my university Class requires it, otherwise, the teacher will fail me. (There are certain assignments I can get by on with Linux, but maybe one or two where he has INSISTED on seeing screenshots of a Windows Desktop, as for Application.
Right now, in peoples minds, the fear exists that if they use Linux they will most fail and if they use Windows there is no way they can fail. Until Linux has the applications nessessary to hold users by that iron gauntlet of fear, Windows will hold people in its Iron Gauntlet of fear. People love Linux, but they don't fear it because Windows is there. We need to be loved and feared.
By the way.
To those who say Linux has no productive applications. I did this in Cinelerra just yesterday. I find I'm terrible at Cinematography. I made a Youtube Video about a Linux game called FreeDroid RPG, but this is the first time I have ever done anything for youtube. I plan on re-uploading it later. but just keep in mind. I did this with Linux programs on Linux for a Linuix program, with a functional Linux capture card.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUCY9cu3eac
There you go.
But the point is also that he had a choice, many people have no choice at all, and the people taking their choice away have never (or often arent equipped to) evaluated all their options objectively.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The problem is that Windows has made the entire segment too homogenous. People are expected to be able to read MS Office documents, visit IE-only websites and install programs (particularly drivers) that only work under Windows, and that is troubling me in my usage of Linux and FreeBSD. Maybe not in my everyday usage, but certainly far from never.
Therefore, I don't really care if people start using my operating system(s) of choice, but I do rather much care that they stop using Windows. I couldn't really care less if what they switch is Linux, Solaris, AIX, OSX, Plan9 or Unununium, all I care about is that Windows usage drops to, say, 50% or so, where not only other people, but even Microsoft themselves will recognize that it is important to start following standards for information exchange, and for hardware developers to recognize that it is important to release specifications rather than just Windows-only drivers (anyone remember the days of old when you'd always get a protocol reference with a printer or modem?).
I have no doubt that Microsoft will last for at least a decade, and I don't really care if they stay in the market forever, but I really don't think it is impossible to achieve heterogeneity within a year or two.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
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?
Actually isn't the 7.4% the same number as 0.81%? If you wanted to look at how much it had increased from its usage in December to its usage now (the same timespan as Linux). I'm sure you'll find that Vista has increased its growth by a lot more then a mere 100%
However a more meaningful number is looking at how much usage of Windows has increased compared with how much usage of MacOS has increased compared with how much usage of Linux has compared with. These three numbers would be more meaningful then the whole article. Funnily enough, the article only provides one of the numbers.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
I definitely agree with you on the compatibility piece. I am, actually, very happy with an HP Photosmart 2710 wifi printer that we have, because it, unlike moat, has drivers, and the HP control panel, for Linux. This makes printing so much easier. (The only problem is DHCP... I'll find a way around that eventually.)
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.
So you are telling me, that despite Windows being pushed with every new OEM computer sold, despite Microsoft's inflated "sales" prices, and despite Linux systems obviously not showing up consistently in "market share" numbers, despite people dual booting to play their games... Linux market share still more than DOUBLED last year? Increasing by 0.5 percentage points from 0.31% to 0.8%.
Greater than unity exponential growth rates Redmond! It's the Penguin, and by the looks of it this will be big...
Huh? You aren't IT?
You need your sound card to stay productive managing Linux server nodes?
The truth is that Linux has no "strangeness" problems on the right hardware, just as Vista or XP have no "strangeness" problems on the right hardware. The difference is that your IT people, or whomever they bought your laptop from, picked the hardware and installed the drivers for XP/Vista. If you buy a laptop from a Linux shop with Linux installed, there are no driver issues either. The only difference between XP/Vista and Linux is that your IT staff is ignorant about anything other than XP/Vista. That is what keeps XP/Vista so successful: user and operator ignorance.
The truth is that every desktop (gnome/kde/etc) is far superior and more flexible than XP. I have to use XP a couple times a day and it is like poking myself in the eye with a stick. Interactivity sucks. And sometimes I have to use IE6. What a steaming pile that is!
Closed source is negative because it stifles progress...
Each vendor has to reinvent the wheel, and can't legally learn from the others. With open source you can reuse other people's code and build upon it. Closed source ensures that only vendors with enough cash to develop a complete application can enter the market, with open source it's easy to build upon an existing project.
Smaller companies or individuals who want particular features have very little chance of getting them in a closed source world, they would have to pay whatever fees a given vendor demanded *if* that vendor was even willing. With open source sufficiently capable people can implement those features, while other people can hire coders to do it for them.
New hardware architectures are far less likely to succeed, just look at IA64 as an example, failing miserably even with the backing of Intel and HP, because people can't run their closed-source apps on it. And vendors won't port those apps until there's a market, thus you have a catch-22. Therefore processor makers are constrained by choices Intel made 30 years ago, as they try to develop new chips while maintaining compatibility. As another example, Apple had to spend considerable time and effort on Rosetta to allow legacy PPC apps to run on their Intel based Macs. In an open source world many of those apps could be easily recompiled, and doing so for a large number of them would probably have taken Apple less time and effort than writing rosetta.
There's also the matter of trust, some large companies and governments are paranoid and want to see the source code and actually build it (so they can be 100% sure the binaries they have came from the source they've seen). A lot of people are equally paranoid, and some of them do have the capability to audit and compile the source.
Long term support - closed source software is at the mercy of it's vendor, so there is a chance of the product being discontinued, or the source code being lost. Users of closed source software have no fallback in situations like these.
Multi vendor support - with the source open, any vendor can begin providing support services around an open source application, customers are free to choose the vendor and support package that suits them, instead of being stuck with a single source of support. As a consequence, vendors are forced to compete. If you want a commercially supported linux you have plenty of choices, for commercially supported windows you have only one source.
Less lock-in, with open source you are far less likely to find your data locked away in a secret format known only to one company.
There are many negatives associated with closed source, and virtually no positives as far as the customers are concerned. If you have evidence to the contrary i'd like to hear it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The parent item is absolutely right. Softpedia has no actual data on Linux installations. The data doesn't exist.
... no XP install disk, so we can't just stick in a new hard drive. I inserted an Ubuntu live CD and she ran with that (no HD) for a month. Worked great! So I installed a $75 hard disk and loaded Linux onto it. It took 30 minutes, no problems, and everything Just Works.
Here are three use cases that would show up as Microsoft customers in any Softpedia data:
My elderly mother finally bought a Vista laptop -- a $400 bargain Toshiba. Very nice dual-core Intel laptop, excellent for the price. Half a gig of RAM rendered Vista unusable. Rather than spend more money, I installed Ubuntu Linux on it, and she's off like a rocket. Everything Just Works.
My mother-in-law's old eMachines desktop blew a hard drive. Oops
My middle daughter just turned 15. For her birthday we gave her a $400 Acer laptop. I put Linux on a partition. By the end of the month I'm confident she'll have abandoned Vista. Too slow, too annoying with its constant security warnings and popups.
(There are only two problems with the Linux setup for her. One is hardware-based. I'd say the installation Just Works except that it doesn't quite; the Atheros wi-fi is broken, and I'll probably have to buy her a d-Link PCMCIA card. The second is the lack of iTunes, and I'll have to introduce her to a DRM-free music store.)
Linux on the desktop is more than viable, and it's installed in a lot more places than "experts" like those at Softpedia know. Even the ditzy kid over at the Wal-Mart electronics section is dual-booting.
Its inherently a minority OS and therefore inherently has minimal rewards for defeating its security and so is therefore inherently more secure ;)
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Though I know I will be modded down.
People who think Linux costs $0.00 IMHO think their time is worth $0.00
I have used linux off and on for the last 10 years or so. I have yet to encounter an install that worked 100% perfect out of the "box". Some installs were darn close, but I always ended up in strange forums from google searches to try and get some aspect working properly.
I don't see how they can even make a wild guess. I get a free boxed copy of openSUSE from Novell which I always give away and I don't know how many PC's it eventually gets installed on, but I know of 2 for certain. I have Linux installed on 7 PC's at home and 4 for other people. On my PC's I have virtualisation running currently running 6 other distros, total is 19 minimum. If the statistics are based on sales and if Novell counts their box set they send me, statistics says the total I have is one. They say OSX is more widely used, obviously based on sales figures which are traceable by serial number. Novell, RedHat, PCLinuxOS, Freespire, Sabayon, Mandriva, Ubuntu, slackware, gentoo etc. haven't a clue how many boxes their distribution is installed on, but I bet it's many many times their traceable installed base. Aint statistics great at surpassing damn lies - they have to publish something, even if it is totally bogus, as that's how they make their money - just another shed load of nonsense.
It won't necessarily always suck or even have to suck today. The only question to ask is whether the hardware vendors behind the various components in your system take Linux seriously. The same goes for any operating system and platform. Can you expect OSX to run well and support absolutely everything on a set of hardware that Apple never blessed? Can you expect NT4 to install and run on a brand new system with SATA controllers from a manufacturer who decided NT4 wasn't worth the time to implement?
By the same token, you can expect a number of systems and devices to be taken seriously even today. If the hardware is common with any Tier one server equipment, it's essentially guaranteed to work. I personally have had good luck with printers, though I confess desktop printers I have not seen evidence of actively trying to support linux. If Linux adoption was ~10%, a vast majority of hardware would absolutely work correctly under the platform. The problem may seem like chicken and the egg, but the truth is that it's at least reached the point where hardware vendors have had to take it seriously, some for the consumer and others who realize the value as an embedded platform, and also internationally there is interest in not funneling so much money to an American software company. The conditions are not perfect, but are surprisingly decent for the right things to occur for linux as a platform.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
It is not illegal - OEM's can do what they what. The GPL just restricts them from ripping off open source software and using it as their own and selling it (like MS perhaps does).
This all leads to the 'lock-in' and makes the user who pays good money (i.e. YOU) have no choice.
Meaning what was measured and how thoroughly? I would assume this was somehow a statistical count with some sort of extrapolation, however, in all these "stidies" that supposedly yield results to the second decimal point no word is given on the estimated error size. Moreover, even well grounded studies have errors of 3-4%, which means a total range of 6 to 8 percent. Therefore, to quote a usage number of less than one percent and to the second decimal place cannot be creditable. This "study" would require significant degree of observation of the total user population. Moreover, to quote these figures by the month makes the whole spewing of dubious statistics beyond any credence.
I would assume, a small subset of data from a narrowly defined group was then being abstracted where the numbers were analyzed beyond their inherent worth. So why discuss something that is no more than an assertion? We have no knowledge of the sample size, the counting method and finally no idea how these numbers were extrapolated to give a global estimate. Until then, are there not more interesting topics and knowledgeable discussions than this article's content?
The One Laptop Per Child .. or XO device (http://laptop.org/) runs Linux and will be soon the dominant desktop for children in many parts of the world. I'm fairly sure you'll see far more interesting numbers then .. especially this November with the "get one, give one" program (http://www.xogiving.org/).
That'd be cool: a Christmas gift for Linux: your over 1% now, baby!! Hoot!
That's true partially but not entirely. This topic has been beaten to death, but let me say this just once again: The security of Linux is partially due to more knowledgeable users, but also partially due to a saner design that eliminates some of the historical burden that plagues Windows.
A lot of problems on Windows are caused by ignorant users who will just click on whatever appears in their displays. The only way to stop Trojan horses is to educate people since the only difference between a legitimate third-party application and a Trojan is that the latter one does damage (and is generally distinguishable from the former by someone who knows what they're doing), and people will need to install applications anyway.
This is one good side of the distribution model in many Linux systems: most applications are installable through the tools of the Linux distributor from the software repositories of the same distributor. If you trust your OS provider, there's probably also reason to have some faith that packages that come from their repository and are signed by them are legitimate. And if you can't trust the OS provider, you're pretty much screwed anyway.
Another thing is that not only are the privileges of the normal user account traditionally limited (sort of like in UAC), the privileges of most daemons/services on the system are also limited because they run under a separate, non-root user account. Even if one of those daemons gets uninvited guests through a security hole, they won't be able to do harm to user files (because user x generally cannot access the files of user y unless user x is root, which it generally isn't) or read sensitive data, assuming that the system and applications are correctly configured.
Also, many systems such as Ubuntu don't have a bunch of ports open to the whole world by default, so exploiting one of these holes would be more difficult in any case. Even if Linux were more popular also among the masses, it would be less likely to see something like the Blaster or Sasser worms on Linux, and even if we saw one, it probably wouldn't be able to do much more than spreading. While it might be possible to exploit a local hole to get elevated privileges after breaking in to a restricted account, that would require the attacker to take advantage of more than one weakness. That would occasionally be possible, but the heterogenous environment where different distributions have different configurations would make such complex exploits more difficult and prone to error.
These are just examples. The fact that Unix/Linux traditionally has been built to contain things at least a little unlike early versions of Windows gives these operating systems an edge in security. Even if modern versions of Windows do something similar, the benefits can't be fully harvested due to legacy applications -- and even many modern ones -- not being compatible with the new development. The culture would need to change as well. Perhaps it is changing, but that is by no means a quick process.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The reason why I switched, and a lot of other Linux folks several years ago, to Macintosh OSX was I was tired of fighting trying to get hardware to work (I know, not as big of an issue today) and I could use MS Office, Photoshop, Quickbooks, Dreamweaver as well as develop in a UAMP environment. Furthermore I got into video editing which is now dominated by Final Cut in most small/medium sized shops.
Goes back to the chicken and the egg, especially in the business world, that people won't use linux on the desktop until the application support it there. Software publishers aren't going to release Linux apps until the demand is there. My classic example is Maya. A lot of folks in the CGI industry were already on IRIX and Linux has supplanted IRIX in many shops. So there is a version of Maya for Linux. Ditto on the rendering engine for lightwave also runs on Linux for renderfarms. There was a demand for those products on the linux platform. Hell, even Apple has kept the Linux version of Shake around. (Although cheaper to get a Mac and Shake than to buy the Linux version last time I checked)
As far as the "Peer-reviewed" and more secure code. I call bullshit. The great thing about linux is that any one can contribute. The bad thing about Linux is that any one can contribute. That means everyone from professional programmers to 12 year old kids. The theory is that when bugs are found, they can be patched quicker, but I'm not so sure just how much code in the Linux domain is security audited by others. Especially given the sheer number of distros and configs out there. (Another reason why a lot of software developers avoid Linux). The only folks I know that really go through and security audit code are the OpenBSD folks.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Truth is you're correct, all OS installs take some time. Linux for the desktop installs just seem to require more level of effort to work 100%.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Yes... specifically the way the security model is implemented through the (lack of) controls around what a user is allowed to do on the box. For instance, when I buy a new PC with Windows on it, and I turn it on for the first time, it begins by asking me a few questions about my connectivity, users, and so-on. When it creates those users for the first time, even if it is just a single-default account, it grants that account administrative privileges.
Compare this to a Linux or MacOS-X installation. My account on my laptop does not have default admin-rights, and demands that I enter my password to do things like install system-wide software, updates, and other key admin functions.
I find it amusing that this fact, along with many others related to how flawed Windows is from a security standpoint, are often overlooked by individuals and the media alike.
I worked at a shop repairing PCs for years. I still have a Windows XP machine here at the house. I've installed every flavor of Windows (except Vista) enough that I call myself expert at it. (In other words, hundreds of installs ranging from reformats to completely new installations on hardware that I just put together.)
I've installed Linux about 8-10 times now over the past 5 or 6 years. When I first started, it -was- painful, even if you knew what you were doing. A couple years ago, I was running Slackware. The last few installs have all been Kubuntu. It is a breeze. Feisty is an absolute pleasure to work with compared to Windows. The hardest part is knowing how to find the software you want to install. Once you learn that, almost everything is in the repository and you just have to tell it to install. A Windows installation generally means I have to scour the internet for drivers and small utilities to bring the system up to usable level, including a decent video player and codecs, a decent text editor, and virus/adware software.
Granted, I don't install the last on Linux because it generally hasn't been necessary, but I know clamav is in the repository as well, so it's covered.
I think you owe it to yourself to try installing (K|X|Ed)Ubuntu and see what a difference a year or 2 has made. I'm not saying you should use the system (I use it, but I'm not trying to force it on others) but just so you know how much less painful the install is, I think you should try installing it.
Gutsy is even going to have Compiz included, and on this box with an Intel GPU, it's amazingly stable. I've only had it crash once in the last couple weeks, and that was when enabling the 'reflections' plugin. The cube flipping and window changing rivals OS X's eyecandy, and it's even got a thing like expose that shows you all the windows at once to pick from.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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
Linux will never have a breakthrough on the desktop until it has a killer app that no other system has.
In the server room LAMP is linux's killer app. It's very effective and it is the reason for the majority of linux installs in the server room that I've come across.
Is there such an App for Linux desktop?
It's easy to say that, for most people, Linux would be more than enough. If you want to do email, browse the web and do basic things, then Linux is already excellent at that. But, for most people, the decision to which system to buy, most times, comes down to the unexpected needs that they may have in the future. That's why so far Windows is dominating. If you buy a windows machine, it's most likely to have any software that you MAY need. It's a safety net. Only Windows' extreme security issues have forced people to look at other system. Let me assure you, had windows been nearly as secure as Linux or OS X, people would have never, ever looked for other solutions.
When developers started moving away from the Mac in the 90s, the platform came very close to death. It barely held on to its measly market share because of cheaper Macs in the late 90s-early 2000s.
It wasn't until Apple managed to get Finalcut into great shape and its iLife suite and then OS X; those were things that people wanted/needed. The killer apps make people want/have to use a system.
I know of no such application for Linux on the Desktop.
It seems to me that Mac and Linux users fall into the standard percentage of the population who "gets it" and a huge percentage of windows users just accept it. As long as users have to take action and break out of the mainstream to use something other than MS, the percentages will be low.
Furthermore, already in this discussion there are posters stating exactly the problem with desktop linux:
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ahref=http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=320419&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20887569/rel=url2html-21826http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=320419&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20887569/>
Sorry, Slashdot URL handling mucked it up -- or likely it was just me :)
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=320419&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20887875
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=320419&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=20887569
Thanks, i will check it out again
I have used windows off and on for the last 10 years or so. I have yet to encounter an install that worked 100% perfect out of the "box". Some installs were darn close, but I always ended up in strange forums from google searches to try and get some aspect working properly. I also had to pay for it, pay for anti-spyware, anti-virus and firewalls that consumed 50% of my system resources and reinstall every other year or so.
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
Nope, you overestimated. And I'm not sure what all the hooplah is about. Usage may have doubled, but doubling zero is still zero :D.
In tomorrow's news flash: Linux usage on the desktop has tripled! Penguins everywhere rejoice!
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
People don't know what a fucking OS is. How the hell do you expect them to choose?
Evidently you missed the part of the license agreement for the CIS tool where it says that you:
... (viii) represent or claim a particular level of compliance with a CIS Benchmark, scoring tool or other Product."
"will not
Also, to better harden your system I strongly suggest that you delete your web browser.
Thank you.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Novell, RedHat, PCLinuxOS, Freespire, Sabayon, Mandriva, Ubuntu, slackware, gentoo etc. haven't a clue how many boxes their distribution is installed on, but I bet it's many many times their traceable installed base.
Agreed.
And there's another stretching going on, favouring Windows' numbers.
The other way round, if you buy a PC with Windows pre-installed and you do not launch this Windows even once, but wipe the hard drive instantly in order to do a Linux installation, the one OS that will get an "add 1" in the "market share" aspect will be Windows. Currently, there's no way a next-day Linux install could ever lead to a "subtract 1" from the Windows numbers...
One PC sold, one Windows counted - following the "market share" model, it has been as simple (and misleading) as this, for many years.
It might be even more irrelevant when somebody tries to guess something like "installed base" numbers of OSes, based on such shaky "market share" values...
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
Yep... I've tried several different distros, Ubuntu 6.10 live cd being the latest. I was mainly interested to see if it would recognize my wifi drivers on bootup, but of course it didn't. I fiddled around with the gui control panel to see if it would work, but after about a half hour of trying I gave up.
I'm not a complete novice, I am a backend java developer by trade and used linux desktops in the computer labs at school (about 4 years ago). I actually ran Red Hat on my desktop a few years ago, as a dual boot, and my roommate helped me get wifi working on that. But it was some pretty good hoop jumping to do so. I realize Windows XP doesn't always recognize my drivers either, but I can usually get those working by putting in the driver cd and going from there. The point is that I am simply more familiar with Windows XP, and I am pretty lazy, and would rather not spend my time learning a new os. For now I am happy to keep up with desktop Linux developments by reading sites like this. I really don't think MS will be able to maintain its monopoly indefenitely, and perhaps as their failures keep mounting I will be more apt to really try something else.
There are hardware compatibility lists available. The problem is that many, or even most, people don't want to read them. A common complaint regarding Linux is that people want to get any hardware on the market, without checking Linux compatibility, and if it won't work, it's the fault of Linux.
Like I said in one of my previous posts, I really don't think MS will be able to maintain its monopoly indefinitely. I think they will eventually become more like IBM.. just one player in a commodity market. Their failures, like Vista, will become more of the reason this will happen rather than their continued success. For now I will be sticking with XP on my desktop, but will continue to keep up to date with Linux developments for when a good time to switch might occur. I'm not stuck on XP or anything, mainly I just use it because it was already on my laptop and works most of the time for me. Inertia has a hold on me.
Well as I said I'm not completely happy with it, I accept it. However continuing to wait for the next Windows OS to be released has been a fruitless wait so with the latest release, while Linux continues to improve (with only a cursory search already revealing one advantage). So that's why I'm switching.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Ubuntu installs painlessly on all the hardware I care about
So then please call me when I can use my bcm4321a/b/g+n&bluetooth card on linux.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
What do they mean by market share? The amount of money that's been paid for licenses?
The number of licenses sold?
Seriously, how do you find out how many Linux installs there are? It's not like people buy Linux in a store, they either download it, or copy it from a friend. This is not much different to Windows, but with Linux it's obviously legal and even some companies do it like that.
Probably the most accurate study could be conducted by Google and Yahoo. They could count how many people actually _use_ what OS, at least among internet users. However that would still underestimate the actual share of Windows boxes as a good part of them probably is not connected to the Internet.
Are you referring to the iPhone GUI? I thought everyone knew they pinched that from Star Trek TNG?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The difference here is that no one* claims Windows is free. If somebody claims the TCO is exactly the box price, then fine. But when Linux vs. Windows is oversimplified to Linux costs less it pays to realize that it simply isn't that clear in all cases, and objective data on the subject isn't so very commonplace.
* assuming they are sticking to non-pirated copies. Pirated copies tend to end up with even more problems you have to google for.
And when/if the big shift happens, there is no reason to believe that FOSS will gain any more market share. This is because the big shift will be caused by Microsoft (doing something such as Surface) or Apple or some other proprietary software company, as usual. And FOSS will simply do a copy of it, probably a year late, as usual. Nothing the FOSS community ever does is innovative enough to be considered a new way of computing. Look at the two primary desktop manager programs on Linux: KDE and GNOME. KDE is a copy/lookalike of Microsoft's interface, and GNOME was a copy of the old Mac interface. Very little new has been done.
I do have to give FOSS a little bit of credit for UI's like enlightenment and fluxbox, which are different than what Mac and Windows use. However, Linux desktop use is so small, and knowledge of/experimentation with alternative UI's is so much smaller still (because they don't ship with most distros), that even if something different is done, no one hears about it. Linux use is too small to change the way users do their computing; only a highly visible company like Apple or Microsoft is going to get the press and spotlight long enough to really change how people work with their machines.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Most people, just like you, take the pragmatic approach. The OS (and the associated hardware) is just a tool to do whatever it is you need to do.
Now just like your car is a transportation tool, you want certain things from it, chiefly predictability and reliability, and perceived value. It needs to start and go whenever you want it to, and not cost you an arm and a leg to buy and operate.
But your vehicle also needs to have certain, convenience, comfort, and style features. Although not essential, these things need to make you feel good when you drive your car, or at the very least prevent you from encountering aggravations when operating your car.
If that is a Ford, GM or Toyota you don't much care, unless you are a brand freak. But you might make the comparison, and I am old enough to remember this, between Toyota and the other "big three". When first imported the Toyota products were a joke, but with years of attending to the things that the others didn't, predictability, reliability, convenience, comfort, quality and style, guess who is number one now? This took about 30 years to happen, no "critical mass" thing, that you hear all the marketers trumpet about, just slow and steady, and absolutely no fanfare when it happened. So in 30 years Toyota went from last to bigger than GM (the biggest), and don't you think that MS knows this?
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
So you've had to edit your registry to get the GUI working properly?
Exactly my point. Thank you.
Linux is hardly $0.00.
No, it's not the year of linux desktop. Double nothing is still nothing.
(Hey! I run linux too, but let's be realistic here...)
So you, who are only now in 2007 discovering the migrating servers to Linux is a good idea, do not think Linux is ready for the desktop? Hmmm, well I have to point out that some of us are further along the adoption curve than that. I've been using a Linux desktop for work (not excluding dev work - I was on Linux for that 7 years ago) for the last four years and it just gets better and better. We're now seriously considering a pilot scheme using custom locked-down Linux desktops for some non-tech staff at work. (It's easiest for people who are in web apps and UIs 7 hours of 8; it's the so-called "power user" types, who've got a lot more invested in learning all the sekrit microsoft l337 tricks'n'tips that are the problem.)
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
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.
Just do not buy a crappy inkjet printer or all-in-one laser. If you need to scan, buy a small scanner. If you want to use a professional operating system, use professional kit with it.
Pining for the fjords
Oh it's you...
I posted a thorough debunking of your CIS tool several months ago, you failed to respond to it at all. That tool does nothing to test security, it merely tests compliance with a set of specifications for how an OS should be configured. Infact, it gives you a LOWER score for removing X11 than for keeping it running while bound only to localhost.
Also i never mentioned spotting bugs, i made a large number of points about where closed source stifles progress and you have not responded to any of them.
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So basicaly what you are saying is "As long as it runs putty.exe I don't need anything else"
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
have a dual boot system XP / Linux for ever. only reason have to boot XP
:
is for the games. Am sure if everyone came up a list and did a distinct
of all items we would end up with 100 or so action items preventing mass adoption of linux.
Reasons for not going solo on Linux
1. Games (More important than any other)
2. Adobe IDEs (Dreamweaver, Flash etc)
3. Greenbow an IPSEC VPN client (I know the stock kernel supports VPN but is flaky and instable as hell)
4. Verizon V640 PCI Xpress - National Broadband express wireless card.
5. Canon Scanner Lide 500f No support.
Like, Dude. With experience like that and all, why not log in and post under your name? I mean, maybe somebody might want to hire you or something. Hell, you don't know. Maybe Bert would even hire you.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
What? No flames? No holy wars? You must be new here.
*looks at respective user IDs* Oh. Heh. Okay, I think you just earned all the Slashdot-related respect I had to give.
It's along weekend up here in Canada, the perfect time to try something fun. After hearing endless praise of Ubuntu I decided to download an ISO and try it out on my G4 Powerbook.
I spent close to a half hour on the Ubuntu web site, on the download page, the Ubuntu home page, the FAQ, and anywhere else that seemed likely and couldn't for life of me find a download link. Searches for PowerPC and Powerbook turned up nothing.
Finally in the Ubuntu forums I discovered that Ubuntu no longer formally supports the PowerPC architecture, that PPC is "community supported", and that judging by the forum comments there some issues even though Apple hardware is pretty much standard from one machine to the next.
Is it too much to ask that Ubuntu add a comment and link on their download page directing PPC users elsewhere?
Really it's stupid things like this that seem to crop up every time I decide to try out Linux.
Three Squirrels
I have never had to do anything to get the GUI up. I have often had fight the os to get various hardware or software to work. And you essentially need a second computer to get a pre SP2 install up to date. The 'ole you need IE7 to install sp2, but you can't get SP2 in windows update without IE7 retardation. This isn't an issue at work where I have plenty of workstations to flip back and forth to, but at home with a brand new pc and no other. . . huge inconvenience. Yes, yes, I avoid it with a slipstreamed image and normally the workarounds can be found with some searching and a little technical knowledge, but all of this is every bit as technically advanced and difficult as any of the "gotchas" I've had in linux (never seen them, ever in osx).
There is a reason that the average computer user is willing to pay $80+ to have windows installed for them.
simple math tells us this!
.81%. extending this trend into the future:
linux doubled its market share over the last year to
2008: 1.62%
2009: 3.24%
2010: 6.48%
2011: 12.96%
2012: 25.92%
2013: 51.84%
2014: 103.68%
so there you have it - 2014 is REALLY the year of the linux desktop, when it will have over 103% of the market.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I posted in early august, and replied the same day as your reply.
The reason no-one bothers to follow your CIS test is because it's pointless. It does not test security, it merely tests compliance with a predefined set of configurations. Getting a 100% score is a simple matter of following the guidelines in the PDF they supply with the tool, and the fact that you tried so hard and still only got 85% says a lot.
I don't dispute your secunia data, the data accurately shows the number of vulnerabilities publicly disclosed in various different pieces of software. What i dispute is how you are misinterpreting this data.
All bugs discovered in open source software are disclosed and tracked. Trying to silently patch a vulnerability would be ultimately fruitless, as just in the example of the Linux kernel you give, you would need to justify to Linus and other kernel developers why your patch should be included, and if you silently patched a serious bug other people would notice. By contrast, it is not in the interest of a commercial vendor like Microsoft to disclose vulnerabilities they found during internal testing.
It is highly likely that more issues are found during internal auditing than are found by external testing, but we can only speculate as to how many security vulnerabilities get silently fixed in closed source products.
I do not even remember all of the points as to why the CIS test is garbage, but you didn't answer the one example i did remember, i would like a direct answer to this:
The CIS test failed to detect the presence of an X11 configuration file configured to disable TCP listening and direct root login for X11, and thus reduced my score.
I do not have X11 installed, and thus there are no X11 related configurations on my machine.
The apparent goal of this is to ensure X11 is not listening on the network, and does not permit root logons, my system fulfills both of these criteria, but fails the CIS test because it does not check in an accurate way.
Is it somehow more secure to have X11 installed and running, but without TCP or root logon support, than to not have X11 installed at all? I would be very interested to know how the mere presence of X11 improves the security of my system.
I could create a higher score simply by faking it, by creating the (redundant) configuration files it's looking for. Will this improve my security, or just my CIS score?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I agree, Windows does have excellent tools for configuring the kernel.
I'm the sysadmin/help desk guy for a large law firm. I use windows because all of my users use windows. I need to have what they are using to trouble shoot connectivity problems and user interface issues, for example. When someone calls me complaining about a desktop issue, I can't say, "Sorry, I can't remember how to do that in Windows." Or "Pretty strange problem. Go on!" I need to see the problem as they are seeing it in front of me. As it is now, I refuse to solve I.E issues anymore. I.E. has gotten too stupid. I tell them to use Firefox. At my last job I used Linux (Debian) for the desktop, and I really liked it, but I had no users to bother with. On the server side we use Linux primarily. I can't wait to get rid of this Windows cr@p again.
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.
That's lots of good "theoretically, THIS could happen, and you'd be screwed!" FUD. I'm scared! Do you wear a helmet 24/7? You should. You could fall down and hit your head!
I don't respond to AC's.
"Of course the focus of the article is that Vista is kicking butt over Mac/Linux, which is not particularly surprising."
I've seen Vista, and I'm surprised it sells at all.
But that's just Fedora alone. Ubuntu has a significantly bigger "marketshare" than Fedora. SuSE is also a significant player. Altogether, the Linux marketshare is probably somewhere between 3-5 times what Fedora is reporting, which would put Linux at about a 3-4% marketshare, worldwide.
But the point remains that the numbers in the article don't jibe with what most other people are reporting. In fact, these numbers are downright silly.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
It would be interesting to find out what the domestic use is. It strikes me that for things like Netware integration, directory services of any kind, common desktop and policies, corporations don't have much choice bar Windows. But for home use, my guess is that more than a few % are Linux users.
It just means that Linus installed it on his daughter's desktop. From one to two copies is a doubling. No one else would use this junk.
Stability(!): Haven't had an OS stability issue on my Fedora laptop. Granted, I haven't tried Suse since I didn't like the 10.0 live CD. I haven't had any real staibility problems on any OS since MS Windows 98. I have had plenty of app stability problems on both MS Windows and Linux. Beryl sometimes had window decoration issues, but I can live without Beryl, and lately just clicking on the Beryl manager automatically fixes them. At work, Windows Explorer locks up alot, but that seems to be more of a network problem.
Drivers: You're right. This is partly a chicken and the egg sort of issue. Still all my hardware except the Broadcom wireless works flawlessly under Linux.
Conrol Panel: This is a problem for me in all of the OS's I've used (haven't tries MS Vista yet), but your main points seem to be related to the "Names" issue you bring up.
Fonts!: Sorry dude, fonts look better to me on my dual boot laptop under Linux than they do under XP, and also better than they look at work on my XP desktop. I did make the mistake of installing a true-type package under Fedora, which screwed up my defaults and made things look worse. However, I've managed to correct most of that, and everything looks good again, ant-aliasing and all. (The exception being emacs)
Names: You're right about non-intuitive names in Linux. But most of that is due to the pre-conditioned familiarity of the Windows names (otherwise, how would I know that "Outlook" is for email) and the improper trademarking of common language words like "Word" and pre-existing computer specific words like "Windows".
I read the article, and it makes no mention of how they measured these numbers, or who these "Market Share by Net Applications" people are. I've never heard of them, so it all seems very fuddish to me, especially with the several digits of precision on their percentages. Plucked out of their arses would be my guess, or measured from a self-selecting sample group and then extralopted to some imaginary global norm.
How much of taht Vista % comes from OEM default installs where the buyer had no option?
How does this square with other figures showing higher figures for net surfers using Linux? And has anyone figure for the number of Linux users who set their user agent to IE/Win.
In larger companies IT is where computers n00bs go to die. It is likely an entirely different department from, say, Sysadmins or DBAs or networking, whose sole purpose is to:
A. Unpack and install desktops when they arrive.
B. Help Betsy with her resolution in the acct. dept.
C. Call IBM when _anything_ on your laptop fails, get a ticket number and handle the outbound/inbound shipping of your laptop.
D. Reformat your machine when there are any issues.
What silliness are you engaged in such that 256 columns is frequently a limitation?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
CmdrTaco should go back to school.
The numbers in the article are Apples to Oranges. Read between the lines of the article and what you find is: Microsoft is losing market share; which is pretty much opposite of what is implied. The truth is, the market has continued to grow and is slowly growing a little bit faster with regard to Linux and Mac OS X than Windows. They obviously have a long way to go to beat Microsoft.
let me tell you something. If you want linux to succeed, then all you need are the following things.
1. _better_ graphics. move your graphics related code to kernel, or, to processor, users do not care, finally, it is usability that counts.
2. two desktop themes, one like windows, and, another one like mac os x (and, may be their varients).
3. configurable keyboard shortcuts. don't ask your users to learn new set of keyboard shortcuts.
4. better browser, email client, wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentation tool
5. that's it.
still if it doesn't work, improve the above.
Meh.
The real story is Linux on the Asus Eee PC and on the host of cheap devices that will follow it. When the price of hardware runs so low that the cost of a Microsoft OS being bundled with it doubles the price tag - that's when the OS world changes in a big way. And it's also when it makes it extremely hard for Microsoft to do anything about it. At last, piracy of their product is no longer the way to go that makes the most sense. *click* Now that's a market story.
And it's coming. Soon. As in - next month - and it will begin to have a measurable effect within two years.
Don't get me wrong Microsoft isn't going away and in 40 years - they'll still be around - and probably still be the market leader. But Vista is a Microsoft OS that most people who have computers **don't want**. That's a unique event in MS history. Combine that with the effect that free Linux being bundled on a LOT of subnotebooks over the next 5 years, and my bet is that we will look back at 2005 as the height of Microsoft's industry dominance. From 2005 onward, it's nowhere to go but downhill.
.Robert
I'm not sure I would trust a survey that has an obscure scripting language clocking in at 0.13% in the September 2007 results.
http://virtuelvis.com/
'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.
I decided to give Kubuntu a try, even took what felt like something of a risk by going with 7.10 while it is still beta, and I've had nothing but a GOOD EXPERIENCE with it. I was surprised how easy it was to switch. I could set up and navigate the system without ever having to go to the command line. I've had only two program crashes, but it didn't take down my system when the programs crashed. They just went away. Within a couple of days, the update system had a fix and I've been rock solid full speed ahead since then. My one quibble, and it is a small quibble, is that the updater doesn't have a setting to just download and install everything in the background, and only to alert me when it needs to reboot (which is rare, even after all the updates). Since there are daily updates, it would be nice to have a "don't bother me, just take care of it" option. I'm using this on an HP / Compaq laptop, and it works great. Couldn't be happier with Kubuntu for desktop Linux (though I would like to see better iPod support, but that's it).
Find the post yourself...
Slashdot doesn't let non subscribers see full posting history anymore, or i'd look it up.
Your so-called development experience is is just talk, you've not backed it up with proof. I could post all kinds of stuff, but there would be no proof behind a slashdot posting anyway.
I have worked for the last 9 years in security doing code audits and network audits, as a kid i used to crack games on the amiga as part of a cracking group that was fairly well known in those days. I run my own hosting company and have contributed to several open source products.
I know many people who do security research on proprietary code, and with one exception they all use fuzzing tools. There is only one guy i know who routinely follows the raw disassembled code looking for security problems. So yes, for almost all people finding holes in a higher level language is much easier.
As to your other request, i am as we speak downloading a vmware image of suse enterprise server. When downloaded, i will configure it according to the CIS documentation and run the test. Then i will post the preconfigured image online so that you can download it to verify the results yourself.
I would have used redhat, but the cis tool for redhat is broken, and i couldnt get the solaris one to work on a stock install of solaris 10 on either x86 or sparc. And they don't even have a tool for OSX.
Where is your answer to my direct question about X11?
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Now, cue over to the server arena, and Linux is certainly replacing Windows boxes for all standard day-to-day servers.
Windows was really never even meant for the server space. Windows on servers has been a long standing joke for more than a decade now. It's something only marketing types can understand the reason for. Linux is and should be replacing proprietary Unix boxes in server space. Windows never even belonged there, and should simply be pushed out of the server room. Unless the admins need a box in the corner to play Minesweeper on, of course.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
There are hardware compatibility lists available.
You are aware that it's reasonably common in the PC marketplace for vendors to change the specifications of something beyond all recognition yet keep the same model number? Belkin and Netgear are both guilty of that, and they're far from alone.
I'm just curious how did they count my desktop linux :)
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
What holds Linux back is the third-party ISV ecosystem that Windows has.
Before it takes off ina big way Linux HAS to make it very, very easy to develop apps for the platform (think Visual Studio and Visual Basic easy).
Novell gets this - Novell's CEO stated that ISV support coming around was the biggest barrier to widespread Linux adoption. I hope Mark Shuttleworth "gets it" too.
It's not the package manager, it's not windows wobbling when you move them, it's the ISV support, stupid! (I mean that in a playful way, not a holier than thou way)
Here's to the crazy ones
I used Windows back when using Windows wasn't cool.
You mean, you used Windows back before Windows 3.0?? I used it for a few things, too. I had Micrografx In-A-Vision and it was an amazingly nice vector based drawing program that I ran on Windows 2.1.
When Works was what people used and I was being different by using Word.
I'm trying to figure out what you're talking about now. Before people used Word widely, the popular choice was WordPerfect or Wordstar. Now, I used WordStar and occasional loaded up Microsoft Works for DOS, too. But I switched to Microsoft Word for DOS for most purposes fairly early.
I don't understand where it was that you were, that people were using 'Works' and you were being different by using 'Word'? There are too many possible 'spheres' that you could be referring to. Claris Works versus Microsoft Word on the Macintosh? On DOS? I have NEVER seen many people using Microsoft Works for Windows anywhere.... Maybe you hearken from a different universe.
I migrated from Windows 98 to Windows XP quite happily because of one very important feature: the damn thing stopped crashing.
A bunch of us, on our Windows boxes, switched from NT 4.0 (or 3.51, which was better) to Windows 2000. Many of us still haven't switched to XP. Because we don't want the damn thing to start crashing again and/or we frown on the 'phone home' features Microsoft puts in everything now. I've never seen anybody who made the jump from Windows 98 directly to XP who I didn't consider a 'lightweight' type computer user. I mean, get real. Windows 2000 came out, it was much better, and it was time to ditch 98.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
I missed this post by a few hours, so this reply will be undoubtedly buried, but I'll post my $0.02 anyhow.
The problem with Linux on the desktop is not the lack of the "killer app", as so many people are trying desperately to solve. It isn't even the GUI interface selection, or any of the other standard responses as to why Linux is flailing without much penetration into the desktop world. The #1 reason why Linux doesn't have a bigger installation base is because it has yet to penetrate the business desktop market, and that fault can be summed up into one service: Native Enterprise Authentication (ie. Active Directory for Linux).
When Windows pushed out the mainframes of its day, computing was still in its infancy, and security/privacy laws hadn't yet adapted to the computing age. Active Directory came along much later in their lineup simply because it wasn't necessary at the time. Once MS saw that site-wide authentication with integrated single sign-on was the only route left to go, they hit the nail on the head with the biggest damn hammer available. They coupled LDAP with Kerberos into a single service that provided a company directory, user authentication, and single sign-on capabilities. Later their killer app became Exchange, and Exchange could never work the way it does without Active Directory. These days we have several Linux installations that are authenticating against Active Directory, as that is the currently installed authentication system within the enterprise. Hell, there are even companies that exist solely around the concept of making this setup work as easily and flawlessly as possible.
If you want Linux to really penetrate the Enterprise desktop market (which in turn has been historically proven to increase home desktop penetration), then what Linux really needs is its own native version of Active Directory. Even if we just cloned the service it would at least make Linux/Windows integration much cleaner, but ideally it would be more than that. Either way, it would need to at least provide the same data as Active Directory, as adding a method of authenticating Windows machines against it would be necessary. This could start as simply a mash-up of Kerberos and LDAP with a management front end, but the end goal should be a stand alone service that is easy to install and easy to maintain.
There. My $0.02. Don't spend it all in once place.
I think what may be holding Linux back more than anything is the belief in the community that its price is huge advantage - its not. There are two ways you can get an OS, pre-installed from an OEM or on some media for you to install yourself.
If you are buy Windows from most OEMs, it is free. Its not kinda of free or a hidden cost, it is free; the entire fee that MS charges OEMs is covered by all the advertisements (aka trial software) that come with it. (you may recall a couple of years ago a discussion on Slashdot about how Dell charged more for a system with no OS than one with Windows) So in this case there is no advantage at all for Linux.
On the other hand, for people installing the OS on their own (or getting someone else to do it for them) Linux has to deal with two huge issues. The first is the stigma many people attach to things that are free; we live in a society that has largely become jaded to anything that is free because the promise of something for nothing is often the hallmark of a conman. The second issue is that even those people who have no problem with getting their OS for free often have avenues through which they can get windows for free.
So to sum up, the GP was right, Linux will have its big break through when it is seen by the general public as being better than Windows in its own right; its price hasn't won it much to date, and likely won't in the future either.
So, yeah, about those new features.
I'm posting this very reply, while installing linux on the same machine.
God, I love livecds (/dvds).
So, yeah, vista is out... why doesn't it have the ability for me to use the computer while it's installing? Lol, I'm even being corrected for spelling as I type this.
(fyi, kubuntu 7.04)
But if we're talking about an existing Windows user switching to Linux on their existing hardware, then it's too late to check the lists. And if their hardware isn't compatible, then moving to Linux may not be cheap since it will have to replaced. It's not Linux's "fault", but it's still a deterrent. I know Windows will do the same thing to people (I've got a printer that won't work w/ Vista, and a wireless NIC that won't work in Linux w/o some level of patching). It's just not a good situation in either case.
No sig, sorry.
Especially when using ubuntu. Because any newbie using ubuntu (and especially any of my customers) is initially, or soon after the upgrade, going to visit the forums where they will likely find information about privoxy. Anyone running ubuntu I installed doesn't even need to go to the forums to have privoxy installed because I do it for them.
Privoxy allows you to replace the browser information string. I do this as a matter of course and there are instructions on the forums on how to do this. As a result, sites by default think I am using Windows XP with MSIE6. Why? Because there are fewer problems when I hit a site that uses embedded media. Opera allows this same sort of functionality and I recall doing the same thing ages ago when I used that with windows.
Now, how many of those linux installs are actually saying MSIE?
I use Open Source *nix for three main reasons:
1. I like the way *nix works
2. It is free as in speech
3. It is free as in beer
I evaluate all types of OSS *nix on an even footing, with the BSDs considered on the same basis as Linux distros.
For my own general use, my ranking goes something like this: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, FreeBSD
For specific applications, the ranking may be different. For me, the biggest strike against the BSDs is the package system, which I find somewhat annoying. It has nothing to do with being too hard.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Why should I use Ubuntu? I start with a base system and built it up from there, exactly the way I like it. If I used Ubuntu, I would just tear down their pretty config so I could set it up the way I like it. Furthermore, Debian has more software without enabling the unsupported universe repo, and Sid generally moves faster than Ubuntu. And I like the Debian Social Contract, Constitution and Free Software Guidelines.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Linux desktop market share to reach 6% in 2007
Market researcher IDC expects to announce within weeks that Linux PC market share in 2003 hit 3.2%, overtaking Apple Computer Inc.'s MacOS. And the researcher expects Linux to capture 6% of this market by 2007. That's still tiny compared with Microsoft's 94% share.
I call FUD, Bullshit, &c. on Softpedia.
Meanwhile, http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php is reporting:
Windows XP 83.06%
2 Windows Vista 4.01%
3 Windows 2000 3.85%
4 Mac OS X 3.74%
5 Linux 1.38%
as of 1 October, 2007.
Now, one might infer that it's intended for desktops. But that inference is left up to the user. It is explicitly not what the article is claiming. TFA is only talking about their measurements of the total growth of OS's.
Had they stated that it was for Desktops only, and that they weren't talking about servers, this article might have more credibility. But they didn't. They are, instead, trying to misrepresent things.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Interestingly, i installed the CIS tool just now, on a default suse install it failed on this:
6.6 Find Unauthorized World-Writable Files
i ran the accompanying command, and the files it complaints about are the cis files themselves (as installed by the default supplied installer)
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Fun With Numbers!
Macs sold in 2006: 6 million
PCs sold in 2006: 240 fucking million
Now you hush your mouth.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
You should be modded down, for you are dumb.
Last week, I fixed two malware-ridden XP boxes. One I fixed by installing Ubuntu. Took me an hour. One I fixed by installing four different malware detectors, waiting five fucking hours to scan through a 20GB drive, and then cleaning out the registry by hand, and then booting to a Linux live CD to deal with a few nasty self-reproducing files, then running all four of the antivirus scans again while I slept. Would you like to talk to me further about what my time's worth?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
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!
That highlights the exact problem I have with Linux:
It never installs painlessly on any of my hardware.
I don't know if I'm just the unluckiest person ever, but on the PCs I've tried to use for Linux (a Dell 4200, a Dell 2400, and an HP 9000 laptop) I've had nothing but problems. The LiveCDs always work fine. The problem comes when I go to install.
One or more of the following bits of hardware will fail to work:
1. No video card. X comes up as a black screen because the damn thing still doesn't have a failsafe.
2. No network card. Makes it lots of fun trying to use the installation for Debian (which doesn't even detect the newer Dell or the laptop). It also highlights how useless a PC is without the Internet.
3. No wireless card. And NDISwrapper hasn't worked very well for me. It connects and gets an IP address, but doesn't send or receive any data. Not sure what I was doing wrong there.
I've dried Debian Etch, Ubuntu 6.04, 6.10, and 7.04, OpenSUSE 10, and Fedora. And they *all* do one of these things.
Now, Windows is no better at all. Except that it will failsafe to 640x480 or 800x600 pretty easily by pressing F8 at startup. On Linux, I don't know how to get into single user mode when GRUB doesn't prompt and the logon screen (if there is one) is a black X session. With Windows I can go to random.vendor.com and download the drivers. I still can't do that for Linux. This is not the fault of Linux. This is the fault of the vendors. However, since it's a problem I have when running Linux, it is a problem that Linux has. The problem exists, and that's enough. Blaming vendors doesn't fix the problem for me as a user. It just makes me feel better as a Linux advocate.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
First, a big fuck you for assuming I am a low rent "appliance geek" working out of my garage. I'm not terribly offended but I think you're an ass for assuming this to be the case anyway. How do you know I don't work for Gateway or Dell? Point in fact, I DID work for Gateway for some time. I don't now, but I most certainly don't work out of my garage. I can't even get in my garage anymore, it's too full of crap. Anyway.
.net, package installers that require "upgraded dlls," and have to track down the occasional cryptic error message via a tech support call or web forum. In short, every time I watch my buddy install XP on someone's machine (no, I don't touch windows unless I absolutely have to) I thank my lucky stars I swore off that shit years ago. It's neither easier to use nor (especially) to install even when install means having to edit a text file. Who the fuck can't copy and paste text? It's not difficult, it's simply a problem of perception.
Another half-a-fuck-you point on behalf of pretty much every windows user out there. I keep hearing this "not many people have installed an operating system" but the reality is I know LOTS of people who have done so - most of them bootleg windows installs. I think pretty much everyone under 40 has probably installed windows at least once. Myabe it was a reload, maybe it was a bootleg upgrade - don't matter. I can't see anyone using windows for a lengthy period of time and not having to relaod, and I am dead certain anyone with a major brand pc will have at least reloaded windows.
"From scratch?" Yes, from scratch. Because everyone has stuff they want to install. That means every relaod is "from scratch" especially if you are using XP on a machine that came with 98 (as many still do). This also means fucking with drivers that require
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.
The FOSS OS world isn't going to take over the world at once. It's cool to see we are growing. 0.81% doesn't look impressive, but it's a large number of computer users. 6.61% for Mac is only going to help us. We still have 79.32% of XP users to eventually switch over to something, and these will be the people less wanting to go to Vista. Once XP becomes less of an option, they'll be more likely to look at Mac and Linux. MS will remain a juggernaut of course, but the first step is to make FOSS big enough to be an option.
Windows 71.1 %
Linux 14.6 %
Unknown 11.4 %
Macintosh 2.7 %
I know this is very unscientific, but it just serves as an indicator that the stats can be wildly different.
1 Vista didn't enter the home market until the end of January.
2 Sales in the home market favor OEM Vista Premium and Ultimate.
Buyers who go this route are looking at OEM system with fairly high end specs. Systems that - inevitably - are going to be priced a lot more attractively in November that the were in February.
The entry level Vista Premium laptop at Walmart.com - HP or Toshiba - has a dual core CPU, 2 GB RAM, a 200 GB HDD and currently sells for around $850-$900.
3 Ten years ago the desktop was dominant and an upgrade to Win 95 was straight-forward. I ran Win 95 on a Packard Bell with a 75 MHz Pentium CPU, 16 MB of RAM and a 545 MB HDD. But those days are gone forever.
Well, the densely populated U.S. cities could have been done. Still could be done. Still are not being done.
http://www22.verizon.com/content/consumerfios/
Coming soon to a densely populated city near you
No, it's nowhere near universal coverage. But it's definitely "being done."
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Take a closer look at the advisories instead of just counting them. Windows 2003 had 135 advisories: 61% were vulnerabilities from a remote attacker and 24% were vulnerabilities from the local network. The most common vulnerability type was system access (54%) and 74% of the vulnerabilities were of moderate or higher criticality (and 41% were highly or extremely critical).
In the same period, the linux kernel had 132 advisories. Only 19% involved a remote attack and 13% involved attacks from the local network. Of the 132 advisories, only 15% were rated moderately critical and none were of higher criticality. The most common type of attack was denial of service (46%) followed by privilege escalation and the exposure of sensitive information. System access (remember, this was a factor in 54% of Windows 2003 vulnerabilities) made up 2% of linux kernel vulnerabilities.
Ok, so this was only the linux kernel; I'm not necessarily asserting that the whole *NIX software stack is secure. Nevertheless, your approach of looking only at the number of vulnerabilities is highly flawed. Lies, damn lies and statistics indeed.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
We can't count exactly and it doesn't matter. If you are choosing to support linux, all that matters is how much money you make off it. And I know for a fact there's nearly enough linux use even here, in the middle of freaking nowhere, to start making money - especially with all those Dells and Emachines and Gateways shipping with Vista. Vista is the best friend linux has had in a long time.
It's interesting how some Mac users are keen to claim OS X as a brand new OS when it suits them - whilst at other times, insisting it's a continuation of classic MacOS so they can claim things like "The Mac had the first GUI". Which is it?
The truth of course is neither - as someone else pointed out, it's derived from NeXTSTEP.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Have you attempted to run the CIS benchmarking tool on any *nix installs?
I ask because I decided to dig into your challenge a bit deeper and what I've found is that the CIS tool for linux is a bit outdated and in some cases flat out incorrect in its analysis and resulting score for linux. That said, it is an interesting tool and does provide valuable hardening information, however, the resulting score is meaningless for any kind of comparison or challenge.
Specifically...
The tool give fails in a couple of tests for permissions on removeable media and fstab settings for media mounts but fails to take into account that the fstab entries don't even exist and the system has no removeable media (it was a headless web server).
The tool found some files that it didn't like the permissions on and gave a failed score but it didn't take into account that the files were protected by the selinux MAC and in fact the file permissions were meaningless for all but the approved contexts.
And then of course there were the failed scores because it was a web server and the benchmark tool suggested turning off apache and mysql. Without which it wouldn't be much of a web server.
Lots of failures for X11 stuff, but its a headless box and X isn't installed. The config files it tries to check don't even exist so it marks it up as a fail.
It goes on and on. Perhaps for Windows the CIS benchmark tool does a better job of analyzing an install, or perhaps its simply more up to date. For linux the CIS tool still needs a ton of work before it will produce accurate results for many of the latest linux distros.
So if your wondering why nobody is taking you up on your CIS benchmark score challenge its because the benchmark tool for linux is inaccurate. Making non-sensical changes to a working system to fake a higher score on the CIS tool is a waste of time.
Go ahead and flame away, I'll put on my Nomex underwear. Linux, in its wide variety of flavors is a good operating system. Technologically it has many features that Windows operating systems don't implement as well. But there are things that Microsoft gets and does well. These things are important to consumers and to companies that put Microsoft operating systems on their boxes. Linux fans I think like to minimize these things and point to things that their favored O/S does better.
Sometimes looking at things from the other side of the fence can help even an ardent advocate of another product see more clearly where their favored product falls short. This is as true in operating systems as it is in cars where die-hard Chevy fans may hate Fords with a passion that can only be described as religious. We say the same kind of thing in politics where Republicans know they are right and Democrats are equally as convinced that they are correct. Don't even get me started on religion (seriously). Then of course there are the great sports rivalries.
I am a Windows user and a Linux dabbler. I need to know, really know Windows for my job. As a result I spend perhaps 90% of my time on Windows boxes. I have experience in every Windows version back to 3.0 and DOS before that. This probably skews my view. There are some things that make me hate Windows. The poor, or perhaps more aptly, terrible implementation of security may be my biggest gripe. Even in Vista, where security is taken more seriously, they got it wrong and traded between convenience and security.
Microsoft gets things right too. If I have a hard time figuring something out there is a lot of help available and there are usually several ways of doing the same thing. If my hand is on the mouse I can use one method and another if I am using the keyboard. Linux does this too, just not as well and not as consistently. In Windows I frequently don't need to resort to the help files, I can just try this and that and soon I get the result I want. This is probably a result of Microsoft's consistency and my Windows experience level. They offer things like "Classic View" which I can revert to when I can't quickly do something the new way and that helps too. I use this a lot because time is money and I have to do things as quickly as possible so I can be as productive as possible.
Linux has a feature (and strength) that contributes greatly to its usability problem. There are so many things you can do with Linux, you can use various Windows Managers, Package Managers, and other utilities that you can get in over your head. Then you go to man pages and each one is written differently but they all seem to have some basic problems. Many seem to have been written as an afterthought. Some assume knowledge that the reader does not possess. Some are well written others not so. I hate to have to turn to them because I never know if I will be reading for a minute or hours or if I will understand something better when I am done. In fairness, I have had problems with Microsoft-speak as well.
I'd love to see more Linux on desktops in homes, schools, and offices. In order for this to happen I think that there are some things that the community needs to address. Things that would counter Microsoft's FUD and would make more people comfortable enough to adopt Linux into their life.
The Linux community needs to address the "Where do I get help?" question. They need to have a website that can identify the user's computer and provide just the right information for their particular blend of hardware and software. This site needs some human involvement that comes from experienced users who can say "I've been there and here is what you do..." These problems and solutions can be recorded and made available to others searching for the same answer. For those users who can't even boot there needs to be a toll-free help line again staffed by people who are experienced users. All of this should be a coordinated volunteer community.
L
A couple of reasons that I'm strongly leaning to get a Mac as my first notebook... Have the advantage of a bunch of software that 'just works' and access to a Unix command line (all of my OS-X experience so far has been through logging in via SSH).One other reason for getting a Mac is to play with Pages, which looks like the first non small niche WP package that doesn't try to copy M$-Weird.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
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.
Well, there are plenty of defects discovered and exploited in closed-source programs, for example, Microsoft Windows (before the source code was stolen) to demonstrate that you don't need the source to crack.
I don't agree, for the record, that source is more secure by virtue of being open. It really isn't clear at all that source is more or less secure by virtue of the source being closed or open. Fuzzing can help good and bad guys narrow in on defects without source. If source is open, perhaps more people help make it more secure over time, including even the bad guys who might well drive a faster evolution in the open source product by finding and exploiting the defects sooner. Closed source might mask defects for a long period of time, which are perhaps exploited only by a few people on a few systems. Not all crackers broadcast their exploits. The Microsoft Office exploits which were discovered some months back, which appear to have targeted individual users, demonstrate that some crackers sit on their exploits, use them discretely, and try to keep them secret. The certain knowledge that this happens makes it quite difficult to claim that closed source is more secure, by virtue of it being closed.
Regarding your other observations, I have little to say, except that Slashdot is full of young people getting started, people trying to learn more, people trying to help, people who haven't had their morning coffee, people who know more than they share, people who don't know as much as they think they do. Just like the rest of the world. If Bert showed you his resume and references, which provided you with compelling evidence that he wrote a compiler, it seems clear that you still would have the same technical disagreement between you about the implications of the security of closed vs. open source. You would continue to have that disagreement because, really, there isn't a clear answer to the question, and there may never be a clear answer to that question.
Some of your comments remind me of one of my own principles for success in a small business, which I used to tell people when they asked me how I managed to assemble such a fine development team. Don't hire anybody who lowers the average IQ of the organization. That means I had to hire only people who were smarter than me. Very few people get the joke. I stopped telling it because some people think it to be an assertion of undue arrogance. Life is like that, sometimes.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I've used OSX, I've used Windows a TON, and the interfaces that really seem to increase my efficiency just tend to be Gnome and KDE. The only advantage Windows or OSX give me are 3rd party apps. That is NOT an inherent quality of the OS, just a simple circumstance. Circumstances can change.
I cannot find an interface I like better than (Gnome or KDE) + Beryl. Maybe you like OSX better, but it just frustrated me. It's all a matter of opinion. Before saying that Linux (by which you only actually mean Gnome and KDE) hasn't caught up with OSX (by which you mean ONLY the interface since the kernel and many drivers already existed) in 15 years, maybe you should think about that.
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.
These analysts are like the old guy near me (sadly departed), well meaning, but could only play tunes from the 1940's. If they don't own the company, one day their employers will wake up to the fact that they are a spent force and get some new blood in that understands the world the way it really is. They have for too long enjoyed a cosy world where they only had to report on the greatness of Microsoft - that used to be the total breadth of the PC scene, no more so.
If you read the comment you're replying to, you can answer your own questions. (Hint: the answer is "no.")
Are you adequate?
The open source development model isn't all that great; it's good at certain things (e.g., superior implementations of well-understood stuff that has been invented before), but not so good at others (e.g., inventing new stuff).
However, it took "Apple" more than a couple of years to do what you're attributing to them. OS X is NextStep 4, in effect; it's been under development for over 20 years by now.
Are you adequate?
Did you read my reply? I don't have or use Windows so I have no idea what the tool checks or how accurate it is on a Windows box. I'm telling you that the score on a linux system is meaningless, as much as 50% of their tests are inaccurate and the only way to pass them would be to make changes to the system that would not enhance security and would just fake the score. Adding fake fstab entries, bogus X11 configuration files, installing iptables management packages from their accepted list, etc. to make the tool happy will produce an outstanding score. In fact I'm sure that by faking out the tool I can produce 100 out of 100 points, but it would be meaningless as the fake configuration files and system settings would do nothing to make the system secure.
I ran the CIS tool on a linux system, I reviewed the results and their scripts to determine what it didn't like, I even changed a few settings that made sense to improve the score, but in the end many of the results are bogus and meaningless. Your challenge is pointless and there would be no difference between gimping a screenshot, editing the html/xml result files or creating all the bogus system setttings to make the tool think a system passes with a 100% score.
Anybody who puts 10 minutes into testing the CIS tool on a linux system is going to come to the same conclusion, its an interesting and valuable auditing tool but as a benchmark for an OS security challenge it is a waste of time. Now if you want to pay me $75/hour to setup a linux box for you that scores 100 out of 100 on the CIS tool then I'll take you up on your challenge, but the box itself wont be anymore secure than one that may result in a score of 50 points.
It's *most* people's experience. It's just that there's so many linux apologists and ubuntu fanboys here that make it seem like it's just you. :) The other respondant here, where everything just worked, is the exception that proves the rule. It's no good even taking a livecd necessarily - will that prove that it works with your wireless router and VPN connection? Most stores don't have a wireless thing you can connect to, for example.
The biggest issue Linux faces these days for casual and corporate adoption is, in my view, laptop support. Everything *has* to work, first time, cause there's no swapping out parts in laptops. Think you can tell just because the outside of the box says "Broadcom chipset", or even "Broadcom 4318"? Nope, cause you'll have "chipset b" and the drivers will only work with "chipset a", but you can't know that till you open the box. I had a laptop a few years ago where it was the same as the floor model I tested my livecd on, and the box said it was the same components, but the video chipsets were just different enough to not allow 3d acceleration for me. Argh...
creation science book
... OS I've ever been able to install and use out of the box. People act like Windows does this.. but I've -never- had Windows detect my hardware. And Windows comes with practically no software.
:wq
The plural of anecdote is not data.
Everyone who buys an office appialce buys it with an operating system - windows, almost universally. There is, included in the box or on the hard drive, a system restoration cd. Any system running windows will inevitably require reloading at some point. When this is done that system is placed back in, from the owner's pov, "from scratch." Unless they are using a system and have never installed ANY software on it - never run updates, installed winzip or an mp3 player or a dvd viewer - then they have to reinstall that software and "reconfigure their system."
It doesnt matter that you don't know any "system builders" who can earn a living. Your opinion is irrelevant. You are not a special and happy flower. You are a decaying piece of meat who is incapable of rational thought or consistency of behavior. So there. Blah.
Remember, the Flaming Bush was reelected ...
It takes a long time for US to catch on Bush=Gates=666 in numerology.
It may be late 2107ce, before GNU-Linux goes over 69% in the oval
office without a Clinton in position to receive the benefit.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
If you get Linux on hardware that works (sort of like getting OS X on hardware that works, except more hardware is commercially supported on Linux), then neither of these things (wireless / DVD playback) eare problems. They're only really issues when you take a "Designed for Windows" machine and hope that it happens to have 100% Linux-compatible hardware.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I'd hardly consider the increase in columns worth the price of the upgrade when free alternatives exist.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Heh. Ok, that's not what I was expecting by a long shot (as I'm not a great speller), But you're quite welcome.
:)
I was actually going to spell it "gybe", given the numerous references to pirates here. But I figured that no one would get that.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
is still nothing.
Linux is more stable, more secure, more efficient, gets fixes faster, it's cheaper even if you are buying support for it, etc, etc. All of this is true, and if you stop there, it's hard not to look at that 1% usage stat and wonder how that's possible. If you look at the web server market, Linux dominates, and rightfully so. Think about why though... With a web server, you want a secure box with all necessary server apps running and properly communicating with each other, on a machine that handles high loads - in particular spikes for when you get Slashdotted/Farked/Dugg/Whatever. You also want it to be cost-effective, especially when you're also buying your bandwidth. Linux excels at all of this. Ease of use is generally not a huge concern - most sites are either on shared accounts or professional dedicated hosting, and in either case, you're paying someone to handle the actual server work for you - if you can navigate a directory tree and set intelligent file permissions (and your FTP client probably spells out how to do that for you), then you're good to go. Sure, some huge companies run the entire operation themselves, but they're also big enough to hire a dedicated server admin, so still no problem. Likewise, ability to run a huge array of programs isn't an issue either - if it can serve, it runs what it needs to. For home users, it's a much different story. Think about a few things: 1. Games - VERY few games were made for Linux, and at the professional game company level, you're looking at a few decent ports, whatever Wine will run, and that's pretty much it. (You can also emulate, but that's never pretty unless you're WAY over spec for the game in question.) Sure, Wine will run quite a bit, but when the best you can say is 'we can run the others guys' stuff... usually', you don't exactly have a selling point. Business users obviously couldn't care less, but for the home user, this is likely one of the major reasons they have a computer, and THE main reason they bought one with a good spec, if they did. 2. Variety of user levels - Unfortunately, nearly all Linux distros are aimed at either the OS expert who can compile his own kernel, or the complete newbie who absolutely must be able to hit one button and have the thing install without a hitch. The majority of users, on the other hand, are between those extremes, and indeed, when you think about the advantages Linux offers, it's NOT the newbie that's going to jump on them. Many an intermediate user finds himself either trying the advanced distros (and failing) or trying the newbie friendly ones and finding it extremely difficult to get up to the skill level he previously had with Windows. Many others have no trouble, but consider the time it's going to take, question the benefits, and give up. 2b. Because of the above, Linux doesn't get passed on - after all, it's usually those experienced (but not expert) users that are setting up their friends' machines, and if they couldn't find a use for it, they aren't going to be recommending it to a newbie either. 3. The familiarity barrier - MS has owned the home market for 20 years now. Most of the current generation started on Windows, and most of the previous generation started on DOS. Very, very, few people started on *nix. This means that switching to Linux means learning a whole new environment, something that no matter how great the tutorials get, is never good to be a simple process. This means the user needs a clear reward - that big Linux-only thing that makes it all worth it. Unfortunately, when I think of the great Linux apps, usually it's either 'they duplicated the functionality of (program)' or 'they took the idea of (program), and they significantly improved on it... but it's not a giant leap.' None of these are easy to address, and so I think it's going to be quite a while before Linux really has a chance to take off as a home OS and not one for servers and hobbyist users.
Oddly, I use Ubuntu, but not for any of the reasons mentioned. Easy isn't all that important to me because I've been on Linux for about ten years now, since long before it was anything you'd call easy. I use it because I have three people who've wanted to switch over to Linux, and I'm supporting them while they do. I gave them Ubuntu because of its ease and popularity, and I use it so that I'm familiar with it when they ask questions.
Put identity in the browser.
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.
That's not "desktop market share", it's browser market share among a biased sample of web sites. The data probably does give you an indication of trends (Linux is growing fast on the desktop), but it tells you little about current absolute desktop market share. In fact, many desktop Linux applications are in settings where people simply don't browse much.
The article gets a bunch of things right: Macintosh has a tremendous advantage in terms of marketing (not to mention a cadre of fanboys going around making wild claims about Linux), and Macintosh uptake is ultimately limited by its restriction to Apple-only hardware.
As for Vista, the numbers are probably an overestimate of its adoption since, again, the sample is likely biased towards home users and web surfers. But even a 10% upgrade rate from XP to Vista would be an embarrassment: that's lower than the PC replacement rate. Far from indicating that people are upgrading to Vista, it shows that even people who buy new PCs refuse to upgrade. If Vista offered any perceived value, people would be rushing out to buy it.
this statistic is based on browser ID counting on websites that use the hitslink technology
no wonder, vista is kicking butt, the only site that does this is support.microsoft.com
no, this information was totally made up, but it demonstrates perfectly, why this statistic is completely worthless...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I use Linux terminal servers which magnifies the above effect. Imagine a room full of XP machines that have just been re-imaged to clean out the cruft. Useless. It would take days to re-install all the stuff I need to teach my courses. I plugged in my Linux terminal server, adjusted the BIOS of each client to boot PXE and voila! A working lab! If I installed the server from scratch it would take a while but I get a bunch of computer seats for the effort. There is no way M$ makes sense competitively against the numbers one can get with Linux. As the price/performance ratio for hardware keeps getting better, GNU/Linux keeps looking better for me because a single server can handle more clients. Last year, I built a system with six servers to run thin clients all over a school. This year, with the quad-core Opterons coming on-stream, a medium sized school could run from a single terminal server, perhaps 200 thin clients and one server costing $4000. If you have the package lists and a local repository on a gigabit/s link, you could install the software for such a system in an hour. Imagine 200 installations of XP! Even re-imaging 10 gB images all over the building would take way more time and trouble than one installation of Linux. Tell me about cleaning malware off 200 machines! M$ is malware.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
When Wine fully supports windows software - linux will rule the world, its that simple.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
I know this is often not a relevant issue, as most closed software, for awhile there, was sufficiently reliable that you wouldn't need to fix bugs. Most open software has some pretty big problems -- Firefox's memory leaks, for instance.
But closed software still has some of the biggest, stupidest bugs that would NOT stand in an open system.
I do HD-DVD development. I use Microsoft's HDiSim. Here are two showstopper bugs:
1) No vista support. Even Microsoft doesn't support Vista. I had to wait a week for this laptop to be downgraded to XP because of this.
2) No USB keyboard support. I'm on a laptop with an internal PS/2 keyboard, so this is inconvenient, but not a huge deal. But many Dells don't even come with PS/2 ports anymore -- it's USB or nothing. The best idea I've heard as to how to deal with this is to run it in a virtual machine, where I can set my real (USB) keyboard to be whatever I want it to be (USB, PS/2, Serial, whatever) -- but then, why not use Linux as the host OS?
Neither of these would stand in an open product. Not because "the community" is "better", but because I would go in and fix it myself.
Someone tell me, has Microsoft fixed the audio/net bug yet? The bug where playing music in Vista drops your network performance to 10%? (Drops it by 90%, to 10%.) Because if Linux ever had that problem, I'd fix it, too.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Every time I've tried Linux, I'd had some software not work. Hell, the first time I tried Linux was way back when Corel Linux was still an option-- on the online documentation, it claimed that it supported Soundblaster 128 sound cards. Great, that's what I have! But when you install it, no sound... no matter what you do, no sound.
Next time I tried it was some version of Ubuntu to use as a MythTV computer. The IVTV driver, which supports "every" Hauppauge WinPVR 150 somehow magically doesn't support my Hauppauge WinPVR 150. Screw it, I went back to Windows and used EyeTV.
Last time I tried Ubuntu a few months ago on my iBook. It failed to sleep the hardware when the lid was closed (a dangerous mistake), and of course wifi didn't work. And the only way to get wifi to work was to have a computer with working wifi first. Nice Catch-22 there, Ubuntu.
Since Ubuntu is widely believed to be the best Linux distro, I can only conclude that Linux is crap. I'd also like to point out a theme here: Linux software makers, stop blatantly lying to your users about what hardware is supported! Don't tell me iBooks are supported if you don't sleep. Don't tell me you work with SoundBlaster 128 cards if you don't! Stop telling me IVTV can be used with all Hauppauge cards when it can't! I'm sick of being lied to.
Comment of the year
For a non-Apple laptop, my first OS choice would be Solaris, which has an even more restricted HCL than Linux. With the proper hardware it would be possible to browse the web at Panera and play DVD's on Solaris as well as Linux. However, neither Solaris or Linux has anything quite like the iLife and iWork stacks (OOo is pretty much an M$-Orifice clone and I'd like to try something different).
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
If you want to use the iLife and iWork software, then you obviously need a Mac to do that. Just remember that a MacBook is *not* the appropriate hardware to run Linux or Solaris - on the off chance that you decide what you really wanted was KOffice, Gnome Office, or some other better-on-*nix software.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
That doesn't work when most of those lists lie about what hardware is supported.
I had a great experience with my Hauppauge WinPVR 150 card, which was "supported" by the IVTV driver in Linux-- hah! What a scam. Or the Ubuntu page which claims the OS works with Apple G4 iBooks, when in fact it doesn't support sleep mode (meaning, it's possible for Ubuntu to overheat the hardware.)
Comment of the year
It sounds like you are implying that my time on Linux is worth less than my time spend on Windows. In the real world I get paid the same, Setting up Ubuntu takes less time than setting up Vista (which is faster than installing XP). I've installed Ubuntu in 10 minutes (on an extremely powerful machine). Next comes setup, Ubuntu installed everything except the restricted Video drivers with Vista I needed to update my Motherboard, Video Card and Wireless Card drivers in order to get it to run properly.
then we have my time supporting Windows, this is where you're time worth $0 argument tends to fall over. to me most time spent with after sales support has a negative gain, my time doing support outside of work is $-0 and greater. I spend more time clearing out viruses, figuring out how to make legacy programs work on vista, updating drivers, doing repair installs and chkdsks on windows boxes which people often expect me to do for free, than I do instructing people on how to use Linux. To me if my time is worth $0 installing and supporting Linux (which BTW its not, I get paid either way) than I am still doing better than I am with installing and supporting Windows.
Also anyone who is computer literate can figure out ubuntu, I mean the kind of people you only need to show them how to do things once.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
1)It means that YouTube suddenly stops working exactly when all the guys are buzzed and that totally hot girl has actually had a few for once.
2)Tyranny-free computers, while a good cause, is not nearly sexy enough to get anyone laid. Quite the opposite, in fact.
"It's not that I don't like Linux, I just don't want to be associated with its users anymore."
Why are you worried about being associated with *anything* when you won't even associate your name-calling with an identity other than "anonymous coward"?
Its when I see comments like this that i know, finally, Linux is on the right track: bye bye, sexless übergeek fanboi and welcome, new Linux users. I dont care if you "dont know what youre doing", I only care that you do it on our OS, that you dont toss us out for another if we can help it.It's not that I don't like Linux, I just don't want to be associated with its users anymore.
That is the most one can expect from an OS and Linux has given it all. Linux on the desktop is comming, weather the fuckers like it or not.
NO SIG
You've been working in the security industry for close to two decades, yet your main retort is "LOL"?
OS X has enough Unix in it to make it a far more productive working environment for me than Windoze, albeit the userland stuff does take a bit of getting used to as when going back and forth between Solaris and Linux (e.g. 'killall' works -um- slightly differently on Linux and Solaris).
FWIW, my Linux box will be a TS-7800 (500 MHz ARM9), but that may be a bit underpowered for KOffice...
I haven't seen his posts before, though I agree that he sounded very much like a shill. As for describing his explanation as autistic, I'm not as sure that's the best way to describe it. I'm either autistic or affected by asbergers, though I'm a very mild case of which ever it is (I haven't been examined thoroughly for some time, though I will be again very soon, so hopefully they can shed more light on the situation), and I have an Autistic father and brother (there's no doubt about my father, but my brother might be moderate to severe asbergers instead of autistic, I, again, am not sure). My father is generally very quiet, becoming loud only when he loses his temper (which can be quite a frightening experience). My father's writing is never orchestrated like that of the AC; he only all caps what absolutely needs to be, and his sentences are concise. Of course, I might be being a little over sensitive. and misinterpreted your meaning.
That said, I'm totally with you that Ubuntu is not 'dumbed down', but designed for the use of anyone; as a power user, I'm no more limited than I would be with any other Linux system, and I haven't seen much, if anything, that a casual user would easily be able to do in Windows or the Mac OS that can't be done by the same casual user in Ubuntu. I'm totally with you when you mention configuring the system; I even upgraded video cards, and didn't have to worry about a thing because nVidia and Ubuntu made the transition so simple. Anyway, my point is that I think your post is very good and concise. Sorry about the long post, but I frequently get carried away when I write responses. Thank you.
I support your thoughts; however, IMHO, there's a key difference between Windows and Linux that's greatly increased my productivity since moving to Linux (after *so* many years of using/administrating Windows):
... I'm an ASP.NET developer and I have to deal with lots of Windows boxes ... but Linux is my desktop of choice, even developing for .NET
~ Automation ~
For the most part, Windows was made for point and clicking, while Linux was made for scripting.
Now, that's not to say that you can't script many/most things in Windows or that you can't point and click in Linux, but *everything* seems to be scriptable in Linux. With Linux apps, it seems like there are always easy to access config files, great command-line interfaces, manual pages, and often APIs that make scripting easy.
Dramatization:
== Linux
* 1 minute spent telling your package manager to install all of the apps you need
* 30 minutes waiting for the latest versions of the apps to download and install
== Windows
* 120 minutes going to all the websites for all the apps you need and finding the link(s) for the most recent download(s) and manually installing each and every single app you need (you may have local copies of the installers for your apps but are they up-to-date?)
* 50+ times clicking 'Next'
Interestingly, I'm in the opposite boat as the parent
2.62^5=123
123*0.81= 99.63
so if we keep up at this rate, Linux will own 99.6% of the desktop market in 5 years.
No Wonder why Bill Gates is soiling his pants worrying about Linux.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
0.81% of people using Desktop computers read Slashdot.
First of all, the whole "is this the year of Linux" is getting kind of old. Linux will be a big desktop OS when it is as easy to use as windows (Not in its own way, but actually works like windows!). My pet peeve is the "setup.exe" which is found on the download page of any application homepage, and will work on any (well) windows system. Package managers can help, but they will never completely replace the "setup.exe" found on the website.
What is working in favor of linux on the other hand, is the mounting number of operating systems that people have to use on a daily basis. A cellphone can multitask, my cable set-top-box is a linux device and so on. People are getting more used to new interfaces, and alternative ways of doing things. Things people don't consider to even be computers, are teaching them that there is more to computers than windows.
At the risk of making a "me too" post, Ubuntu also installed fine for me on my Lenovo laptop, including some things which I'd been led to believe were likely to prove problematic (e.g. sound). In fact, the only issue I have is with my USB soundcard using Amarok, where it jumps back to playing via the onboard soundcard between tunes.
Aside from that, the water is lovely.
I visited your Autopackage web site. I was quite impressed by the way you were able to figure out a set of simple instructions, understandable by grandma, that would work for most distros.
Once you can get the user to run a given application, the app itself can take over and be as user-friendly as you want, but the tricky part is to get them to run the app in the first place, using instructions that don't involve compromising the security of their Linux system. Your 4-step instructions, which don't involve any command line, was suitably impressive. You've figured out how to formulate the instructions so that it is consistent across the KDE and GNOME interfaces. (Having two possible desktop environments is a bit of hassle, isn't it, when it comes to giving user instructions?) And, even if the user fumbles around a lot and just happens to randomly succeed in getting Autopackage installed, from then on Autopackage is installed and s/he won't need to do it again.
In doing research for writing this reply, I learned about Zero Install from Wikipedia. This is also a distro-independent way to install software. Reading through the instructions, I see that it looks like you have to install the Zero Install launcher first, and then from then on you can install software. I think this is not as good as Autopackage, in which (apparently) the software installer comes with each and every package itself, so that grandma user doesn't need to do a separate step; just download TheSoftwarePackageIWant, and it will already set up Autopackage. (Presumably it's a stub that downloads the full Autopackage installer only if necessary, to save space?) Nevertheless, Zero Install is also a worthwhile system for allowing users to install software without waiting for the distro maintainers to do it.
Now, Klik is slightly different; as I understand it, it actually downloads and runs the program from a RAM disk, almost Knoppix-style (the last K in K.L.I.K used to stand for Knoppix). Very handy, from the developer standpoint, in establishing a way to temporarily install software in a consistent environment. That doesn't really matter to grandma users, though, and the main disadvantage I see for Klik is the complex first step that will turn lay users off: you have to get to a terminal (already a big hurdle) and then type in:
wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh
But wait! If you run k/Ubuntu, first you have to type
sudo apt-get install binutils libstdc++5 rpm gnome-about
Not very user-friendly at all. (Granted, I don't think the goal of Klik is necessarily to be user-friendly.)
So, for the three systems, Autopackage, Zero Install, and Klik, I think Autopackage comes out the winner in terms of ease of posting instructions on the software author's web site. In other words, suppose I wrote a SuperDuper program that I want to give/sell to non-geek users of all sorts of Linux distros. Autopackage would best let my users download and run my software, without needing to send them to the actual web site for Autopackage / Zero Install / Klik itself.
Also, Autopackage and Zero Install have very friendly web pages, for when people do need to check them out. Klik has a very busy web page that's intimidating to new users, and, much as I hate to say this as a KDE fan, typical of how KDE is more for the technically minded people who want the dazzling array of switches and blinking lights, and not for the lay user who just wants to get things done.
But I'm impressed with the way packages can be basically distro independent now. I no longer think that having different packages is so much of an issue, and the software author who writes The Killer App (e.g. some cool game) no longer needs to wait for the distro maintainers in order to distribute the software.
All we need now is to spread th
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Since we installed Ubuntu, the only thing she has needed help for was finding appropriate software with Synaptic - mainly to save time, since she knows how to use the search function on it. She knows that all the updates are 'OK', and not a thing has gone wrong with her installation for over a year now. She is confident to take her laptop anywhere without needing to know if there is a "computer guru" around to help if something goes wrong.
Our time is worth more than just money. Time spent fixing a broken computer is time spent away from the kids. Ubuntu was free, but the profits from stability and usability over XP have been immeasurable for us.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I think people are being a bit too hard on Linux. For one thing, it hasn't been a viable choice for most people until recently. The lack of available software and the user-unfriendly interface made it a non-starter for that majority of the population who can barely operate their DVD player.
It's not quite time for Linux and Open Source yet, but that time is coming. It will be here when:
1. The next generation of Linux comes out.
Linux isn't quite user-friendly enough yet, but it's getting there fast. A lot of us who view the computer as a tool, not a hobby, have invested time and effort into learning to "work under the hood" enough to make Windows behave. We won't throw that knowledge away and re-learn a bunch of tricks for Linux until we have no other choice. I personally auditioned Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and decided I'll stay with XP Pro 'til the bitter end. My next OS will almost certainly be Linux, though.
2. Microsoft gets serious about stopping Windows piracy.
If you include grey areas, there's probably more illegal copies of Windows out there than legal ones. It's foolish to talk about free Linux versus expensive Windows when the real choice is between free legal Linux (which you've never used) and free illegal Windows (which looks and acts a lot like the outdated Windows OS you're using now). And let's face it, your odds of being penalized for using a pirated copy of Windows are about the same as your chances of getting into a three-way with Jessica Alba and Angelina Jolie.
3. Microsoft takes the next big step down the road towards Big Brother.
One of the major failings of Vista is how much of your computer's resources it spends trying to keep tabs on you and call home to report. The next logical step would be some kind of leased operating system that allows Microsoft to channel you towards certain companies and organizations that affiliate with it. Turning off Windows Update would not be an option. (A poorly-done version of what I mean can be found in the IPhone/AT&T arrangement).
If my only choice today was between buying Vista and a whole new computer to run it (my current box is a P3 that works just fine, thank you very much) and spending a few hours installing Linux (free) and appropriate software (free)...well, I'd already be sending Bill a "Kiss My Bum" letter and learning Ubuntu.
Please pull this out and wave it under my nose if I'm proven wrong but I would bet that Linux will be found on a really significant number of personal computers within 5 years. If Microsoft doesn't make some big changes, I see Linux and Apple snarling at each other over the smelly corpse of Vista Next Generation five - 10 years after that.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
People who think Linux costs $0.00 IMHO think their time is worth $0.00
I have used linux off and on for the last 10 years or so. I have yet to encounter an install that worked 100% perfect out of the "box". Some installs were darn close, but I always ended up in strange forums from google searches to try and get some aspect working properly.
Windows is only $400 if your time is free. Out of the box windows does nothing of interest to me aside from a (with XP) very old web browser, and requires a lot of patching and suplementary programs to get to a working state. When something doesn't work in windows (at work I had an issue with connecting a Windows 2000 SP2 box to a Windows 2003 Cluster, the supplier wont support SP4, so I ended up connecting to a linux box which has the share mounted, worked first time. My linux laptop connects to the cluster fine. Found lots of spam webpages, and several forums with people asking the same question, but nothing of any use, in 3 hours of searching.
Out of the box linux does pretty much everything I want. I spend all day with computers at work, when I get home I was simple things, email, web browser, watching video, listening to music. I don't want to deal with patches, virus scanning, personal firewalls, adware etc.
When I buy a new machine, it takes about 4 hours to clean the crap off a windows install, bring it uptodate, install essentials like anti virus, anti spyware, not to mention driver problems when I plug something in.
Ubuntu is a 30 minute install from a CD that I do on the train on the way into work (when I got a new laptop a few months ago)
Perhaps these things aren't windows' fault, but the point remains that as a home user, Windows takes a lot more time for admining (and installing) than linux.
Well, the OLPC XO is about to be spread across the globe, creating a generation of computer literates among the yet uncomputerized part of mankind.
They happen to be very very many and their first contact with computing will be Linux. Chances are that they will continue to use it. Expect that desktop distros that are similar to the XO will appear, since they are likely to want to remain in their familiar environment.
Also expect the market share to increase dramatically between 10-15 years from now - the time these kids need to grow up and get out of the crop fields and into newly made offices and make homes of their own with desktop computers of their own, as the poor world gets less poor.
A more buggy superset.
But quite ok for a desktop, if you happen to like their defaults.
Rethinking email
You've got it exactly backwards. The first thing to get rid of is the Microsoft activedirectory. There's lots of commercially supported versions of samba from lots of companies. Novell has a good one. I'm sure redhat does too. From there, anything is possible.
I'm running two AD domains with Linux servers getting their authentication from the AD machines. It's easy and works flawlessly despite microsoft's nasty hacks to both LDAP and kerberos.
1. install kerberos client.
2. A couple of changes to some files in pam.d.
3. Join server to domain.
4. Replicate AD users. (just the one's you want)
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
yeah, I do the same thing
apt-get is just so easy to use that I do a minimal Debian install, deselecting even the carefully put-together "desktop", "server", etc options, then install whatever is necessary on the machine as time goes on
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Right, so you pointed to a couple of not very well known tools and plenty of forums slagging you off, great.
/opt/CISngtool, but feel free to download a fresh copy to make sure it hasnt been tampered with.
/etc/X11/xdm/gdm.conf and /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf
Where's the answer to the direct question regarding the CIS tool you were asking me to run?
So i ran the cis tool on a downloaded SUSE vmware image, followed the cis guide and got a score of 90.86, which beats your score or 86 or so.
I could have continued and got a higher score, but why bother? You said you'd eat your words if someone posted a score higher than your 86, so i'm waiting.
You can see the results here:
http://enigma.ev6.net/benchmark-report.html
And if you want more proof, and are willing to download a *LARGE* file, the vmware image will be on
http://enigma.ev6.net/vmware-suse-cis.tar.bz2
Wait a while for it to upload, its big... check back tomorrow!
The CIS tool is installed in
A few notes about the cis benchmark tool, which is an absolute pile of toss btw:
The check for gdm is broken, looks for both
The check for bastille is broken, modern versions have an uppercase B in the package name, the guide even tells you to install one of these versions.
Many parts of this benchmark are broken, and assume something to be more secure if it's installed and configured in a particular way, rather than not installed at all. The gdm config for instance, fails if it can't find the config, even if the gdm package is not installed at all (and thus the config would be redundant in any case).
I could go on, but why bother. I beat your score, i am uploading a vmware image as proof which is more than you ever did for your rather feeble score of 86. I could quite easily get a much higher score than 90, but as i said i stopped at the point by which you said you'd eat your words.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
'A more buggy superset.'
Apparently I've missed them. I haven't seen any bugs in Ubuntu that aren't in every distribution using the packages. The actual Ubuntu specific parts are more stable and functional than I've seen in any other distribution.
You know, I was trying to help you get your message out to a broader audience; you complained that noone responded to your posts, and I tried to explain why.
IHBT.
WRONG! Ubuntu's driver process can be simplified to one step, so long as you have purchased hardware on which Linux is guaranteed to run:
1) Install it.
Now, if you have esoteric hardware, it takes a little more effort.
1) Open up Add/Remove Programs or Synaptic.
2) Enter part of the device name.
3) Double-click on the package with the driver.
The only time I have had to ever drop into a terminal to install a new driver was with an ATI card, because I couldn't be arsed to figure out how to use their restricted driver setup and I already had the ATI binary driver installer downloaded.
Or just run setup.exe
And hope you haven't downloaded a trojan, because you have very little way to verify security.
Then after you do have that driver then how to you access it?
Uh...uhm...it does it for you, maybe?!
Linux Software bundle isn't always that great. With Stupid Naming schemes GIMP (Who would think that is anything like Photoshop?) KSomething Gsomething all very confusing.
Except that your launcher menu in Ubuntu/Kubuntu and in openSuSE looks like this:
Gee, that looks so much harder than Windows! Do I need to go into the name retardage of Microsoft Excel? Microsoft Access? Microsoft Outlook?
...Except that this attitude is entirely absent on Ubuntu's forums, openSuSE's u
Grow up.
I can it was a couple of weeks ago. Some people are not into this Holy quest so if the site doesn't work then they will use something else. Besides all Windows users should be using Firefox due to its superiority to IE. what kind of crap is that. Sure I use firefox but, to say that everyone should no. Freedom people have the right to choose. and some peoples freedom doesn't like Firefox. Freedom means making your own choices not just following what someone else does.
Wrong again! Hey, fucker, your choices affect other people. People who use IE, whether intentionally to REFUTE TEH FIREFOX FANBOIYZZZZZZ or just because they don't know any better, damage others. Their computers are inherently less secure than they are even when they're just running Windows. This opens the door for botnets to crapflood other people. Their browsers don't implement CSS correctly, which means the rest of us must tolerate workarounds that waste our time and money in order to make it not look like liquefied diarrhea on Internet Exploder. It's not a "holy quest," it's "get the fuck off of broken shit." We don't care if you use Firefox or Opera or Safari, just don't fucking use Internet Explorer.
"Freedom people"? What are you smoking? (And they aren't "making [their] own choices", they usually don't realize they have a choice.)
It all depends on where you go a newbie can stumble on an expert site where they get the rude comments.
Or you use a distro that's newbie-friendly, such as Ubuntu/Kubuntu, where their IRC channel is packed with about two thousand users at any one time, most of whom can help you with almost anything. Their forums are also top-notch, and the distro itself funnels you to those places when you go to its help feature. If you're a newbie using Slackware, you deserve whatever the hell kind of "rude comments" you get, because you were too fucking dumb to do your research before blindly going "INSTALL! INSTALL!".
Or if you were not fixed on Linux is God then you will face more resistance.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
That was new to me. Thanks! :)
I have had just about the opposite experience, but I also did some research before building my own computer... mostly just buying trusted names in hardware, and never buying junk from some never heard of company with one product with no specifications or a web site. Mind you I acquired this hardwire all about the time it came out, but the features for my Asus K8V deluxe motherboard hardly worked under windows, worst of which was no support for my gigabit network card even under windows XP SP2. It also doesn't recognize either of the raids I had setup. This was a gaming machine, so I had to work around it, Never getting access to about 1 terabyte of storage. It also randomly crashed for no apparent reason (I have learned a lot more since about diagnosing bad RAM). Ubuntu 6.04 worked right "out of the box". It automatically found drivers that worked right on the CD (most all features under windows didn't work on default settings / drivers) for sound, video, ATA and SATA raids, and network card. The first time I tried Ubuntu I was up and running in about an hour after tweaking a few things just the way I liked it. I like to be rough on my machines. I had to wipe everything every few months for one reason or another and took a full weekend, and a lot of swearing... which is why after awhile I just stopped playing with the system, and just played games. I eventually made my own slip-streamed install specifically for my machine with all the crap taken out (like MSN Messenger) which meant I could get to a working clean install in an afternoon. By the time Ubuntu 7.04 came out, there was too much more interesting stuff to learn and play with that I even bother with traditional 'games'. I am more aggressive than ever tweaking away just to see what happens, and only having used it for just over a year, It has been many moths since I could do much of anything that would 1) hardlock the system 2) crash in such a way I couldn't repair quickly. The only time I reboot is every few kernel patches, or shutdown to save power. I'll never go back... and having to wait till gaming experience is similar between Windows and Linux... No bother, just looking forward to it. I consider my time valuable, and Windows is just too expensive for my needs.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
I didn't say they were "not critical," I said they were less critical than the vulnerabilities affecting windows. And Secunia agrees with me (I notice that your response conveniently ignores the statistics I gave from the "Criticality" section of Secunia's data).
Funny - privelege escalation can be used from a buffer overflow attack, & if the app involved solicits connections from remote rigs?"Privilege escalation" implies that you already have privileges; it requires the user to have an account on the machine before they can exploit it. I don't mean to say that it isn't critical, I'm just pointing out that it is less critical than the vulnerabilities affecting windows
This can be used remotely as an attack vector... & for remote system access because of privelege escalation via buffer overflow exploits (and it can escape chroot jails too if the author so writes it to do so as well).Not according to Secunia's data. They say that only 2% of linux kernel vulnerabilities can be used for system access. You're trying to twist their data to lump an extra 17% of vulnerabilities into that category. Read the advisories again.
Also, the 2nd most most common type of attack was denial of service (46%) per your own words...Is that not a remote attack as well, & one that can damage a site based on views/pagehits no longer being able to be made, to make money?
A denial of service may or may not be a remote attack. Clearly, not all linux DoS vulnerabilities are remote because 68% of its vulnerabilities were local and 46% of its vulnerabilities were denial of services.
Once again, I'm not claiming that a DoS is not critical; I'm claiming that its less critical than the vulnerabilities affecting windows. The most common windows vulnerability involves a rooted box; the most common (not the 2nd most, as you said above) linux vulnerability involves a denial of service.
(OR when you try to take on those stats on that clearly show Windows & its peripheral wares (IIS 6x & SQLServer 2005, both with 0 vulnerabilities found) has less vulnerabilities than Linux & Apache (and probably ANY backend DB engines it has as well, which I did not include)).Why are you trying to change the subject? I clearly pointed out that I was only addressing one aspect of your post (the aspect of your flawed data). Is it because you can't properly address the points that I did make? Anyway, I'll bite just this once.
Care to name one (a DB engine for Linux), so I can point out how much more vulnerable than SQLServer 2005 it is?PostgreSQL 8.x has 0 of 8 vulnerabilities left unpatched. Happy?
SECONDLY: I'd learn a BIT of comp. sci. before you attempt to interpret SECUNIA's findings above as you have... you are WAY off as to how they CAN be used, & yes, remotely... apkSecunia says that 19% of the linux kernel are remote vulnerabilities and I mentioned this specifically in my post. This clearly implies that not all of DoS vulnerabilities (that you are so quick to call remote vulnerabilities) are remote. If you want to argue with facts, I'd suggest you read all of the facts and stop twisting them.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. As I said in my post, 19% of linux vulnerabilities were remote exploits. In other words, I addressed the notion of remote versus local (and linux came out ahead, for what it's worth). Furthermore, I'm not aware that Secunia gives a statistical breakdown via attack vector (if it does, please point out where). As such, I don't know why you're talking about buffer overflows since their existence or otherwise cannot be derived from Secunia's data.
I'm sorry if I've missed your point because I don't understand what it was.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
I'm sorry, but you're coming across as a raving lunatic who is obsessed with this score that you managed to get on your tweaked 2k3 box. Bert is arguing that the test is flawed. It's simply really, address his argument in a rational way. Throwing out what amounts to a resume does nothing to prove that this test is right in giving a lower score machine without X than one with it.
You're freaking out here and it's making you look more akin to a thirteen year old in an AOL chat room than a world class expert that writes '110 % bugfree code'.
Unnecessary chime in by a neutral third party who couldn't care less who has the higher score or who is right.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
Without "cheating" as you put it, you could make a system far more secure and it would get a very low score on the cis test. I have already pointed out multiple flaws in this test and you have failed to answer them, why should anyone bother pointing out more when you have yet to answer the few that have been posted already?
// Funniest part is, ALL I ever asked for was a valid result from *NIX folks, & asking them to discuss where they felt this test was in error on their OS, & if possible, to share know-how.
// Think anyone believes you, now, Bert64... After you stated that which I quote from you above & your "VMWare testing methods" & PROBABLY PHOTOSHOP JOB ON YOUR "RESULTS", too??
You challenged people to get a higher score than you, which is what i have done, nowhere did you ask for the flaws to be pointed out, but that has also been done too, and now you are trying to backpedal.
But i will reiterate what i have said already.
CIS DOES NOT TEST "SECURITY", IT IS MERELY A COMPLIANCE TEST
Since you failed to understand that, CIS publish a set of configuration guidelines and this test merely checks if your system complies with these configuration guidelines. Because of the flexibility of linux, there are often multiple ways to achieve the same goals, and the cis guidelines only specify a small subset of those.
This is what i did the first time, my system scored 60.something, and i went through the points where it failed one by one and pointed out why they were incorrect, i write it in response to one of your posts in august. I wrote the response within 12 hours of your original post, but i can't locate it now because slashdot no longer lets me see my entire posting history.
As for cheating, i did not cheat, i merely implemented the configuration changes as specified by CIS. I wouldn't say the resulting box is as secure as it could be made, but it complies with the cis test 90%.
I notice from the web logs that you didn't bother downloading the test results, they are at:
http://enigma.ev6.net/benchmark-report.html
Nor did you download the vmware image, it is at:
http://enigma.ev6.net/vmware-suse-cis.tar.bz2
The fact you could only get 86%, even tho full instructions on how to comply with the cis configuration is supplied both as a PDF and within the output from the testing tool, suggests a high level of incompetence on your part. I am certain that a score of 100% would be easily achievable on any supported system, including windows. After all, someone at cis must have configured a machine in the described way when writing the test.
Before you accuse me of cheating, why don't you actually read the results and have a look at the 90% compliant machine?
This is the funniest part... Can i have a copy of your version of photoshop which edits HTML files and VMware images?
The results i submitted are in HTML format, that stands for "Hyper Text Markup Language" and is plain text with markup for formatting. When you run the CIS tool it creates output in HTML and XML formats, i chose to post the HTML form so it would be convenient to browse from the web.
Photoshop on the other hand is for editing IMAGE files, there are absolutely NO IMAGE FILES in the results I posted.
Obviously i could have edited the HTML results, but i would have done this using a TEXT EDITOR and not PHOTOSHOP. And because the HTML is so easy to change, i posted a vmware image so that you could verify the results.
So face it, your argument has been proven wrong and like a cocky little child, having been proven wrong your trying to deny ever making the argument in the first place. You remind me of someone i used to work with, he used to go away and cry when people would see through his bullshit.
Your writing style is very childish too, hardly what you'd expect from someone with supposedly 20+ years experie
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5 individual replies, i feel honored.
Have you no idea what vmware is?
It simulates a physical machine, no part of the cis test ever tests for being installed in a virtual. I could dd the vmware image to a physical host and get the exact same score. The reason i used a vmware image was so that you could download it and verify the results, but you obviously have no idea how vmware works so i dont hold much hope of you being able to actually run it.
You still think i used photoshop on an HTML file? I suggest you go and read photoshop for dummies...
And you still think i cheated? I did not "cheat" as you put it. Cheating would be to modify the test program (which is trivially easy to do, the test parameters are an xml file) or modify the results (in a text editor, not photoshop). Instead, i merely implemented the configuration changes suggested by the tool's output. Had you downloaded my vmware image you would be able to see that, but your more concerned with making yourself look stupid than actually try to prove your point.
I also did some searching around the information you posted earlier about yourself, and it seems you do this all over the place... Post garbage, cry like a spoilt child when your proven wrong. A very brief search on google basically makes you out to be a laughing stock with virtually nothing positive to be said about you.
I haven't read any of the articles you mentioned, simply because they are in old printed magazines which are at least several years old. It seems that some years ago you at least had some respect and a few worthwhile tools published, it's sad to see how far you've sunk and i truly feel sorry for you. I would liken you to SCO, once respected but due to some back luck, stupidity, errors etc, you've become a laughing stock that everyone looks down upon and pities.
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So you bring it back to the point that closed source stifles innovation, where i quoted several reasons for this.
Not one of those reasons made any reference to being able to reverse engineer the code, I made several other points none of which you have addressed.
Instead you have fabricated a point that I didn't make, and then used that to try and argue against me. Have you got mental problems or are you just trying to be annoying? I really do pity someone who's so incapable of intelligent debate as to fabricate both sides of an argument himself.
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Now come on, all you can do is accuse me of cheating without having downloaded the vmware image to prove how i cheated. As i said before, i simply followed the recommendations within the cis tool itself. If you would bother to read the output, you would find that it actually provides COMMANDS WHICH YOU CAN CUT AND PASTE alongside any "fail" results, have you ever even tried running it on a unix system? Did you even bother reading the HTML which i posted?
/etc/init.d/$FILE stop /bin/false $USERID
Behold:
3.6 Disable Standard Boot Services Check Type: Status:
OVAL5 Failed
Description
Action:
for FILE in apache2 apache apmd autofs fbset gpm hotplug \
hwscan joystick lpd mars-new named nfs portmap smb snmpd \
ypbind ypserv yppasswdd; do
chkconfig $FILE off
done
for USERID in lp apache named mysql; do
usermod -L -s
done
Discussion:
If you merely execute the commands posted in the HTML output, you will usually achieve a pass in that area.
You challenged people to point out flaws in the cis test? not to me you didnt, but here you go anyway:
1.5 Install and Run Bastille
Current versions of bastille (3.x and higher) have an upper case B in the package name, the cis tool checks for it's presence with a lowercase b (as version 2.x) but the tool tells you to install 3.x
2.2 Configure TCP Wrappers and Firewall to Limit Access
It checks for the presence of tcp wrappers, most people use firewalls instead of tcp wrappers these days as theyre less susceptible to dos attacks, the tool doesnt check for firewalls
5.1 Capture Messages Sent To Syslog AUTHPRIV Facility
Modern linux systems no longer use syslog, preferring to use a superior alternative such as syslog-ng, the cis tool checks only for a syslog config,
5.2 Turn On Additional Logging For FTP Daemon
It also says to turn *OFF* ftp.. I would remove ftp completely, in which case the configuration file enabling logging wouldnt be present and this test would fail.
5.3 Confirm Permissions On System Log Files
This test explicitely tests the permissions of several system log files, and will fail if the permissions are wrong or those files DONT EXIST... if you run something other than syslog, or dont run all of the log-generating programs (as the cis test recommends) then the files wont exist and you'l fail.
5.4 Configure syslogd to Send Logs to a Remote LogHost
same as 5.1
7.2 Create ftpusers Files
What is the point of this if you dont run ftp, cis recommend you dont run ftp but then demand that you create an ftpusers file (which would be redundant without ftp running)
7.3 Prevent X Server From Listening On Port 6000/tcp
this checks for the presence of certain configuration files too, not only that but it checks for the exact formatting within those files, a space or a comment in the wrong place and it fails. I would secure a server by removing X11, in which case it wouldnt be listening on port 6000, cis would fail me for this even tho not having X at all is more secure.
7.4 Restrict at/cron To Authorized Users
I never run at/atd, therefore the cis would fail on my systems due to the lack of an at.deny/at.allow, i would probabl configure cron by setting permissions on the executable rather than using cron.allow/deny as this is more secure (you cant execute it at all, vs the crontab program executing and following the code path to parse the cron.deny file)
7.6 Configure xinetd Access Control
not running xinetd at all is surely more secure than configuring it in any way, cis test fails if this configuration is not found
7.11 Only Enable syslog To Accept Messages If Absolutely Necessary
see 5.1
9.2 Create Warnings For GUI-Based Logins
this requires warning banners to be configured for all the graphical login programs, if you dont have them installed the config files wont exist so you fail.
Many of the tests are also flawed in that they check for particularly for
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The point I was trying to make is that the number of security vulnerabilities is not as important as the type and criticality of the security vulnerabilities. That's why my original post gave a relatively detailed breakdown (which you seem to have ignored) showing that the vulnerabilities of Windows 2003 are more serious than the vulnerabilities of Linux 2.6.
As for web servers and database servers, you may be right; I thought I made it clear on more than one occasion that the purpose of my post was to point out a flaw in the original poster's argument, not to get into a Linux vs. Windows flamewar.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
When doing security work of any kind, the companies you work for don't like the information being made public. I don't want or need people on slashdot knowing who i am, so i am quite happy for people to believe i'm unemployed.
Also what you call "proof" merely proves that someone exists, it doesnt prove that the user on slashdot is the same person as mentioned on the sites posted.
Why is vmware not legitimate? Many companies run a large number of servers under vmware these days. How exactly does being executed under vmware make a difference to the cis test? If you can show me a valid reason why vmware makes a difference i will re-run it on native hardware. I used vmware so i could post the image online, so that the results could be verified.
Yes obviously html can be edited, you should be smart enough to realise that for yourself without me having to point it out. Again, i posted the vmware image online for the express purpose of allowing people to verify that this wasnt the case. Did you bother to do so?
I stated that closed source stifles progress, and then listed a number of reasons why i believe that to be the case. I did not list the ability to find bugs as a reason. None of the replies have addressed any of the reasons that i did post, and have completely strayed from the point. If you believe any of the original reasons i posted are not valid, please explain why. They were (in a nutshell):
Cant port to new architectures, vendors wont until there are users, users wont use the new arch until there is software, this has contributed greatly to the failure of ia64 and the slow transition from 16->32 bit.
You have only one proper source of support
If vulnerabilities / bugs are found, only one vendor can really fix them
Incidentally, i believe you are apk. Few other people would bother still reading this story, your just trying to fool me into thinking your not a single pathetic loser.
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I will quote the original post i made, which you are seemingly unable to read:
----
Closed source is negative because it stifles progress...
Each vendor has to reinvent the wheel, and can't legally learn from the others. With open source you can reuse other people's code and build upon it. Closed source ensures that only vendors with enough cash to develop a complete application can enter the market, with open source it's easy to build upon an existing project.
Smaller companies or individuals who want particular features have very little chance of getting them in a closed source world, they would have to pay whatever fees a given vendor demanded *if* that vendor was even willing. With open source sufficiently capable people can implement those features, while other people can hire coders to do it for them.
New hardware architectures are far less likely to succeed, just look at IA64 as an example, failing miserably even with the backing of Intel and HP, because people can't run their closed-source apps on it. And vendors won't port those apps until there's a market, thus you have a catch-22. Therefore processor makers are constrained by choices Intel made 30 years ago, as they try to develop new chips while maintaining compatibility. As another example, Apple had to spend considerable time and effort on Rosetta to allow legacy PPC apps to run on their Intel based Macs. In an open source world many of those apps could be easily recompiled, and doing so for a large number of them would probably have taken Apple less time and effort than writing rosetta.
There's also the matter of trust, some large companies and governments are paranoid and want to see the source code and actually build it (so they can be 100% sure the binaries they have came from the source they've seen). A lot of people are equally paranoid, and some of them do have the capability to audit and compile the source.
Long term support - closed source software is at the mercy of it's vendor, so there is a chance of the product being discontinued, or the source code being lost. Users of closed source software have no fallback in situations like these.
Multi vendor support - with the source open, any vendor can begin providing support services around an open source application, customers are free to choose the vendor and support package that suits them, instead of being stuck with a single source of support. As a consequence, vendors are forced to compete. If you want a commercially supported linux you have plenty of choices, for commercially supported windows you have only one source.
Less lock-in, with open source you are far less likely to find your data locked away in a secret format known only to one company.
There are many negatives associated with closed source, and virtually no positives as far as the customers are concerned. If you have evidence to the contrary i'd like to hear it.
----
And i was replying to an anonymous poster who said:
----
Explain how closed source is so negative? Sure, you don't have the option of multiple people looking at things and fixing bugs, but when it comes to an end user only thing, does that really matter?
Be serious with yourself here - no mom-and-pop is gonna see "ooh, this program has a bug, we better look at the source and fix it" - at BEST you'd find then posting, on a forum, the bug, and someone else fixing it. Other times, they just deal with the bug and continue.
*** how long are we going to have to wait for the big breakthrough?" ***
There won't ever be a big breakthrough until there are games out SOLELY for Linux systems that can compete against the mainstream games out there nowadays....games that make people WANT to run linux and NEED to run it in order to play the games.
Once that happens, then you'll see your breakthrough.
Too bad we'll all be dead before it happens.
----
Can you point out where i talked about finding vulnerabilities/bugs? The AC i posted to mentioned it, I mentioned seve
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Ok...
/etc/permissions.local, or the suse specific locations for configuration files. The actual goals sought to be achieved by the tests are for the most part implemented on this system, just not in the same way as the cis test expects, for instance:
// I could not understand in your init. post HOW ON EARTH you could say that "closed source stifles progress", & especially vs. those looking for security holes in code...
I still fail to see how vmware can have any effect on the things tested by the cis tool... None of the things tested would be in any way effected by the use of vmware, in which case creating a vmware image was both much quicker.
As i noted, a default install of SUSE 10.3 gets a score of around 60, i forget the exact number.
The issues you have with windows 2003 are very similar to things i encountered with suse 10, in that the tool was intended for an earlier version and things have changed. In the case of suse it's possible to comply with the test by rolling back the applications it fails on (bastille, syslog etc) although this actually decreases security while increasing your test score.
You mention Ubuntu and SELinux, the cis test doesn't support Ubuntu. It only supports SUSE 9 and aparrently RedHat, but i couldn't get the RH version working. That said, i did run the suse test on a gentoo box and the results are here:
http://enigma.ev6.net/result2.html
The score was 46, and is incredibly misleading, most of the tests fail because they cannot find suse specific files such as
3.4 Disable GUI Login If Possible Failed
I don't have any form of GUI installed on the system whatsoever, no X11 nothing.
But i have no doubt that an install of suse 9 could get a 100% score simply by cutting+pasting the help provided in the html output. I would imagine windows 2000 or any other supported os would be exactly the same. However I'm also certain that i could configure suse 9 in a more secure way but which would fail this test.
I believe suse 9 supports selinux by default btw, tho it's not enabled and the cis test doesnt make any mention of it.
-----
I said in the original post how closed source stifles progress, not in relation to bug finding, but in relation to several other points. Your points about bug finding are correct, it is easier to find bugs but also easier to fix them too. This can be a plus or down side depending on who you are, what your requirements are and who you're scared of etc. It's also important to remember that not all bugs are security related, a majority of them have no security impact whatsoever but are still incredibly annoying to users.
I would say that overall it's a plus to have the source, because blackhats will search for bugs in any case, but with the bugs being easier to find the chance of white hats finding and fixing those bugs is also higher. Then you have the advantage that you and/or others can fix non security related "annoying" bugs.
You are also missing out on another interesting point. With closed source there will only be a small number of "builds", so the memory layout will often be the same or predictable. Conversely, programs compiled by hand can be compiled in many different ways, different compiler flags, different configure options, making an exploit coder's work that much harder.
I _NEVER_ made the point your trying to argue against, please reread the original post. It stifles the general advancement of computing as a whole. Although finding and fixing bugs could also be considered a form of advancement too.
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I doubt they would care about vmware, while it is emulation of a kind it emulates the hardware so the os can run unmodified. Perhaps paravirtualization like xen, or even higher level virtualization like virtuozzo would have more of an impact.
Even so, vmware esx is very commonly used in server deployments these days so it is a perfectly valid configuration to test.
The windows test is much larger, this is mostly to do with windows itself being a far more complex beast.. It has layers upon layers of backwards compatibility cruft, many instances where multiple APIs do the same thing in slightly different ways or with slightly different options etc. Unix by contrast runs off a simple philosophy, everything is a file and is accessed through the single VFS layer, and it has always been like this. By having a good design in the first place, they've not needed to fundamentally change anything in an incompatible way.
This also brings up another point against closed source, had windows and the apps running atop it being open source, the old backwards compatible apis could have been removed long ago as programs could easily have been updated to use the newer apis instead.
As to why the default install is so weak, it's because people are lazy. They want everything to work out of the box with no hassle to configure (and hence why they dont bother turning off the default crap most of the time). That said, the diversity of open source operating systems has resulted in plenty of distributions which do have a secure-by-default approach, but these have limited mass market appeal for the reason stated above. Windows by contrast tries to be one size fits all, and thus caters to the largest body of users (the lazy ones).
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The backwards compatibility cruft is only necessary because the original system it's intended to be backwards compatible with was so poorly designed to begin with...
Linux is backwards compatible at the binary level to the early 1.x series kernels (tho support for a.out binaries is optional nowadays), many distributions don't include the necessary backwards compatibility libraries anymore primarily because most programs are distributed as source and thus simply get recompiled, but there's nothing to stop you loading older libs.
It's also source compatible to a large number of even older systems, I have C code that was originally written for old unixes running on vax systems which can still be compiled and executed on modern linux, because the source API for unix has largely remained compatible.
Contrast with the windows API which differs hugely between releases, but also keeps the old incompatible APIs on newer versions, and cant easily be removed even if people don't intend to run older programs.
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I dont know much about delphi/kylix, tho i do seem to remember about kylix having been discontinued some time ago... Does it abstract the native api in a way similar to say java?
// I.E.-> As long as the .h files called between platforms ported to work fully & don't overlook things like registry vs. config files under etc. for instance, or sockets diff.'s that exist between diff. OS (how they use them), OR drive letters (Ms stuff) vs. mounted devices (NIX for example).
And much code isn't written in such languages,
This example is interesting, i often have to write cross platform code, and it basically boils down to:
Every major os except windows has a standard way to do something, windows has a different way
You talk about backwards compatibility being a blessing in relation to dos, but it's really not...
Have you ever looked at iBCS (intel binary compatibility system), it's a fairly old program for linux that lets you execute non-native binaries, and it stems from the days when linux was very new and sco was the dominant x86 unix and thus most closed source apps were compiled for it. iBCS allowed you to execute alien binaries (eg sco) under linux, and worked by remapping the sco system calls to their linux equivalents. This was relatively easy because the apis were so similar, and even worked for older (16bit) unix binaries.
By contrast, dos is wildly different from current versions of windows, dos was pretty much a hack and had to be replaced, they couldnt simply continue to use the same apis. The unix apis on the other hand, while being far from perfect are still much cleaner and better designed, and hence why they've lasted so long. Even today it's possible to run linux binaries on freebsd and solaris, for the same reason as before - linux is now the biggest x86 unix and gets the lions share of the closed source apps.
Attempts to remap the windows api (wine) still dont work very well, even after many thousands of man hours of coding time.
As to the cleanliness of windows apis, the first example i can pull off the top of my head is winsock.. current versions of windows support at least 2 different winsock apis, from winsock.h and ws2_32.h. They both do much the same thing, and both still work for basic socket operations. this is just pure cruft, and wouldnt have been needed if whoever decided to write winsock2 had felt winsock1 was well designed enough in the first place that it could be updated rather than scrapped and replaced.
By contrast, linux has gone through several tcp stack implementations (arent they now upto net4?) but the api has remained constant, and there is never more than 1 api and 1 backend implementation at a time. And even so, i can take a program i compiled many years ago on redhat 4 using a 2.0.x kernel (net2) and run it on a current system with a 2.6.x kernel (net4)
Unix apis may get extended for new functionality, but the developers dont generally feel the old api is so flawed it cant be updated, and better to replace it from scratch (and have to leave the old one there unmodified for backwards compatibility)
All this extra complexity, legacy cruft and multiple revisions of apis floating around doesn't help security or performance either...
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