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Where Linux Gained Ground in 2007
christian.einfeldt writes "Computer scientist and media maven Roy Schestowitz takes a look at platforms where GNU Linux gained the most ground in 2007. In a thorough review which is the first of a two-part series, Schestowitz looks at trends in supercomputers, mobile phones, desktops, low-end laptops and tablets, consoles, media players and set-top boxes. Schestowitz finds that GNU Linux solidified its dominant grip on supercomputers; made huge gains in low-end laptops and tablets; won major OEM and retail support on the desktop; gained new entries into game consoles; and also spawned new businesses in set-top boxes while holding its ground in pre-existing product lines. He sums it all up by saying that '2007 will be remembered as the year when GNU/Linux became not only available, but also properly preinstalled on desktops and laptops by the world's largest companies.'"
running homebrew in wii mode was demonstrated at the CCC congress. check the video about the xbox360 security breakeage
it doesn't (yet) run linux, though.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
While I too doubt the estimate that the number of users running Linux has doubled in 2007, I don't doubt it by much. I know that between 1/1 2007 and 12/31 2007 I have seen more new people install and run Linux than any other year in my memory, and I have not seen any of them abandon it after a few weeks or days. The very fact that user survey participation on Linux specific sites has more than doubled is a strong sign that, even if the actual number of users didn't double, at least the number of people interested in it has, and that's big. If only Dell would take their Ubuntu machines off of the separate page and let us install it on more than two models as a drop down alternative to Vista/XP (with a big warning dialog to scare clueless buyers away from a product they probably don't want) I think 2008 would definitely see the number of Linux desktops double.
Just as importantly, I've seen a massive move toward non-MS products even on Windows machines. My college has Firefox installed on virtually every machine, and I can't even remember the last time I saw an open IE window; I've even seen a few installs of OpenOffice next to Office 2007 on the least frozen machines. The more cross platform apps gain steam, the less reason anyone has to pay the Microsoft tax, and the less likely people are to actually do so.
So yes, doubled is probably an exaggeration, but it's definitely been a banner year for (GNU/)Linux and FOSS in general.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The biggest drawback for Linux isn't the platform or OS, it's all those dumbass Klingon sounding names for the applications. Fix that - and for god sake don't make people use a perl script to install it - and you might be able to claim more inroads into general public market share. People don't WANT to use Linux, more people just don't want to use Windows because they've realized how treacherous it is. The iron is hot.
For that reason, your instincts are good for OS X because I've seen many people switch off the Windows platform in 2007 and never look back. They love their Macs mostly because the OS leaves them alone to work plus they've discovered all the software that comes with it. If you are the kind of person who can install any Linux flavor and be able to answer the question "ok, now what?" then Linux is for you. That excludes the vast majority of people who just want to use a computer.
Most of the stuff on
Article nor the summary says that.
Google is your friend... I'm being general.
Unix is not important to me, I also don't think the majority of people who use Linux, use it because they want something Unixy.
Wow... well, I think you just might be wrong there.
Tons of high quality third party applications and you are going to mention OS X? Can I have what you are smoking?
What do people do most of the time? Photo editing, surfing, word processing, spread sheets, movie watching, music playing, IM, email and gaming. Adobe Creative Suite, Omniweb (very nice app, by the way) - Firefox - Safari (not great), MS Office, Apple office suite (very very slick, IMO), Quicktime with codecs (quite nice, in fact), iTunes (not great, but not bad), Apple Mail (very nice app), various IM progs are all pretty decent, games... I don't play games, so I don't comment. You've got great interoperability in these apps, drag and drop is superb, man... it all just works.
But as well, how about artists? Incredible audio app support like no other. Most of the apps that windows has (and some it doesn't) but supported in an OS that understands how these things should be done - CoreAudio and CoreMidi - not bolted on by some third party guys after the fact. It's integrated and works extremely well. People are tossing out their synthesizers and studio gear for a powerful Mac and their favourite apps, and they're not afraid to take the gear on stage. Try this stuff with a linux box... I still have my wife using a linux box and she can't even get her email to work right because people send her attachments that are *still* a bitch to read on a Linux box, and I am not about to put in the effort to get it all working right... I've grown very tired of doing that stuff.
But! If I were to choose a system for Unix capability, I would choose windows over OS X...
For Unix compatibility, you would choose a non-Unix over a Unix... Thanks for playingThis sig used to be really funny...
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
That's a brilliant observation and it's one I tend to overlook, but you're totally right. People don't necessarily want to use Linux, OSX, freebsd, Joe's OS, but they simply are tired of using Windows and desperately need an alternative. OSX doesn't immediately run on their Windows hardware, so the next choice is Linux.
Thanks for the insight.
This sig used to be really funny...
1) running Windows games on Linux
I've personnal experience of playing GuildWars flawlessly under Linux using Cedega. Cedega also supports World of Warcraft and other games making it probably much better than Wine (well, I should check on this one, lots of progress have been done) and CrossOver Office (which wasn't meant for games in the first place)
About Linux commercial games, you forgot about NeverWinterNights, and some promising products like Planeshift. And the upcoming "project Apricot" (Blender Foundation and CrystalSpace).
2) Audio
Very few sound engineers rely on only ONE program. Most of the time, they switch from one to another depending on the task they've to do. Don't forget that SAE is behind Ardour... They would not lose their time and money with it if it was useless...
3) compatibility
Linux rely on some standard components like openGL, X11 and the kernel. If you want to distribute some closed source binary, you may statically link those libraries which may be a problem.
Source distribution don't have many problems thanks to the autoconf and automake.
Did you already try to run some old Windows 3.1 softwares on Windows XP or Vista ? Often, Windows 98 applications don't run under Windows 2000 or XP.
4) ESD, aRTS, JACK,...
Well, ESD was GNOME, aRTS was KDE and JACK was for Realtime with low latency... You forgot about OSS and ALSA, GNOME/KDE and lots of other similar duplicate efforts.
GNU/Linux is also about choice... something lots of people have forgotten since the old ages...
COMMAND.COM or 4DOS.COM ?
Sound Blaster or GUS (now, most of the time, it's the onboard sound card)
EMM386 or QEMM386 ?
If you're "computer illiterate", you don't mind about what's installed and go with what the system install (aRTS, ESD, what are those things ?)
If you know what you're doing, well, you will choose the one which suits the best your needs...
I agree that there is still lots of place for improvement, but when I look back to the old time of Linux 0.99pl10, yggdrasil (CDROM) or SLS/Slockware/MCC (floppy) installs, the X11 Config file to build by hand (with a calculator and the specs of your monitor), very basic keyboard support (US qwerty, FR azerty and DE qwertzu, nothing more),... the way behind is much bigger than the way ahead...
Lately, I had to install a brand new computer in dual-boot Windows/Linux. Linux didn't need any extra driver but Windows needed lots of extra drivers (Video, sound, network,...). Security updates were also much faster to install under linux (and they included lots of apps, unlike Windows)... So, unless you need some specific software or plan to use the computer for gaming, Linux is going to become a better choice than Windows... Truly PnP !!!
All I can say here is that you seem to be missing the point. It's not that such things don't exist, they certainly do. All of the different types, the different implementations and flavours are all very nice and fun to have, but they simply don't measure up - they *really* don't. OSX CoreAudio and CoreMIDI are engineered properly. There's only one choice and you only need one choice. It's fast, it's clear and concise, it requires ZERO (read that word very carefully and then ask yourself how much work is required for any of the linux variants) user intervention to work with, there are no "interesting" bits of information that need to be known or configured, or tweaked and played with... etc etc...
Musicians write and perform music and the apps themselves are designed to let them do that with a minimum of hassle. Do you really think that any pro musician wants to spend any time whatsoever setting up the OS audio, let alone even having to choose which audio code to run, when OSX requires nothing of the sort and outperforms Linux anyways? I think that's the point of this whole thread (and others)... Linux may not have missed the boat here, since time is fluid and who knows what the future will bring, but OSX has given the Linux community what it's been craving for years - Unix on the Desktop - and it did it while the Linux community is still trying to figure out how to do it. Closed source simply did the better job here - it does happen. Apple could ignore any hardware issues since they controlled everything, and they could focus on the job at hand. OSS has much more "cowboy" related hardware issues to tackle, and it's not nearly as focused - OSS writes "everything" while closed source writes "something".
Who the hell could be surprised at the outcome?
This sig used to be really funny...
I think you're close, but not fully there. If Dell gave users an option to install both with dual boot setup easily (which might require license haggling), it could be bigger. "No worries, if Linux isn't good for you, switch back to Windows by rebooting!" It's working for Mac, isn't it?
For context, click Parent.
[quote]Making software that works right out of the box requires a grown up sitting at a desk working their ass off 40 hours a week getting paid a nice fat wage.[/quote]
This is why most of the best open source software is written by people who work for a company which derives its profit from elsewhere.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
And yet, we're not "waiting on Linux". We're using it on our desktops today. What does that say?
I saw a NeXT cube when I was in college, and I thought it was the greatest computer ever
I realize that if you've been setting up hundreds of Linux boxes, you're probably just ranting, and want nothing more to do with something called "Linux" no matter how good it is. I could tell you that these days it's pretty much "insert Ubuntu installer CD, reboot, press return" (you don't even have to give away personal data like on the Mac), but you wouldn't hear me. That's OK. We'll still be here in 20 years if you ever decide to come back.
"Linux" is not a single operating system, it is just a kernel. The kernel can be run without GNU utils, without X11, etc.
Palm trees and 8
How about this, then: for the first time in ten years of using Linux, I was asked by someone else to install it. In fact, two different people requested it. That' definitely different
Put identity in the browser.
Booted with Ubuntu 7.10 CD. Network and proper wide resolution just work.
Wiped everything and installed iATKOS (hacked Mac OS X). It was a bit tricky to get running (it's a hack after all), but again, network and resolution simply work.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Musicians write and perform music and the apps themselves are designed to let them do that with a minimum of hassle. Do you really think that any pro musician wants to spend any time whatsoever setting up the OS audio, let alone even having to choose which audio code to run, when OSX requires nothing of the sort and outperforms Linux anyways?
First of all ARTS and ESD are being deprecated and OSS has been deprecrated already so take them out of the picture. Linux can do low latency scheduling and in combination with PulseAudio, JACK, and ALSA it is a pretty powerful audio workstation. Thrown in Ardour and the whole thing is hard to beat for the grand price of FREE. In fact I would love to know what CoreAudio does so much better than these technologies. Do you have specific features in mind or are you just stating your opinion? I don't know anything about CoreAudio so I would love to know.
As for musicians' ability to install a Linux audio workstation...they don't have to worry about any of that. That's what distro's are for. There are even distro's geared towards audio and others towards video and graphics. It doesn't seem like you have been paying attention to Linux development for the past few years.
Check out 64 Studio
Time makes more converts than reason
Where are the commercial game ports for Linux? No one wants to make them, obviously, save for the FPS crowd (and there's only an Unreal Tournament for Linux because Epic passes the buck to Icculus to get the job done, not because they have the in-house talent to do it themselves). There are a few commercial games for Linux, yes, but only a few, and there's very little variety between them. In the open source world we have a few good games (the majority of them being FPS's, what a surprise), Battle for Wesnoth if you like strategy games (turn based ones, that is). Then we have the unfortunate, ugly ripoffs like "Secret Maryo Chronicles," and other games that look like they were developed for a C64. Plenty of selection, not a lot of quality.
The following publishers develop comemrcial linux games:
http://www.pompomgames.com/
http://www.garagegames.com/
http://www.introversion.co.uk/
http://frictionalgames.com/
http://sillysoft.net/
http://www.basiliskgames.com/
http://www.guildsoftware.com/
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/
http://www.rune-soft.com/
http://grubbygames.com/
http://www.caravelgames.com/
http://www.planewalkergames.com/
http://www.graalonline.com/
There are also the high profile ones such as neverwinter nights, the doom and quake series, unreal, etc.
There are many high quality independant titles such as neverball, you mentioned wesnoth, crimson fields, flight gear, torcs, the spring project, total annihilation 3d, tecnoballZ, powermanga, tile racer, pingus, clonk, freeciv, ultimate stunts, planeshift, scorched3d, VDrift, silvertree (not complete, but being created by the wesnoth guys so likely will not be vapor), ufo: alien invasion, scourge, etc.
http://spring.clan-sy.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://torcs.sourceforge.net/
http://www.flightgear.org/
https://icculus.org/neverball/
http://ta3d.darkstars.co.uk/
http://linux.tlk.fr/games/
http://tileracer.model-view.com/
http://pingus.seul.org/
http://www.clonk.de/
http://freeciv.wikia.com/
http://www.ultimatestunts.nl/
http://www.planeshift.it/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://vdrift.net/
http://www.silvertreerpg.org/
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/
http://scourge.sourceforge.net/
Many of these are very impressive independently made free games. Perhaps they lack the multi million dollar marketing budget and won't make your geofrce 8800 gtxz 45 x super elite ultra melt, but theya re *fun* games, and they are numerous. Also keep in mind this publisher and free game list is only what I could find in 1 hour of searching.
Then there are freed older commercial games such as warzone 2100, homeworld, descent 1 and 2, doom, quake, etc.
Lets not stop t
I haven't seen a single person install Linux all year.
You should come out of the basement more often. Your mom installed Kubuntu upstairs 4 months ago.
The Farewell Tour II
It gives Dell something to do in the customization step, too. When I set up Ubuntu+XP for my parents, I added a shortcut/bookmark in Nautilus and the Places menu to the "My Documents" folder on the XP partition (rw access). So all their documents are available from both OSes, they don't need to learn much about user home directories, Dad has easy access to Excel, and Mom isn't plagued by the various anti-productivity measures built into Windows and Norton Antivirus For Home Victims.
This has been a good solution for them so far, and I think I'd recommend it for general use. It might be even better to symlink ~user/.mozilla to %ApplicationData%/Mozilla, to share extensions and bookmarks, but I haven't tried it.
Not sure if offering dual-boot out of the box is even the best option, really. I think the most effective thing Dell could do for Linux would be to list usable Ubuntu laptops on the same pages and in the same categories as the Windows Vista laptops for home and business users -- Vista isn't cheap, and home laptop prices are dropping quickly, so the comparison could be very compelling for customers.
I'm not a follower of Stallman. I only know what I see as the result of OSS. The FOSS movement in Thailand when I lived there did real good for the country. OSS gave the country a way out of piracy, putting it back in the good graces of the WTO. The software offered real opportunities for localization so that young people who had never studied English could learn to use a computer without a dictionary. Before the Linux movement there, even adults with the standard, required education had real difficulty using MS Windows. The IT industry began creating software which made them (instead of MS) money. The government saw a way to stop sending the citizens' money overseas for basic operation.
This was all real. This was in stores. There were Linux desktops on sale in every hypermarket. There was local software for these desktops on the shelves.
Then MS came in, and in a back-room agreement with BCAA-style blackmail or who-knows-how-much money as palm grease, reversed the government policy so that it officially supported MS solutions, filled the school with half-asses localized copies for nothing, offered virtually free copies of MS for everyone, and killed the opportunity.
Yeah. I'm bitter about it. I don't put all the blame on MS. The Thai people carry at least half the guilt for selling themselves out for a few free copies of Win98, only to lose them six months later when it was EOLed. Thailand is now in exactly the same situation that it was it eight years ago, without a real IT industry of its own and a center for software piracy. Sure, the fabs are there. The little bit of outsourcing they get continues. That's it, though.
Still, for six months or a year, I saw what could happen. I saw the way it could be. I'll never forget it.
Put identity in the browser.
We hosted three Christian youth workers from England in our home a few months ago. They all had laptops, of course, but to my surprise, the laptops ran Ubuntu. When I expressed surprise (because I usually see technical people running Linux rather than Christian youth workers), one of them looked at me with a puzzled expression and said, "Linux doesn't crash so much."
I guess he told me! :-)
But I, too, noticed a much broader cross-section of the "normal" population discussing and using Linux than before.
"If you're choosing low-latency professional audio recording, which one do you pick?"
Jack. As none of the other servers are intended for low latency professional audio recording.
"SAE is behind Ardour? Great. But who's behind them, who's doing the back-end that makes low-latency multitrack possible?"
No one needs to do the back end because it's already been done.
I've been doing low latency audio on Linux for about five years or so. The first RT patches for Linux appeared some time in the 2.4 series.
If you want to do professional audio on Linux, you use Jackd. It's as simple as that. There is not a combination of solutions, there is only one solution. If you had used Linux for audio, you would know this already.
One of the reasons for this is that the different sound servers fill different needs. Jackd is callback based and clients run synchronously. This is important for latency, but demands that all the audio apps should be real time safe. The other sound servers are for much less critical situations and work somewhat differently.
On Windows, it's a bit more complicated as there are a number of competing sound standards (ASIO,MME,DirectX,WDM,GSIF,EASI,KStream etc). There is unfortunately no equivalent to Jackd (the Windows port is not finished yet), but you can sort of do some of the same stuff with Rewire.
The question is, why would you do that when targeting say, Win2k, is adequate for most applications?
If you're running XP with no service packs in 2008 you're going to have a lot bigger problems than running apps from a developer who doesn't know how to target his Win32 applications for maximum compatibility.
And yet the end users rarely sees the issue on Windows. Linux users, on the other hand, often can't run the same package on different versions of the same distribution spanning more than a couple years. Look, I'm no Windows fan. In fact, I dread using the OS for anything more than playing games, but it does have one thing going for it and that is decent backward and forward application compatibility.
I haven't used Slackware since around 1996 so i can't really confirm this, but the fact that so many things depend on your distribution only goes to prove my point.
Well, least you can run apps for PPC on x86 at all. Windows and Linux users are still struggling with 32 -> 64bit on the SAME architecture.
As for OS X versions and backward/forward compatability... 10.3 is pretty much the minimum that you need these days. While not as good as Windows, it is better than the Linux distribution mess.
I'll assume you're using the term "distribution" lightly and are including major versions of an OS such as OS X 10.4 vs. 10.3.
In which case I can only say that you often have little choice. It woudl be awesome if all developers could produce unique builds for every major release of your favorite OS, but it just ain't going to happen. I've been running OS X Leopard since it came out and I don't think I'm running a single application that is targeted specifically for Leopard aside from the apps that came with it. The only reason Linux is even usable when you do a major upgrade is because nearly all the apps are upgraded at the same time. But this isn't very sustainable. At some point there's just going to be too much software out there to include (and test) in the with OS and still maintain a reasonable release schedule. And using commercial software is still a problem.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I don't disagree at all. But I'm not much of a GUI user so it's not a question of switching from KDE to OSX... I used to use ION as my window manager because, personally, KDE was brutal and ION gave me a buttload of great features and stayed the hell out of my way. Now, switching from THAT to OSX has been painful, but it's been totally worth it. I don't "fiddle" with things anymore ... hell, I don't even have printing working from my linux box because it requires me to screw around with a bunch of crap to get it going... what the hell is that? I plug it in to the network, and my Mac says "Bonjour!" and I print. It's stuff like that that I got tired of mucking around with. I want to code, I want to surf, I want to edit photos, read email, view attachments, watch movies, etc etc... I don't want to go and modify fstab to get my USB mounts working right, or futz with the printer subsystem to print a document, or install something that can play mp3's from the browser, etc etc... that's all just busy work that I shouldn't have to do. I could switch to Windows, but hey, that would be stoopid. So I switched to the Mac.
At the end of the day, if the UI let's me open terminal windows and surf the net then that's all I need. If your window manager is actually more important than the OS then, yeah, you probably want an X11 unix so that you can use any window manager you want. But I'm more concerned with my machine doing the right thing than how it presents my windows to me.
This sig used to be really funny...
OK, now I think the Linux distro's you installed were ALL a decade ago.
... etc.
Hey, even Corel Linux (remember that one) handled USB ports. Now, almost 10 years later I can tell you I have NEVER had to "modify fstab to get my USB mounts working right" or install something that can play mp3's
Man, the distros I try just work out of the box. In fact, if you want something that "just works", some of the Linux distro's come with every codec you can think of. Files that the average Windows and OS-X user can't play, just come up.
The only thing that the Linux user has to worry about is that a few devices don't work with Linux... but hey, us OS-X users know NOTHING about that, right?
So, it turns out that you are really comparing ION to OS-X not Linux to OS-X. You also seem to mirror the attitudes of the main(only?)ION developer, Valkonen. In fact, he has also recently started writing windows software just like you. By 2004 ION was considered a project to make Linux like a MAC, hmmmm, also Valkonen became really pissed off at the OSS community.... ARE YOU VALKONEN?