A Peek Into Tomorrow's Linux

jellybeans writes "MadPenguin.org takes a peek into the world of Linux as it looks going forward. "I hear this argument all the time. How companies trying to make Linux more accessible, through any means necessary, so long as they abide by the GPL, are working against the vision of Linux from the beginning. This is asinine. The vision, based on my own interpretation of Linux was always about choice."

Comments

Good article

[Brian Gordon]

TFA makes a good point: the more desktop-friendly linux becomes, the less it loses its no-nonsense technical power. But I don't care what everex is doing with linux.. I have it configured the way I like it and even if they're putting out some watered down linux I can still get my flavor anytime I want.

Re:Good article

[erroneus]

Linux kills babies!! Damn you Linus Torvalds!!!!

Re:Good article

[kusanagi374]

Oh, stop this fallacy already. If easy of use is such a bad thing, why don't we all migrate to Hurd and use command prompt only since Linux now is becoming user-friendly?

User friendliness (aka usable by idiots) is a GOOD thing because it allows us to do what needs to be done, faster. I don't want to take 5 minutes to do something that could be made in 30 seconds, and I guess other people think the same way, geeks or not.

Guess I should be answering this from Lynx and not Firefox.

Re:Good article

[webmaster404]

Exactly, I really don't want to bother with getting something as simple as wireless networking is a pain in some distros, I can use a "power user's" distributions like Gentoo or Debian and spend a few hours getting my wireless up or I can get Ubuntu and connect within a few seconds. I honestly don't see how everyone thinks that easy to use == loss of power and I think that Ubuntu shows this. Even though Ubuntu is easy to use, it still retains almost all of the features of Debian. We should never have to choose between freedom and functionality but until we can get fully free drivers for everything I don't see how including them is a bad thing, and if that equals a loss of power, im fine with that and so would most people.

Re:Good article

[fluxmov]

This might be true for basic concepts like finding files etc., but the "bare-metal way" won't do you any good in a couple of years, when all of the underlying infrastructure has changed in your distro and you simply don't know what the "best practice" is. Until last week, I had an Ubuntu (7.10) install which still used configuration files that I had hand-edited for Debian potato. Then I finally decided to try all the automagic features of that same Ubuntu distribution - and I don't regret it. As long as the distribution will still let you have that look under the hood like Ubuntu does, I don't see any disadvantage to autodetection and "ease of use". (It's nothing more than a Debian variant, after all...)

Re:Good article

[Mad Merlin]

That depends on what you mean by user friendliness. Generally people refer to user friendliness as a metric of how easy it is to learn how to use a program, and not how productive one will be with said program. The latter is often sacrificed for the former (because it's less work to remove a feature than to make it easy to learn), but it doesn't have to be.

User friendliness (aka usable by idiots) is a GOOD thing because it allows us to do what needs to be done, faster.

Now you're mixing the two up, assuming that making something easy to learn will instantly also make that program the most efficient way to get something done. This is an incorrect assumption. A program that is easy to learn does not imply that it is efficient, nor does a program being efficient imply that it is easy to use. Similarly, a program that is difficult to learn does not imply that it is efficient, nor does a program that is efficient mean that it is difficult to learn.

Obviously, making a program both easy to learn and efficient to use is the ideal. However, if you can actually figure out how to do so in any non-trivial case, you'll probably be able to retire by the time you're about 30.

For example, Notepad is a very easy to learn text editor. Notepad, however, is hideously inefficient for actually editing text with. In comparison, Vim is a difficult text editor to learn how to use, but once you know how to use it, you'll find yourself several orders of magnitude more efficient at editing text than someone who only uses Notepad. If you think that comparison is unfair, replace Notepad with your favourite word processor, but the large gap in efficiency does not change (though the ease of learning how to use it dips).

So yes, ease of learning is good, but efficiency of use is more important, especially for people who already know how to use the program. Unfortunately, ease of learning a program is more flashy and marketable than efficiency of use, and keeping in mind the quickest path to making something easier to use (removing features, as noted above), you can understand why people who already know how to use something really don't want developers to take the short road to making something easier to learn, as it gains the experienced user nothing, while possibly giving up feature(s) in return.

Re:Good article

[manifoldronin]

Conversely, with a 'power user's' distro, you can learn the bare-metal way to configure your wireless. You know it once you've done it once, and can do it again anytime. And since you've reached down deep into how it works, you're able to secure it and understand what you're doing.

Actually it's not that rosy in reality. See, the thing is, for most of the desktop users, many of these "sys config" tasks are not what they have to do very often. Sure, you'll learn "the bare-metal way" to configure your wireless, but the next time when you have to do it again is probably going to be the next time you upgrade to a new laptop, which for most people is like 1 or 2 years later. Do you honestly think most of us would be able to remember "how I did it last time?"

I think, while by now people have learned to distinguish between "users" and "power users", there is one more level of distinction to be made. That is between "power users" and "system admins". I use command line a lot for my daily tasks, I custom and build some of the software I use, and I constantly tweak my ubuntu installation, so I consider myself a power user. OTOH, I don't consider myself a system admin, not when all I have to manage is 3 ubuntu desktops. For a system admin, yeah, learning how to do things in the bare metal way can be really beneficial, because it's cost effective when you have 278 system to amortize your effort with. It's a completely different economy for desktop users.

Whereas if you use the latest 'control panel' busybox to configure wireless, you've got your wireless... until the next shiney-thing distro comes along, and you have to learn a whole new set of buttons to press.

You say that as if "the bare-metal ways" don't change as often, if not more often. 8-)