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Why Linux Doesn't Spread - the Curse of Being Free
Vlad Dolezal tips us to a philosophical take on why Linux hasn't grown to challenge Windows as the most popular operating system. According to the author, the reason is simple; Linux is free, and humans tend not to equate free things with being valuable.
"Here's what Compy McNewb sees. He can get both OS's for free. But one of them is worth over three hundred dollars, while the other one is worth nothing. 'That's not true!' I hear you scream. 'Linux is worth a lot! It's just being offered for free!' I know it's not true that Linux is worth less than Windows. It's far more valuable to the end user in terms of getting things done. But that's not what Average Joe Computer Newbie sees. He sees a free product versus a three-hundred-dollar product he can get free. It's all about the perception!"
Convince him that it'll let him Frist Psot! more often and see what he thinks of the free one :)
because it is relatively difficult to buy as a pre-installed system.
Nothing new, and basic psychology. This has been proposed before, even on Slashdot many times in many posts.
It is also the explanation behind fraternity rites / hazing and various initiation procedures to clubs. No pain == no value in many people's eyes.
You could almost look at defense of Microsoft as a form of the Stockholm syndrome.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
This is just another story about perceived value vs. actual value ... whoop-de-do. It's funny too, because the music industry would take the exact opposite position: people see "free" as being more "valuable".
Gagh. The human psyche is fundamentally twisted.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
A computer nowadays is an appliance, that plays games, downloads porn, and gets you onto Myspace. Whether its a Mac or PC is based on what other s/w you can steal from your friends, or whether you're rich and/or trendy. You have to buy a computer, and it "comes with" the OS - why would you even waste your time farking around with something else?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Is that this blog post? http://blog.anamazingmind.com/2008/02/why-linux-doesnt-spread-curse-of-being.html
Who wants to use Linux when there always seems to be one damn thing that doesn't work? How many of the cheap Walmart cd's will run on a linux box? The killer still seems to be accounting programs. When Quicken, Quick Books and Simply Accounting work, then there will be real in-roads to business.
Home users may never sign on. Shit far too many home users already shouldn't have a computer. You want Linux to work and be accepted by the masses? Make it look and work like windows. Any learning curve is too large. We've had the same basic windows functions and menus (until Vista) since 95. How the hell are we going to train legions of AOL users to use Ubuntu? Good luck with that.
I hate Microsoft as a company. Their business practices have been highly suspect, but their software (XP Pro anyway) does work and lets me do stuff without having to read man pages, or tweak files or find special drivers or find a replacement program, or run in a sandbox. After 8 years, countless distros, way too much time and actually failed hardware (how does ubuntu kill a previously working drive), I personally have jumped off the linux soapbox for the last time. Linux is awesome on servers but I don't think it will ever even challange even Apple for desktop market share.
/rant
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
One can come up with all sorts of complicated theories on why linux hasn't gained significant ground on windows, but it's very simple. Applications, applications, applications. If linux was running word, photoshop, quickbooks, and a host of other business software (not to mention games), we wouldn't be reading these endless pontifications about why linux hasn't been overtaken windows on the desktop.
I call this the "King's New Robes" effect, which is the same logic by which "boutique" products are sold - you can take the same crap, repackage it in a pretty way, and charge 10X as much, and people will flock to buy it by the hundred.
In the past year I've had a lot of success converting frustrated Windows users into Linux people... and simply convincing both Windows and Mac users that Linux was a legitimate operating system. However, I've also frequently run into a scenario where I would be showing somebody my Dell laptop running Ubuntu, and they'd be REALLY excited about the features, the intuitive UI, the eye candy... and then they'd ask me how much it was... and when I told them it was free, they'd be disappointed!
I'm guessing it has a lot more to do with Windows being pre-installed on everyone's computer. Once it's there and average joe is used to it, he's not going to bother changing to something else. There's no estimation of value, explicit or implicit there. And honestly, Linux would "cost" the average person more than $300 to start using in terms of time and effort. It's cost me way more than that, and I have some idea of what I'm doing.
I don't think the n00b sees it this way at all. To them, the OS/window manager is part of the computer. That's what they see when they turn it on, and that's all that matters. As they don't see Windows as separate from the computer, they won't see it as extra value. Linux may be ready for the masses at last, but until it's marketed as such in the stores they visit, they'll never know. I was at Harvey Norman the other day buying a new Wacom tablet. There was not one Linux PC in the building. Same goes for just about any other computer store. If your lucky, there might be one or two in a corner. Linux is a build-to-order option from Dell, but Joe n00b won't choose that - he'll just take what's recommended. Right now, you have to actively seek out Linux if you want it; that's perfect for techs, but no use for n00bs.
Is that why free love didn't catch on?
Maybe we should use a modified version of the "freedom isn't free" slogan.
You're talking about "joe newbie"... he can't install Linux if he's never heard of it. To most non-IT, non-geek people, it's Windows or Apple. Linux isn't even on the radar.
I've tried to setup several small offices with OpenOffice. Within a week or two, they are screaming for their Excel and Word. It's not that they hate free, they hate change! If it doesn't look and behave exactly like they are used to, they won't invest the time to learn a new product.
It's not because Linux is free, it's because businesses don't put Linux on their desktops.
For a really large number of people, their main experience with computers is at work--that's what they learn on, that's what they come to understand. Deviation from what they know is a barrier to entry.
Couple that with virtually no vendors selling computers with Linux pre-installed, and you have a huge barrier to entry. The vast majority of users use what's put in front of them, either by their employer or Dell or Walmart, and see little to no incentive to switch.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Thanks for the profound knowledge, Einstein.
I noticed this a long time ago, when I first started my business. According to economics, there is more demand if you lower your price. But in reality, this is not always the case. In fact, I would go so far as to say that almost as often as it does, price does not affect demand at all.
I've been saying for a long time that someone should package a Linux distro in a box, and sell it for $100. People will buy it. Anybody could do it, developer or not. It is perfectly legal, as long as you follow the license for all of the programs, which can usually be done by including a source CD along with the package. I haven't done it myself because I'm not familiar with retail setup, and would probably just end up spending my money on a business venture that I can't complete.
Red Hat does something similar. They sell their package for $15. They should increase the price.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
The author is off base, Linux isnt free when presented with the same features as Windows ie codecs. Thats why we have $$$ distributions that sort all that out for the consumer. What is an issue are people downloading free versions of Linux then being stupidly surprised that the $$$ bits are missing.
"None sing hymns to breath, but oh, to be without it!"
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I'm not sure who's counting, over what time and using what metrics, but the Age Of Information is just starting, and Linux is just the tip of a much large iceberg. MS will be just another player in a much larger world as time goes by. The free alternatives to any product are DIY constructions using parts available and common knowledge. FOSS exists because the "parts" are digital and there's (relatively) no effort in duplicating them.
Check your trends on a decade basis.
I think the reason doesn't spread is because of the virtual monopoly windows has on the OS market. Linux is difficult to get on a system pre-installed, and its difficult to get a lot of mainstream software on Linux. Games are almost non-existent in any real way because developers just aren't producing for Linux. At the moment, it will take quite a bit for Linux to take hold of the OS market just because Windows has made it so hard to get in.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that almost every computer average Joe has ever seen had windows on it.
I have a minor in marketing and economics, woohoo. Anyway...
This is the best example I can think of. There was a small watch company (can't think of the name off my head without getting out a textbook) who sold fairly high-end watches for about $500-$800 and sales were poor to flat. The company raised the price to around $1500 and sales went crazy. The higher price has a perceived higher quality, even if it doesn't.
Cars work that way, computers work that way. Of course price doesn't always equal quality, but it can and that is a that point is stronger in peoples minds.
Gone!
People associate more expensive products with being superior. Stupid, I know. But it's true.
Linux hasn't and won't spread because by the time it became (or will become, depending on your viewpoint) ready for prime time, the desktop was already a well established and developed product (by Microsoft and Apple). Since Linux has always seemed to play catch up in terms of user interface, it is only relegated to the tech savvy and those who are interested in customization/maximum useability (a.k.a. the knowledgeable few).
There are fields where Linux made an inroads early on (servers, mobile devices, etc) and where it has spread.
Fonts look crap so lets see how to install some decent ones..a quick google and after reading several different ways to do it, I'm copying them over from my Windows installation - another 20 minutes. Now, lets set up a shared folder so I can access it from my Vista desktop. Right click on folder, select Share Folder. Goes off and gets another raft of files. Refresh Windows and my laptop shows..all good. Click on the icon for the laptop, user/pass prompt. Try several including guest and the logon for ubuntu and no go. Off we go to Google again and there's a Howto. Only problem is it misses out a few IMPORTANT steps (like saying I have to add a SMB user WTF???) In the end, a post directs me to a Youtube link which shows exactly how to do it. Try to let it share without user/pass and in the end I give up. There's another 45 minutes wasted.
So it's taken me 2 hours just to install BASIC multimedia functionality, some decent fonts and figure out how to share files over a windows network. What makes it worse is there's not just one way to do something but several ranging from completely ridiculous strings of CLI commands to a simple solution but you can bet which one tops the search results. OK, I know how to do it for next time but do you honestly think Average Joe on their first venture into Linux is going to persist as much as I did? Not a chance. Windows "Just works" so that's what they'll go back to. It'll be "Yeah I tried it once but it was just too damned complicated to do anything so I gave up."
And that's why Linux isn't cutting it on the desktop.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
The local 'The Source' can't keep the Eee on the shelves. The minute they get them in, they sell out. Walmart had the same experience with its latest Linux box. For cheap computers, where the cost of Windows is significant, Linux has a measurable advantage. The advantage is amplified by the fact that Vista wants more expensive hardware than either Linux or XP.
About 6 years ago during my introduction to Linux and subsequent zealotry phase, I stubbornly ran Linux as a desktop environment despite all its shortcomings at the time. Once I got over that part, I slowly found myself drifting back to...Windows. Linux was clunky in that area and really didn't have the support it needed. It has come leaps and bounds since then, but I believe still has some to go. After being introduced to OS X, I would never go back to either. Linux has its place in my life as a spectacular server operating system and I wouldn't consider using anything else. Windows...doesn't have place in my life. OS X bridges the gap for me by combining the flexibility and integration potential of Linux while retaining the familiarity and ease-of-use of Windows (go ahead, laugh,) and bringing to the table a _killer_ GUI that is intuitive and as simple or as tricked out as I want it to be. I can sit my Windows-only Mom down in front of my Macbook and she can figure it out just fine. But it can still run all the fun Linux stuff and more! Woohoo.
1) IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sun...along with small businesses and individuals across the country (via the Ron Paul *Money Bomb* line of fund raising), do a flat-out hostile takeover of Intuit.
2) Quickbooks and TurboTax are ported to Unix/Linux under the GPL.
3) IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, etc., build a Linux application server tuned especially to offer up Quickbooks in a Remote Desktop style.
4) Offer said server on an easy to install LiveCD that lets everyone try it out and easily install it.
5) IBM, Sun, etc., make a huge amount of money selling enterprise ready QuickBooks servers.
6) Novell, Red Hat, etc., make a huge amount of money selling QuickBooks support.
7) All the small businesses save a ton of money not having to deal with QuickBooks forced upgrades and other shenanigans.
8) MS certainly isn't going to disappear, but they certainly feel a disturbance in the force -- as if a million people suddenly cried out Freedom!
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
How many people pay for Windows? These scenarios are common:
"When I need Windows, I just grab my friend's Windows disc with a volume license."
"When I need Windows, I just buy it for $5 with my University ID."
"When I need Windows, I just borrow my friend's bootleg copy that he got in Asia."
"When I need Windows, I get the pre-cracked version from The Pirate Bay."
How many people really know the real cost of a full license of the various versions of Windows Vista?
I think that the cost has very little to do with it. I think the reason Linux doesn't really contend with Windows for the OS crown is that the main backers of Linux are relative nobodies to the general PC using masses. Sure, everyone who reads slashdot knows about RedHat, Ubuntu, Suse et al. but your average PC user has probably never heard of any of those companies. What Linux needs to make a real run at mainstream is a major player with a lot of non-enthusiast brand recognition to take the torch and run with it. Not that I advocate any of these companies but someone like Google or Adobe or Sony or Mozilla, etc etc. If someone along those lines was willing to jump on board and actually help make deals to have it installed at purchase time, you'd see Linux jump in market share...I honestly don't believe there is as much "brand loyalty" as Microsoft would like us all to believe. You give consumers a real option with real brand recognition, and I think you'd be pleasantly surprised by the result...
This was news years ago but this view is slowly changing.
1) Open Source is gaining more and more penetration in the workplace. It starts out small with free stuff like wiki's, gimp, open office, etc. Eventually the ethos will spread to the OS as well. OSS isn't just abstract theory anymore, there are real apps that non-geeks can appreciate.
2) There's more and more frustration with Microsoft.
I'm hearing people in userland start to talk about going open source. Case in point, a parent I know found out the cheap computer they got did not come with Office. They need it for school. Well, you can fork over $125 for Office or $0 for Open Office. Assuming they just need basic word processing, free is fine. Said parent was highly receptive to the idea. Five years ago, I can just about guarantee the answer would have been "Open what? No, no, I want the Microsoft brand, what everybody's using."
More than "free must = crap," I think the dominant corporate meme is still "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." If Microsoft drops a steamer in your lap, you just shrug and look at the boss like "Hey, what can I do, the market leader is dropping steamers on everyone." You go with a product no one has ever heard of and it fails, the boss looks at you like "We're the only outfit in the industry with a steamer in our laps and gee, we're also the only one using that Foosoft app. Got any excuses, flitboy?"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Honestly I think it has more to do with being less user-friendly, and people not having any experience with the OS than just "Good things cost more".
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
...for what it's worth, as to the reasons Linux isn't spreading as quickly as was hoped:
(1) Crap-all marketing. Windows has posters, flyers, tv spots, and general awareness by most computers users. Apple has poster, tv spots, attractive retail stores, and in most cases a general awareness by most computer users. What does Linux have? At best, word of mouth.
(2) Lack of commercial apps. Don't give me crap about being able to use GIMP for free - armature and profession photographers want professional-level tools like Photoshop. They WILL pirate the damn thing if necessary.
(3) Path of least resistance. Moving from one operating system to another is generally an exercise in trading one set of hassles for another. It's not often that it's a painless experience. Moving to a Mac though is much more realistic for someone fed-up with Windows than moving to Linux however, due to points (1) and (2).
Finally, the biggest reason of all - why change? Windows just isn't that bad if you know how to use a computer. Most people have more important things to do in life than worry about operating systems, or at least they do once they get to a certain age when priorities become clearer.
I'm not bashing Linux or open source software in general, but the simple fact is that Windows is Just Fine for most people. Add to that fact that people don't see the hidden cost of Windows, and you have the current situations.
The free issue could be valid when comparing to other *nix operating systems, except that the major server operating systems such as Solaris and HPUX are typically packaged with large server hardware, while Linux is designed for desktop PC processors.
Anyone tried getting a java applets to work in firefox on a 64-bit AMD linux platform? Or how about sending audio to a TV over an HDMI connection? How about video overlay on an ATI x1250 video card (on a motherboard with the AMD 690 chipset)? Can you tell it just took me over 1 week at over 8 hours a night of getting my new HTPC set up with linux? And I tought very long and hard between whether to go with linux or windows xp. It has decent new hardware but still performance is horrible mainly due to lack of proper driver support (even though this hardware has been out for more than a year). Anyway ... if you have the ability to patch source code, (re)compile kernel modules, and sort through 100's of pages of forum threads telling you to change one config setting after another, then sure, you can make a really great platform working for free.
But is the average PC user really able or willing to put the necessary time to figure all this out? At the same time, you can't blame manufacturers in not putting the resources to support the relatively small linux userbase. So it's a chicken and the egg problem.
Whether chicken/egg or not, the FACT remains though that overall, installing, maintaining, and using linux is still far more complicated for the average user (who has no clue what a daemon or python script is) than windows.
+1
It's almost a shame that Linux doesn't charge a fee for the Operating System in that if they did, they might actually be able to afford to hire the developers to work on all the hardware and software compatibility issues on a much wider scale...
.. all Linux has to do to become the worldwide dominant operating system is to charge a million dollars a license and turn the other way when people 'pirate' it? I think theres a little more to it than that.. //does Linux float on water?
It's lock-in, hardware and software lock-in.
Hardware: Linux is pretty good at working with MOST of the hardware, but there are wireless cards and scanners and of course other devices that don't work out of the box with Linux
Software: yes there are replacements and most of the people probably need only a browser, but if 100% of Windows programs would work on Linux I'm sure we'd not have this discussion.
All the rest of "reasons": ease of use, resistance to change, lack of perceived values they are there but they are minor issues, most of the people I know won't even be able to tell the difference between KDE and Windows, most of the people I know don't care about the "value" of their OS either.
And of course, why says that Linux is not growing? It's growing pretty fast considering these issues. What do people expect?
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Yes some people do see FREE as something of less value. If you goto the grocery store and see steaks half off , the first thought is going to be they must be getting old and about to go out of date. But there are other reasons as well. Ive only had 1 experience with Linux (years ago) and I remember it being a major pain in the neck to get the drivers for my DVD Burner. If I cant find the driver for the DVD Burner obviously I didn't end up downloading the software to burn the DVDs with. I know that now it is much easyer to get the drivers for various pieces of hardware , but that image I have of Linux is still there. It will still be there until 1 day I install Linux onto something and get it up and running without much trouble. Linux being installed onto the EEEPC is going to be a huge help for the OS. Its a fairly pain free way of introducing people to Linux. (See its OK the penguin doesn't bite) I would like to see Linux installed on small ready to use Gizmos. Stuff like hand held electronic games or media players. After awhile people wont be so hesitant about maybe trying linux out. There are quite a few reasons its not spreading as fast as some would like. Including the Fanboy attitude some linux users have. Its a good thing to have something like Linux. Something you can build a skill and a community around. Its something to be proud of.But the talking down about windows and down to windows users isn't going to help people to switch over. Perhaps maybe an approach like... Sure windows is fine for a generic operating system. If you want to just install it and run simple things...ect ect..But Linux can be just as simple. and as you grow into it and learn more about it you get much better control over your computer. PS im not a big computer expert so take my opinoin with a grain of salt (but then again nether are most people who use computers.)
Why Linux Doesn't Spread - the Curse of Being Free
More like "the curse of ignoring the user".
Noone, and I mean noone, needs to know how to use a command line to install windows.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 this weekend on my thinkpad. The process was seamless. Ubuntu is ready for grandmas. I got it at a good price too! However, I don't know how I can convince my non-geek friends that it really is that good, and it really is that easy.
--why?
It's got NOTHING to do with Linux being free and EVERYTHING to do with inertia. Linux is used by jillions of companies every day for all kinds of shit BESIDES desktop apps, so it's not like there's widespread distrust of Linux, and certainly not due to its price tag. The reason it hasn't reached that tipping point is circular: nobody is using Linux on the desktop because nobody is using Linux on the desktop.
Windows is well-known and it's Good Enough for the masses, so they have no reason to go through the unknowns of switching. That the "something else" is Linux has nothing to do with it.
Yo mama so fake, she failed the Turing Test.
Chad: Whatcha doin', Luke?
Luke: [nervous] Nothing!
Chad: Looks like you're installing linux.
Luke: It's just a Live CD.
Chad: You know, I've been into linux for years now.
Luke: Really? I'm just
Chad: Yes?
Luke: God, I can't believe I'm saying this
Chad: Oh. Let me show you how to properly set the boot parameters on that Live CD you've got
[cue the "bow-chicka" music
... with ubuntu on it. i mentioned it to some guy i knew - several month later i was positively surprised he had chosen the same laptop.
...ideas I have heard lately. Just checked, trading at around 30, market cap 11 billion.
Hmm, kinda expensive. Probably a lot cheaper to just develop a very good set of financial apps.
Linux biz apps, you hear this all the time, it needs photoshop, autocad, and tax/business software and the mythical "exchange killer". Now there exist open source alternatives there, but none of them have even some million$ being thrown at them, let alone billions. I think for this idea maybe start a little smaller and see how it does, try the money bomb on one of the above first, see if something could be built that was even better than the original-not equivalent, but *better*.
I've been using Linux for 5 months now and it's been great, but Linux is still the OS for the geek-minded. :P
What will your sister do when after an automatic (and apparently inoffensive) system upgrade, her computer doesn't work anymore?
You say: "Let me see, I think the new video driver config screwed up xorg."
Hey, root filesystem can't be found! "Let's update grub and what about uuid?" and on and on and on... IT'S FUN
But it's your sister!!!
ps. On the other hand, my sister wouldn't mess (and screw up) with Linux as much as I do.
All the games are on Windows. I have used Linux in the past, but have no reason to install it today since Windows does everything. I have my favorite games and Adobe apps. Office suite, I dont really care and would be fine with Openoffice.org. I think games are keeping the newegg builders on Windows.
Corporate America needs Microsoft Office, so that is why they do not switch. Outlook is the key to success for the office suite...not the word processor.
Please stop whining about why Linux doesn't spread. If any Microsoft product had half the problems of the typical Linux distribution, the Open Source community would spend weeks slapping each other on the back and predicting the end of Microsoft. How old is GFTP? And it's still not stable. Every distribution upgrade drops dozens of perfectly fine applications and replaces them with new just-barely-beta applications based on some perceived notion of them having greater long term potential (never realized because those apps soon get replaced too).
Instead of yet more excuses, the Linux community should focus on creating a fully marketable product.
It's an interesting experiment, but as I said in the comments on his blog post, there's one thing I would change. He says "I'll say I managed to get an illegal copy off a Polish guy I know over the internet." (Emphasis added.)
Why bother lying about it? Just say "I managed to get a copy off a Polish guy I know over the internet." Don't say anything at all about its legal status and allow the listener to assume that it is illegal. There is no need to tell an explicit lie in this case.
And doing so could potentially have adverse consequences. For one thing, the listener may actually have heard about Linux before, and call him on the lie.
For another, it might have personal consequences. It sounds like this a completely informal experiment, and that the guy will be trying it out on his friends. If I was his friend, and I discovered later that he lied to get me to try something, I'd probably be upset with him. Even if the lie meant that I had actually not committed a crime at his suggestion.
Even if telling the lie doesn't have either of those consequences, it explicitly gives them the false idea that Linux cannot legally be copied. So does misdirection of the kind I have proposed, of course; but I tend to think it's easier to correct a mis-impression than an outright lie.
As for the price, I think there probably are people selling Linux for $500 in the States. Certainly there are small vendors selling pre-installed Linux systems for that or more. So that part's not a lie.
So, slashdot was running out of Linux articles and so decided to post an article containing what's mostly a wrong, "oversaid" cliche as news. Great!
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
1. It doesn't run "Word", "Outlook", "Photoshop" and all that people are used to
2. The flaws, difficulty and learning curve are very different from the flaws, difficulty and learning curves the people are already accustomed to under Windows. (It's important to note that Windows isn't perceived to be 'better' than Linux or even MacOS, it's that the users are accustomed to the problems with Windows and are reluctant to learn to deal with a new set of problems associated with alternatives.)
Most Windows users will not give you any argument about the expectedly poor performance, stability, reliability or security of MS Windows. If you told them it was unsafe, you wouldn't be telling them they don't already know. The reality of the user psychology that most people seem to be missing is that people are accustomed to Windows and its shortcomings.
The reality is that there's a LOT of psychology to overcome when it comes to getting users to try alternatives... even alternatives such as MacOSX. And getting beyond the psychology still isn't enough -- there has to be a comprehensive set of answers to handle the questions surrounding migrating their data to a new OS and running needed applications or their acceptable substitutes. And most significantly, the answers to those issues are not one-size-fits-all! The comprehensive solutions need to be tuned to the user being converted.
I don't have a clue how to get beyond the psychological barriers to change. But taking a lesson from Microsoft when they were busy converting users from Word Perfect to MS Word, they were ALL ABOUT providing massive guidance and assistance for Word Perfect users. Microsoft's efforts won users over. It would seem to me that if there were sufficiently effective documents and "wizards" to guide Windows users in using Linux, it might prove to be helpful... do a degree. (If I were to estimate how effective such an effort might be, I'd guess about 5% effective. It's not a big estimation, but it's not 0.)
Honestly guys..... perception of price? You're retarded.
Flamebait? K, just know this.
When you make something intuitively easier to use for most of the ways people wanna use a computer, they will come, they will come in droves.
Stop talking, get to coding. It's open source, right?
The Linux community needs to: STEP UP!
You guys bitch and moan but the majority of you don't attempt to fix the problem because you give up before the fight starts!
"According to the author, the reason is simple; Linux is free, and humans tend not to equate free things with being valuable." Linux fails because it's _doesn't_ do anything significant. Apple = iTunes, iPod, iPhone, Digital Monopoly Windows = Gaming, Office, Corporate Environment, Desktop Monopoly Where does Linux fit in among the current scheme of things? It does nothing well of the previously mentioned market space, so what does it have going for it? Those 8 things are probably 95% of what consumers do with computers so where and how will Linux compete?
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
If that's really the problem, people would be blowing away Windows every time they bought a new machine. What choice is "easier" than a pre-installed OS?
Then people should be wary of Windows: the perception is that it's "free," and the reality is that it's forced.
But that's not the case. Why? Because there is no choice of OS at the time of purchase. Until a majority of retailers offer Linux as an option and subtract the cost of Windows from the computer, typical users will not run Linux.
The situation is out of our hands.
Windows *is* free to most users, eg. people who use Windows at work or get it pre-installed with their systems.
... 'Office software' ... and they're good.
... tho they tend to think that it's a Mac. My girlfriend doesn't care that her Eee runs linux - she just cares about browsing the web and writing documents ... the same as most people!
If you asked people how much Windows costs, I'm sure most people would have NO IDEA.
Seriously, who buys Windows anyway?
You get it for "free" with the system you buy.
Or, at work, it's magically installed on all of the workstations.
To the general public, Windows *IS* FREE !!!
I'm sure most people don't even know that you can install operating systems besides Windows on their PCs. Hell, the term 'PC' essentially means 'Windows' to lay-people and technical support employees.
The *real* way to spread linux is, in my opinion, to do it without letting on that it's 'linux.' Kindof like the new microlaptops have been doing - they run linux but they haven't overly promoted that facts. All consumers here is 'Web browser'
My boss and many of our employees use my workstation (Ubuntu) just fine
Besides us geeks, people aren't going to buy computers and devices because they run linux. They're going to buy them because they're affordable and meet their needs. That's all. End of story.
Do you care which brand of toaster you buy?
I used a linux type OS fr the first time in the late 90's at a computer lab at the university I went to. Mosaic worked and later netscape worked. I thought it was fine as a way to access the internet. I still used word perfect (on a windows system) for word processing. Hell... I remember telling my dad that you could find anything on the internet. i told him if you want to find out more about "nose picking" just type it into a search engine and you will discover new ways to pick your nose (there were less than 10 hits back then on fast.com compares to 400,000+ on google now) So recently I downloaded and burned a gutsy gibbon boot disk. I was not a Comp Sci major. I am not some computer guru even though i built all my computers and my parents computers (the only exception being the laptop I am currently posting from. Booting to GG showed me a desktop that I was almost familiar with (things do change a bit with time). I immediately discovered that my bluetoooth mouse and my internet connection did not work. Obviously without internet it becomes impossible to research solutions to a problem on the internet. Without bluetoooth I could not use my mouse and I hate using a touchpad. I would like to use some sort of Linux distro but I don't seem to have the specialized knowledge required to do so. If, eventually it becomes a system where all you have to do is install it and almost everything works then I will gladly become faithful fan. Until then I will continue to use windows products because I have a lot of other things on my plate than learning how to finagle an operating system to meet my needs when there is one that already does.
how about when I come home all I want to do it play some TF2, maybe browse some iTunes, do my homework, and not reconfigure the machine to do any of these. Karma be damned, Linux is to much - to many options, to many choices, except the one a home user wants - "just work" and leave me alone. Linux doesn't do this now, and won't for a long time. Yes I know 100 posts will follow this saying "All you have to do is get and it does all that for you"; because thats not all I have to do, you get the package manager, the packages it needs to run, then you start pruning forums because somehow, your computer is the only one with , and after a few hours of searching you find a work around, but if you just had XP, you could have just not had the problem. Not to be a Microsoft fan, but XP is a good OS. I hope Linux reaches the level of ease that XP has, and with vista as misdirected as is it, has afforded Linux some catchup time which is always nice. but that's the problem, not affordability. If the product is good the demand will be there, this is typical of our US thinking though, because it's the same reason our domestic car industry is dying, they don't blame their products, it's something else. it has to be. The blame game.
These kinda articles pop up all the time. They're nice excuses, but really, Linux isn't spreading because it's just not ready. Look at Linux on web servers; Apache has half the market, and that's because it's been ready for servers for a long time. Even with all of Vista's problems, it's still going to be a far more pleasant desktop experience for most consumers than Linux is.
When people buy a computer, it is easy for the sales droid to FUD them into windows even if there was a Linux option. Sales company and Sales droid makes zero profit/commission for selling Linux, so they FUD the customer (Ooh! compatability, ooh! warrantee, programs etc etc).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
According to the model of economics that is usually presented in intro economics courses, demand is a two dimensional curve where x is price and f(x) is quantity demanded. Therefore, one usually says that as price changes, quantity demanded changes. Other factors that effect demand, like availability of substitutes, or to be more on topic here perceived value, can be said to change demand. Similarly, in the economic model supply is a two dimensional curve where x is price and f(x) is quantity supplied.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
There's a big gap in lifestyle apps. I'm talking things like photo, movie, and music managers. They either don't exist, or are much harder to use, or lack the features that really matter people. (FYI: No one gives a shit about Ogg-Vorbis support, because there's nothing out there in that format. They DO care about WindowsMedia 10 though. Stop making excuses and fix that problem.)
So in summary, if you don't have the apps I need, you're worthless to me, and Linux doesn't have the apps many people need. Also, if you require me to do any sysadmining whatsoever you've epicly failed. The total cost of ownership has just 1000%. Sucks, I know, but that's just how the world works.
You want linux to really be valuable to people, then get your fat ass of the damn blog patting yourself on the back and get to work!
Tell him his new clothes are ready!
As far as I am considered, I hope Linux NEVER becomes mainstream.
I've been using Linux exclusively for 4 years and I love it, especially when all the freeloaders ask me
"You're in computers; my computer is acting up, can you take a look?"
"What operating system are you running?" I ask.
"Windows."
"Sorry, I can't help, I run Linux"
Ahh... Sweet peace and quiet, not only in my computer, but in my life also.
Fuck being an evangelist, it has caused nothing but pain for me and now I just want to be left alone.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
for the sales channel. They control the distribution more than anyone else. They get money out of selling Windows and zero from selling Linux, so what's the motivation?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...is that XP actually is quite good. I've made the jump but I've tried before and failed several times, and even now it's a close run with Linux winning out because there looks like better times ahead on Linux (Hardy Heron) and worse times ahead on Windows (Vista). Did I mention that on XP things mostly work, all those applications you like that don't run quite well in WINE, and games... well, you can get most working if you're a constant visitor to warez sites since none of the popular copy protections seem to work with WINE. Not that strange possibly, but there it is. Oh yeah, and the really annoying glitches in video playback where some things work in Kaffeine (xine), some in KMplayer (mplayer) and some in VLC? In my experience multimedia is a complete mess in Linux, and I haven't even gotten to where basic audio mixing doesn't work properly yet - vmware loves to tell me /dev/dsp is busy. OpenOffice... well, whoever says it's a drop-in MS Office replacement can try filling out a travel expense form from my company in Calc, the cell locks are crazy until you turn them off. And little details like the side buttons of my mouse not working, fun to hack xorg.conf for that and dual screen still isn't working properly.
Don't get me wrong, I have a long list of grievances with Windows XP as well, in total it comes out about even. I just get a little tried of the "where's the dam that's keeping all the people from switching to Linux?", we're talking beaver dam rather than Hoover dam here. Get some more altitude difference, and they'll flow whether there are dams in place or not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...but it's not *worth* shit.
it's way too fuckin' hard to use. Period. Non geeks don't wanna mess with all this shit just to browse websites and create documents. So how much linux is "worth" (to them) is obvious; Not a damn cent.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
I can go get any application anywhere in the world. being able to choose from billions of possible programs.
and they will all run on windoze.
linux cant say that.
oh sure you can run SOME things made for linux. and SOME things if you fuck around long enough with something like wine.. and there are SOME things that have a linux equivilant. but you're still missing a TON of apps.
windoze still has the majority of apps.
fix that before you continue wondering why linux isnt the majority os.
its impossible anyway. catch-22.
there wont be the applications until theres the market share. and there wont be the market share until theres the applications.
So in short.. stop creating useless text about how great linux is and should be number one. and go port some apps.
If everyone else used it i wouldn't feel cool anymore.
Am I the only one that thinks this whole "year of the linux desktop" race is bullshit. Who gives a rats ass if people like, use, or understand linux; or any free software for that matter. The difference between proprietary software, and free/open source software is that the success of FOSS is measured in the greatness of the software, not the wide use (profit margins). I don't care if others use Open Office, I care if Open Office works well. And it does, thanks to the work of many talented people. In my opinion, it's misguided to constantly seek approval from the masses, if they don't want it, let 'em pay however much MS is now going for and get a low end OS. Who cares.
Am I the only one who immediately thought of Chad Vader?
Zing!
I know so many Mac... "enthusiasts" I will call them that won't dare touch a PC because Windows sucks as they so often put it. When I tell them that they don't have to use Windows some look at me with an almost deer like gaze. I think this is true for most non-IT/geek types. They correlate that a PC=Windows. For over a decade now you haven't been able to even buy a PC at retail with out Windows being thrown at you. I don't think some people even know that their machine could run with something other than Windows on it. I think for a lot of people they just don't get that a computer doesn't need Windows to work, and that there are a multitude of operating systems out there to be used. But unfortunately we have things like the Mac Vs PC commercials that just reinforce this idea. At least the commercials are entertaining. On a side note: I usually try to have one Linux and one Windows system in my house if possible. My old laptop that I used for business and school ran Linux and the desktop I used for games runs Windows. Unfortunately the laptop bit it hard a few months back... I've been craving my Linux fix too. I bought one of the Gateway P-6931FX laptops to game on, and a week ago a latch broke and I was locked out physically :( I didn't want to do the job myself cause I wanted to keep my warranty intact. But once I get the sucker back I'm throwing Linux on my desktop! Can't wait :)
I think many people with some basic computer knowledge associate unix-like systems with a CLI and they consider that archaic. I'm a college student using kubuntu as much as I can, and lots of people in the dorms get wide eyed at compiz. When my roommate first saw it he asked me what it was and I told him it was linux. His response was "That's a really old system".
I "wobbled my windows" and "rotated my cube" and replied "Yeah, it's real ancient"..
Might it be that Linux is considered more technically challenging by the common person?
Might it be that the only people who promote Linux avidly are computer nerds?
Might it be that since Linux is less popular than Windows, Linux has a compatibility issue?
I am sure Linux is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but sliced bread sucks. Linux is the best, if you know what you are doing. Windows is the best, if your computer expert is a 12-year-old kid.
I am sure plenty of people will be upset with this comment, but really think about it first. Most people would rather purchase the product with all of the pretty packaging from a big company. It might suck, but people are generally idiots.
Product recognition goes a long way in influencing customer decisions. Linux is seen as the "Nerd OS" and Windows is seen as the "regular person's OS". It is as simple as that, and it is going to be nearly impossible to change that opinion.
Business users don't generally use Linux on the desktop because of:
1) IT inertia - i.e., application infrastructure which would require replacement (a.k.a. lock-in)
2) Corporate desire not to spend extra money supporting another OS
3) Training costs
Joe Home User sees #1 and #3 as well. e.g. for #1, they want to play Cabela's Big Game Hunter, not hack on Gnumeric. And Big Game Hunter is a Windows app, not a Linux app. For #3 - and this is the killer - Linux is still too hard to use. Venture outside the well-defined, tolerably easy-to-use user needs space of web browsing and... and that's about it... and you're looking at having to deal with a command-prompt. God forbid you should have to install something like a printer, which is usually dirt-simple on Windows, but a PITA on Linux (to wit: I have used Linux and FreeBSD since 2000. I still cannot get my Brother HL-2040 to print anything besides text and Word docs via CUPS + SMB on my FreeBSD box. PDFs are a no-go. But it works fine when connected to my OSX laptop - which also runs CUPS, so I know it *can* be done.)
Users have a hard time dealing with command-prompts -- that's partly why GUIs were invented.
Windows offers a path-of-least-resistance/lower barrier-to-entry. It does so by having a larger established application base, far-greater mindshare (which in turns feeds the app base), and by providing a generally easier-to-use interface -- all of which drive its own growth, or at least self-perpetuation.
Meanwhile, although Linux is free-to-possess, it is certainly *not* free to learn, and operating it requires more time spent "tweaking" than is usually the case on Windows. As the old saying goes, "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing." Hence why some of us have switched to OSX (my time is pretty expensive)...
Windows' continuing desktop dominance is ultimately a feedback loop in action. Linux is great for many things, and for a power user who does no more than basic Office-type work (Word docs, spreadsheets, etc.), and who doesn't mind multiple audio streams failing to mix together correctly -- or require different audio frameworks to do it, depending on the app -- it's usable... But as a desktop for Joe User, Linux isn't there yet, and probably never will be (consider the expansion into synchronization with iPods, cellphones (and the PIM stuff that goes along with smartphones), and so forth. Even Apple has a lot of catch-up to do here; Microsoft is using its market dominance to connect all these things in a tolerable -- but far from perfect -- manner.)
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
The problem with charging for Linux is that the first thing people hear about it is Linux is free, so anyone charging you for it must be ripping them off!
Put free stuff in a box and charge $100 for it and you'll soon get labelled a ripoff artists (this fscker charged me for free stuff!) and your company will fold.
The only way to sell free stuff is to establish brand loyalty or image. Selling the sizzle, not the steak. But that requires Coke-scale advertising. Alternatively you have to sell something a bit more. Free Linux + paid-for support can work, but there better be something more in the box than free stuff.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
ZOMG! He's bi-curious! (/south park)
sri
Ok, press some CDs and slap a $50 price tag on each one. Problem solved.
MORPHEUS: At last. Welcome, Neo. As you no doubt have guessed, I am Morpheus.
THOMAS: It's an honor.
MORPHEUS: No, the honor is mine. Please. Come. Sit. [Pause] I imagine, right now, you're feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole?
THOMAS: You could say that.
MORPHEUS: I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, this is not far from the truth. Do you use closed source software, Neo?
THOMAS: No.
MORPHEUS: Why not?
THOMAS: Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my computer.
MORPHEUS: I know exactly what you mean. [Pause] Let me tell you why you are here. You have come because you know something. What you know you can't explain but you feel it. You've felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don't know what, but it's there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?
THOMAS: Windows?
MORPHEUS: Do you want to know what it is? Don't we all feel that there is more to life...that there is something missing? [Pause] Windows is everywhere, it's all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your - ahem - window [short pause] or when you turn on your media center. You can feel it when you login at work, when you surf to slashdot, when you pay your taxes online. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
THOMAS: What truth?
MORPHEUS: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what Windows is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the recovery disc, the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the Ubuntu disc, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.
(Thomas takes the Ubuntu disc and some cookies.)
Who's this 'they' you speak of? The problem with your idea is that linux is decentralized and largely made by the user base rather than the original creators so throwing cash at a bunch of code monkeys and saying "fix it" just isn't a practical way of making linux better
Thus confirming that the only thing keeping Microsoft on top in market share is piracy. Don't bother trotting out the old argument that Linux is no good for gaming; if Linux were number one, then all games would be made for Linux. Side by side comparisons of games which run natively in Linux as well as Windows have always been better under Linux for me.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Honestly, all those companies have done something to help Linux. Google has devoted resources to help Linux agenst another SCO-style case, and has Google Code which helps the Free Software community which is mostly Linux. Adobe has Flash for Linux, and without that it would be a major point of how Windows is better then Linux. Sony has allowed Linux to be used on the PS3. And Mozilla has Firefox which because of the dent in IE's marketshare makes "I won't know how the surf the net on Linux" a null and void argument. Although none of these companies seems like they are helping Linux, they are. What we need is an OEM who isn't afraid to put mention of Linux in ads, unlike Dell who seems to confine Linux to a small corner of their website inaccessable from the main page with the heading "Are You Sure Open Source Is For You?" on it.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Not just businesses, schools and agencies don't either. Unless it's a computer science class more often than not your workstation will be a Dell or HP running Windows. So long as Windows remains the operating system of the government, it will be what most people learn and inevitably use. So long as Dell keeps selling computers with Windows to institutions, the government won't have any reason to consider a switch.
I don't know that Ubuntu GNU/Linux isn't spreading.
//have// to. The thing installs itself; I just get a postcard every so often.
//precisely// because of the lack of restrictions on what it lets them do, instead of trying to sell and advertise a bunch of crap they don't want, or have to pay more to get if they do want it.
//taken away// instead of given to them, they find ways to make the switch.
I've long since given up trying to advocate a new OS to people who aren't fed up with the one they have. But last week, I heard from a friend of mine who told me his roommate installed it after seeing it on his PC. He installed it after seeing it on his girlfriend's computer. She happens to be my roommate, and she asked me to install it without prompting from me.
I didn't even install two of these systems. I didn't
Aside from that, freedom is worth more than free. I am worth more than beer. Thank you very much.
So he may be right, in the sense that Windows users basically hate freedom (like terrorists! er, no wait...), so they put a low price tag on it. But everyone I know who's installed Gutsy since it's been out has been pretty pleased with it
Perhaps freedom won't sell. But that's because it can only be given away. And as people realize that they're paying to have their freedoms
And again, why is it so important that GNU/Linux "spread"? Just keep it^H^H me free.
Seriously, five years ago only the companies's local geeks had heard of Linux, nowadays only the young-and-stupid MSCEs *haven't*. And the amount of Linux users I've met during non computer-related activities has been surprising, too, and it has only tended to increase during the last couple of years.
Sure, it hasn't been as fast as Firefox, but I'd say it's not so much due to Linux's "free" status, as much as due to Microsoft's tight grip on it's OS monopoly. HTML is a standard, the Win32 API... not so much.
Not that I particularly care, though, Linux works for me perfectly without needing a 50%+ marketshare, but it *is* spreading, slowly perhaps but that should change once it gains a good foothold in the business market.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
All I see is 'blah blah blah bleat bleat bleat'
The best part about Linux is the idiots who piss and moan about why nobody else uses it.
I value things which are free over things which cost money. There's a simple reason:
;).
Things which cost money are sold buy people wanting to receive money, and the most common reason for this is profit. If someone wants to profit it takes only a small amount of time before they realize ways to do so which damage the product.
Things which are given away at little to no cost are generally made by people interested in making the product. They're labors of love.
I'm definitely a believer in "you get what you pay for" but "buyer be ware" is far more helpful. Usually you have to pay out the a** to get things of good quality: And it turns out it's almost universally cheaper to pay out the a** for better stuff; it lasts longer. But the important component is to not buy things because they cost more but because you understand the improvement they're charging you for.
The best things in life are free. Some of them are tangible products, but those are few and far between. When you find them, you should investigate them and treasure them if they don't suck. Most people are too stupid to figure that out, which is why the best things remain free.
So, shh, don't tell them Linux is good they'll ruin it for the rest of us
The real problem is that it is a hassle to get any operating system up and running on a machine. Microsoft solved this problem by working with manufacturers
to make sure the windows runs on their product. Apple solved this problem by only allowing their operating system to be used on machines that they sell.
Until recently there had been no solution of this sort for Linux, so people who ran linux had to be brave enough souls to fuss with the machine
so that it acts right after the operating system has been installed. Part of the reason that linux is starting to be used more on the desktop is
because manufacturers are selling the machines with linux preinstalled. I am not so sure its about perceived value, its more likely about convenience.
A few years ago, you could walk into a Best Buy store and find any of several boxed Linux install kits in the $75-$100 range sitting next to the $75-$100 Windows XP upgrades.
Did charging money for Linux do anything to spread it to the masses? Well, SUSE was purchased by Novell, Mandrake nearly went bust, and Red Hat canned its end-user distribution and replaced it with Fedora. So much for that idea.
Every business I've ever seen is running Microsoft Office.
I don't doubt that there are businesses out there running Open Office or something else, but over the length of my career and through engagements at probably three dozen or so companies in a wide variety of industries, I've never seen a business that didn't run MS Office. Even tech companies where I've been where the culture was very anti-Microsoft and open/free technology was used for everything else humanly possible were still running Microsoft Office.
Yes you are.
I thought of the Novell Linux/Mac/PC ad spoofs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa1RCg-Ccp0
Ramen
If this were true, then Apple would be on top.
Its the apps... Thats it.
It starts with the applications. Its things like iTunes. It's things like Office, Games, etc. On the more professional level, there are a lot of apps that are still just windows and those that do have linux versions lack the other complimenting applications that are only still on windows... which prevents people from using the linux versions.
There are other factors such as ease of use. Linux is still a bit tricky in some areas. Its a lot easier to install now a days but it is still not as smooth and straight forward as windows.
Hardware. Linux supports a lot of hardware... but not all.
The main thing is applications and not because its free. Just because it's free, doesnt mean i'll take it. A free Ferrari without its Ferrari engine in it, is worthless to me.
To test the "people aren't lapping it up because it's free" hypothesis, just do this:
Advertise your PC with Linux preinstalled as being bundled with "over $2000 worth of software, for free!"
The Gimp - how much is Paintshop Pro or Photoshop worth? $1000?
Gnumeric - how much is Microsoft Excel worth? $200 bought separately?
GUI of choice - how much is Microsoft Windows worth? $1000 for a Professional Ultimate?
If it still doesn't sell, there's more to it than having no dollar value.
Linux hasn't spread because it's still a pain in the ass.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Linux is going nowhere because of the lack of quality software.
Open Office != or > MSOffice
GIMP != or > Photoshop
There's nothing on Linux for quality page layout, CMYK etc, video editing is a fright, and the music software is years behind stuff on windows or mac.
Sure: running a server on Linux is fine, but that is a tiny tiny percentage of what computers do, and Linux software simply isn't there. Yet.
Until then, it's going to be a minority OS.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I used to fiddle (read: work for a living) with X. You had various window managers, configured them, etc, etc, etc. (Cue the dead horse.)
...."
I read here that it's about the desktop, but when has the Linux community embraced strategies to oust Windows?
There was Lindows - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_vs._Lindows - but in googling for it, I came across this, that I didn't know about:
http://www.linspire.com/
Seems to claim to deal with codecs and have a Window-sy interface. Also - mass market support at US$199 at Sears.
If adoption - as other posters above have suggested - is about a mass-retailer support, a low but not free machine, an easier interface, a pre-installed GNU/Linux, codec support so it just works, and an easier interface without a large learning curve, then this beast should be setting the world on fire.
It's not.
In addition, they claim to protect buyers from the wrath of MS patent rage and support all sorts of needed capabilities.
And they charge money for it - US$49.95 for a "digital download" (gotta love marketeers). Still not setting the world on fire.
I think back to the unspoken covenants I faced when I turned to OS X. "You can't any software for the Mac!" "Yes, I can. There MS Office, built-in apps, and Fink!" "But, I have free copies of
I wonder how far we've put our heads in the sand over application piracy being the principal driver dooming the world to Windows.
I know - but stopped associating with - all sorts of Windows guys trading software because _they could_. Makes me wonder how much of the perceived value of a Windows box is offset by pirated applications.
It's not because Windows itself is perceived to have value, nor because you can't get a decent machine at low cost from a major retailer with Ubuntu installed, etc.
So, I'm just saying.... maybe it's time to speak up for the real problem.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Kinda makes you wonder how much a typical linux distro would be sold for if it was closed source.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Linux is in fact the most popular OS out there. There are far more Linux machines in the world than Windows. Each year about 300 million Linux devices are produced, while the total number of Windows devices are only about 600 million. If we assume a 5 year life span for a Linux device, then there must be at least 1.5 billion Linux devices in the world. Granted, these things are mostly routers cell phones and telephone exchanges, but the fact that ordinary yokels cannot see the mountain of Linux devices in the field, doesn't mean that they aren't there.
Desktop wise, the little Asus Eee PC alone will outsell Apple in 2008. Apple produces about 3 million Macs in a year, while Asus plans to sell 5 million of there little toys.
So don't tell me Linux ain't popular, while it is in fact the biggest OS success story ever.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Zealots twist the world to fit their beliefs and are often bemused when that world doesn't seem to fit the evidence. Here is a prime example. People acting confused wondering why it is that Linux doesn't spread faster. If you didn't live in a fantasy world it'd be so obvious why Linux didn't spread that you wouldn't need to even ask the question. But I'll just get modded down because anyone who actually points out the emperor has no clothes just ends being part of the world that gets twisted out. Linux is a piece of shit.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The good:
- rock solid stability if a system is well configured, no latency,
- solid office and graphics software: firefox, ooffice, latex, gimp, inkscape, etc
- peace of mind, being in control of all processes, own the machine
The bad:- presentation software. there is a long way towards something like Keynote on the mac.
- games. Will I ever see games like "crysis" be sold for linux?
- propriatary software like Flash, photoshop, dreamwaver, tax or business software
The ugly:Average Joe (fictitional) buys a new computer with the latest hardware and tries to get some Linux distribution to recognize everything.
He fails - he would have to wait, say, a year for all of his drivers to be incorporated into the kernel.
Well Windows seems to recognize everything - so he installs a Microsoft O/S and thinks he's on the top of the world.
He figures it's $100 (or so) well spent because it gives him access to all of his toys.
Currently, hardware manufacturers release Microsoft drivers on release of their products.
Until Joe can buy a new computer with a version of Linux recognizing the whole shebang, old Microsoft will maintain its O/S dominance on newly-purchased computers.
Year-old computers are fair game for Linux.
It is just hard to get Joe to switch operating systems once he's started on the Microsoft path.
I set my 67-year-old mother (not fictitional) up with a 1-year-old Linux box and she is perfectly happy.
She does not want to switch to Microsoft because she is used to Linux.
Habits are hard to break.
To get Joe on board with Linux, the hardware manufacturers would have to supply Linux drivers quickly.
Who is going to get them all to do that?
I am trying - by only buying Linux-supported hardware.
Its amazing the parallels you find between religion and OSes.
Will this myth ever die? I've been using Quickbooks on Wine on Linux since 2002. Last time I checked, this was 2008. It is time to wake up d00d...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
A good example would be the whole source code thing. This is scary to a non-technical user. Maybe it shouldn't be, but it is. While it is possible to run Linux and never run in to any code, it isn't that hard to find something you want to do that needs source code. Maybe it is a driver or an app that is distributed only in source form. Well, compiling that scares people. You have to drop to a command line and you are going to get a shitload of text dumped at you that makes no sense. Even though the end result might be just as easy as running a visual installer in Windows, it doesn't FEEL as easy, it feels scary.
I could go on with a whole list of design choices Linux has made that are like this. Basically what it comes down to is that it doesn't seem as easy to a non-technical user. Even if the process is just as easy (and there are times when it certainly isn't) the fact that it involves something that looks highly technical makes it very intimidating. This is going to hinder adoption, of course. If people feel it is harder, they aren't going to want to use it or learn it.
The real solution is to pretend like it's sold by putting it on a torrent site with "cracked" or "full with key" in the title. Then it will spread like crazy. You know why? Here's a story I heard!
This one guy wanted to get rid of his old refrigerator when he got a new one. He put it out on his front lawn with a sign that said "free." It sat out there for like two weeks and nobody took it. His friend told him people must assume it doesn't work if it's free so he put a sign on it that says "For sale $25" and the next night someone stole it.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
er... actually i think it has little/nothing to do with it. in the end people are lazy, have lives outside of techdom (imagine someone only wanting to use the computer to read email and surf the web..yes, these people do exist), and linux (while it has gotten much better) is still an OS for people that surf this site. i run windows at home. i run windows at work. i have no incentive to run linux at home other than a greater sense of security and the ability to go out for drinks a few more nights because i didn't drop an absurd amount of cash on some piece of software. i dabbled in dual booting machines and VMware server but i usually seem to give up after a while because i run into something in linux that, my god, just works in windows, and it really isn't worth my time surfing discussion boards looking for someone that ran into a similar problem and edited some file (that i have to read the specs on to edit (yes, i know, i'm lazy)) hoping that it will work for me. what was most telling for me was talking to two of my friends that both worked for ximiam (and quit novell once their stock options were cashable..) and telling them i had just installed opensuse and everything worked right off the bat. the sound of amazement in their voices struck me as odd. it was the first linux disto i'd ever installed and just figured it would work because that's what i was used to. when i added my second monitor and things got flakey i uninstalled the os and went back to windows because...it just worked. don't get me wrong, i don't like big corporations that abuse their power any more than the next person but i have a life outside of tech and would rather play with my kids than spend what precious little time i have left in the day learning something new...especially when i can just pop in a disk and live with something, albeit flawed, that just works (for me). i do hope for the day when linux "just works". open standards and true interoperability will be nice... free, as in beer, is also nice when you have 4 kids to put through college.
i thought i had lead poisoning until i stopped browsing at -1
If free vs paid was the reason, then opera would be the most popular browser in the world as it was a pay only browser for a long time.
It's about ease of use. I love open source software. But free or not, what matters is it has to work. No one wants to spend 5 hours trying to figure out how to play a DVD. No one wants to recompile a kernal to use dual monitors. No one wants to use a command prompt for anything.
For linux to work, make it more like Mac OSX; Easy to use. Then, it'll work. Cost has nothing to do with it (I'm posting this from firefox, NOT Opera).
When Linux gets good support from hardware and software developers then it will fly. It's getting closer, but not there yet. ZERO to do with (NOT) being free.
(It costs to buy a disk or download the distro, then there is the learning time, searches for replacement software, etc, it ain't free)
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when publishers start making games (real games) run on Linux, I'll switch my desktop.
When adobe ports their library to Linux, design houses and all sorts of content houses will switch their workstations.
When intuit ports their library, more small businesses will switch. (thanks to people like me)
It's the Software Stupid!
They're using their grammar skills there.
Out-of-the-box usability means a new user can find his basic needs in a Linux distro without having to google for command-line instructions for installing or configuring something. Modern Linux distros generally have evolved to this requirement in the West, but in the East, few KDE-based distros automatically set up an East Asian language input functionality. This is lethal to Linux's survivability in East Asia. Fedora 8 is so far the only distro that both is available with a KDE Live CD and automatically installs Chinese input for me when I change the system langauge to Chinese.
Ecology is another vital aspect. Like a "living language" is not only about a specification of a vocabulary and a grammar, but also a large enough user base and information base (information available in that language), a "living operating system" is not only about an installation CD itself; it has to build up a social ecology around it: (1) tutorials available in bookstores and pre-installed computers available in computer stores; (2) a large applications market for this OS; (3) a large user base. A Windows user does not migrate to Linux first and then wait for his needed applications to become available for Linux. Things has to happen in the other way around -- first let there be free and open source and cross platform Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools that can let an application developer write a single version of source code and compile for multiple target platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc.). I'm glad to see such things have already taken shape: Lazarus for Pascal-based RAD and Code::Blocks for C/C++ based RAD. Bill Gates has three weapons that win him the desktop software world: Windows, Office, Visual Studio. While Office is no longer a user-locking factor since there is things like OpenOffice.org, RAD tools as easy as Visual Basic are still rare for Linux, and more importantly, for cross-platform desktop app development. The open source world has to conquer the user's desktop by first introducing applications that are available for both platforms, such as Firefox, The GIMP, Pidgin, OpenOffice, BitTorrent, FlightGear, StarDict, to name a few. When the Windows user gets addicted to the Windows versions of these cant-live-without apps, and when hopefully all his critical apps are available in a cross-platform fashion, that's the moment that he can truly convert to a Linux distro.
The bottom line: invest in and support cross-platform RAD tools like Lazarus and Code::Blocks (and backbones like wxWidgets, but Java is too slow-ass in my opinion)!!
Well, I dual boot. And I have talked to my best friend in Waco, and she dual boots now. I even have one box that is Ubuntu only. Ubuntu works better than any previous try, for me, personally. Her boyfriend runs it now, and she gave one to another friend, who also likes it. It's going to spread like that. All of them always say the same thing, though. I loaded it and it came up with this "third party restricted driver" thing. I clicked it and it said ATI so I thought it should make things better. I clicked it, it loaded, wanted me to reboot (how windows-esque). Now Compiz doesn't work anymore, and everything else looks exactly the same. Now in windows, I would just go to the hardware control panel and uninstall the offending driver, or "roll back" - yes I know that never works properly, but the point is, uninstalling it does, and there's nothing to it. I have no idea how to do that on linux. There should be a place I should be able to go and do it graphically. I don't want to open a terminal, this is 2008, I shouldn't have to do that. My 1500 dollar box should have a way to do that simply, and in Windows, it does.
That's the first point.
The second point, that my friends, and about half a trillion slashdotters who are not Linux people (yes, half a trillion) keep coming back with is the simple fact that walking into a store, seeing a cool new game, and wanting to take it home, put the disc in, sacrifice their personal privacy, deal with it whispering for activation, and then play it, is impossible. Yes I realize there are some games that are Linux compatible right out of the box. Not nearly enough games. Not nearly as easily as buying the disc and putting it in the drive, and not nearly as easy as downloading a torrent of a game, cracking it, and playing it. WINE doesn't do the job properly. I want my computer to do it with no emulation overhead AT ALL. Not even a little eency bit. And again with the driver thing. I remember learning to do all of that stuff in Windows, and it was FUN. I loved learning all that stuff, but my curiousity about that kind of thing is . . . waning. Now I just want my computer to do what I desire, when I desire, with cool little graphic things, maybe a "sci fi" sound event now and again, and I don't want to spend 2 hours getting it to happen or read a bunch of forums with explanations too advanced for me to get easily. Ubuntu is fun, but I can't let go of Windows until I can play my games, and my hardware just does it's thing without me having to type anything manually. I want to point, click, be happy. It's almost there, and I'm really excited about it. I'm not trashing Linux, I'm just saying it's not there yet.
In order for Linux to win, Linux must be able to run all software of all platforms completely. Wine is a step in the right direction. But other platforms need to be like Wine, OSX, even obscure ones like Amiga, if I insert a CD from any platform, Linux should install it, infest it, and take control of it. Also, Linux must circumvent DRM, must circumvent CD Copy protection, everything. Installing something on Linux must be far easier than on Windows and automated.
Because of the GPL restrictions, no one can improve Linux and sell it to you for the price of the improvements. So, things that someone doesn't want to write for free won't be added.
Also, the restrictions prevent it from ever including technology under any other restrictions so its capabilities will always be restricted compared to operating systems that include licensing for all needed functionality.
Sounds more like a Mac commercial.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The reason is not being free or anything else. The reason is that Linux is difficult for the average user. I had a new laptop and it took me three days to connect my wireless at home. I spent hours on Google, in newsgroups and forums. So, how can we expect an average user to do the same thing? Like it or not, doing the same operation (i.e., connecting to my wireless) under Windows took a split second.
Computer is a tool to do things for most of people. For them, which ever is the easiest is the best solution. Who cares it costs money? If their can do their job with it, they will (and do) spend money.
Final note: I have high hopes for Ubuntu to solve these problems, and become more end-user-friendly.
I believe that Linux being free has nothing whatsoever to do with its value perception.
Instead I believe that people, and to some extent correctly, still equate Linux with "something for geeks, not end-users" because of:
- the generally poor standard of GUI's on Linux itself and Linux software
- the generally dismissive attitude of Linux users / software developers for a nice polished GUI with all the details taken care of.
There ... I've said it. So flame me.
Ordinary users simply do _not_ want something that forces them to go to the command line for system maintenance. Neither do they want to have to edit configuration files, let alone scripts. It has taken Linux distributions years to come up with something as sophisticated as YAST (for SuSE Linux) and KDE Control center, and especially KDE still doesn't provide a reliable one-stop solution to detect and install my inkjet printer. I have to go to CUPS for that. In a word ... it's less simple than MS Windows (unless you already know what you should be doing because you did it before and kept notes).
I have seen threads with expostulations about how great command line oriented programs are, and I agree ... for some programs that are oriented towards batch processing, for repetitive jobs, and for software that I write myself for my own use. (When I write software for my own personal use, I never write GUIs. Command-line, control files, and file in, file out. If a GUI is needed, someone else can do that.)
But for other people's programs, and for programs I don't use every day I want to be prompted and guided ... by a GUI ... with tooltips and a smoothly functioning and fairly complete Help function. The very last think I want is to be obliged to read a manual and remember commands for some fink of a program before I use it. I believe I have a typical end-user mentality in this respect.
And did I mention that as an end-user I really do _not_ want to see every program sporting its own GUI layout either? I don't care a fig about what some programmer thinks is good way to organise his GUI. I want my GUI to be *standardised* (at least the toolbar) so that it's somewhat familiar as soon as the application starts. Copy-paste should of course be supported, and don't you dare to let it default to any other key combination than C for copy and V for paste, and a print option (if applicable at all) right where I expect it ... under the menu (which has to be the leftmost menu) somewhere 3/4 down the list.). Well ... I might be able to cope with a standard GUI layout under Linux that's different from Windows, but no more than one.
And then the graphics itself ... ouch. I really *hate* GTK-based programs. They look somewhat like the Windows programs I'm used to, but the widgets work differently. I find them clunky. Ugly and clunky. Again, I couldn't care less what some programming community thinks of them. I don't want them. Take the typical GTK file menu for one thing. An abortion! And what's more, I won't have them unless there is no alternative.
As an illustration, take for example AviDemux (see here: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/). It comes in two flavours: with a GTK+ interface and with a QT4 interface. I tried the GTK+ flavour first and disliked it. The QT4 version on the other hand was acceptable. It didn't irritate.
The good news is that this nicely illustrates the difference between what in the context of "Git" (the version control software) is called: the plumbing (the guts) and the porcelain (the superficial layer that comprises the GUI). A well-designed GUI can be rendered in either GTK+ or QT4, and it should have absolutely no impact on the plumbing.
This is why CD sales remain robust despite the existence of file sharing.
How do you think big companies with thousands of desktops in multiple domains push out changes to the right machines and restrict shared filesystems to particular groups and delegate certain administration to local admins and create mailboxes and keep all those machines and all of those accounts organized and maintained?
.NET script to collect information about a mailbox, generate a report and put the XLS on a shared drive *and it would work equally well on every Windows network*.
Most people are utterly clueless about how Windows is *really* used in large organizations. They assume it's like their PCs at their home with a "server" in their basement. They've never thought about security policy, they don't understand how an ACL and unix permissions are semantically different, they don't know what Kerberos is and they think LDAP is an authentication service. When maintaining a few hundred PCs for a bunch of brokers or a design firm or a government organization a slew of Windows tools and services come into play that Linux simply does not have.
The fact is, Linux and Windows are not interchangeable and should not even be compared. Linux's strength is it's flexibility and simplicity. It's the flatbed truck of operating systems. If you want to run some web thing, a Java app or Oracle, Linux is the way to go. The strength of Windows is it's integration. It's not customizable and as such everyone's setup is the same so everything works easily with everything else. You could write a
Incidentally, if you think I'm a Windows fanboy, as a programmer I use Linux as my desktop 100% of the time. I only use Windows as necessary to test my code (I write Linux / Windows integration software).
Ok, go ahead and mod me down now, I'm on the record.
The most confusing thing that happened recently to my "users" is that they started getting XPS documents (unfree spec) as email attachments - courtesy of MS. Fortunately, half of the Windows using recipients hadn't upgraded to the latest MS, and couldn't read it either, so I had some credibility explaining the problem.
In case you were wondering, no I can't easily recycle the ridiculous amount of effort needed to create "personal OEM" versions of Linux. This is because you can't get identical hardware unless you buy it all at once and keep it in a warehouse. Manufacturers keep changing chipsets on a whim. Even the same model on the same shelf has often had different chipsets. They *never* print the chipset on the retail box. (Grrrrrr.) There are companies that offer properly configured pre-installed Linux. But it ends up costing as much as a Mac. And at that price point, a Mac looks a lot sexier to an end user.
We did buy a bunch of identical DTR Status systems a while back where I work. That was an excellent investment, even though they are rather dated now (600Mhz Celeron). Everything was figured out in one go, and they were and still are drop in servers for email/firewall/etc.
I hate it when the the same model of a component on the same shelf with identical packaging has a different chipset. There should be a law requiring manufacturers to list software facing chipsets on their packaging - just like being required to list ingredients on packaged food.
The home PC and the locked down corporate desktop parted company quite some time back. You can chose any arbitrary date:
1991 Neverwinter Nights
1993 Doom and Quicken for Windows 3
1995 Windows 95 and Amazon.com
1996 America Online adopts flat rate pricing. $19.95 a month.
1997 Internet Explorer 4, AIM and Winamp
I chose these particular examples because they took the home PC in directions the office machine could not go.
Put some copies of linux in boxes with documentation and sell at retail for 500 dollars but keep it free to download. Nobody will buy it, but people will download it thinking that they are getting a good deal.
I can't tell you how many IT people claim to have "tried linux and it is too experimental/incomplete/unstable/whatever". Then, I ask them a little more about their experience and find that they tried the wrong distro, three versions ago. In the OSS world, 6 months is a long time. If you haven't tried the recommended beginner linux distro at the version that has been released within the last 6 months, you shouldn't be asserting that modern linux distros are not mature. That would be like me taking a copy of windows 98, trying to install it on my 3 month old computer, and then calling Windows a bad OS because it didn't work. You wouldn't give an assessment of Vista based on your experiences with Windows 2000 would you? Then why does it make sense to say that current linux distros can be evaluated based on your experience with older versions.
I highly recommend you take that computer and try it again with Ubuntu linux 7.10. Your nVidia card will almost certainly work. Installing software is really easy and the number of packages in the repositories is massive. NTFS just works. The sound should just work. Finally, are you really complaining about having to choose between desktop managers???? Give me a break. Use whatever you like. Stop spreading ignorant assessments of linux. If you don't know the current state of linux, don't say anything. Better yet, learn the current state of linux. From what I hear, it is pretty cheap to try it out.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5... That's the combination on my luggage!
...isn't being used by more people, "Average Joe Computer Newbie". If this is the perception of your target market then you will NEVER get anywhere. Despite all the vitriol and hatred directed towards Microsoft on Slashdot, Microsoft does one thing that NOBODY in the LInux world does, listen to customers. That's right, you hear me, listen to customers. Microsoft spends hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars and man hours with usability testing through things like focus groups and feedback. Linux users simply reply, "if you don't like the way things work, here's the code, fix it yourself." Telling this to anyone is disrespectful. Telling it to someone who doesn't care about computers or to a new Linux user is annoying and the best way to turn them away from using Linux. I know that I've looked at linux since RedHat started making a distro and have given up on it each and every time, regardless of all the glitz and polish they put into the icons and window decoration, for the very same reason each time. There is no good help out there and when I tried to offer my time and services as a designer I was ignored or told to go away and use Windows or MacOS. I've done just that and have not been the less for it either. Keep thinking your users are "Average Joe Computer Newbie" or whatever other degrading name you can think of that makes your virtual penis bigger but Linux will NEVER get any better until you start listening to your users instead of telling them what's best for them.
FTA ""That's not true!" I hear you scream. "Linux is worth a lot! It's just being offered for free!" I know it's not true that Linux is worth less than Windows. It's far more valuable to the end user in terms of getting things done."
I'm sorry but... no it isn't more valuable, ESPECIALLY in terms of getting things done. Most of my time spent actively using linux is spent holding it's hand to get it to do what I can do in windows with a hand full of mouse clicks and a restart. Maybe I wouldn't have to restart in the case of linux but in a choice between fighting with linux for 4 hours or 30 seconds clicking stuff in windows followed by a 2 minute long reboot, I pick the latter.
I agree that free will make people pause and consider the possibility of getting burned, but then a few people take the plunge and try it any way, whether because of tight money or curiosity. Those people will come back with stories of how good or bad something is. Napster is a perfect example. The music could have easily been some degraded low quality crap, and in some cases it was. People didn't know what p2p was and most people when they first heard aobut it had no idea that they would be downloading stuff from other end users or that they themselves would be sharing what they downloaded. What they knew was a free service was offering something that normally costs 25 bux at Walmart... at no cost.
If what this man says is true then Napster should have struggled for years. It didn't. The question is "WHY?" The answer isn't in how much people paid for the songs they downloaded. The answer is that it didn't have countless individuals try it and then discover it to be full of problems and limitations that ultimately made it worth LESS than free. I know that this will not be a popular sentiment on Slashdot but Linux has many serious flaws. The number one is that it is designed with the assumption that people who could barely operate a mouse a month ago could tell Ubuntu what services need to be stopped before APM is upgraded. If I had been a blogger I would have been blogging about it the moment I saw that. Ubuntu is leaps and bounds closer to being "user friendly" than any other Linux Distro that I have tried, but it is still less user friendly than say... Windows 95.
In the end users don't really care that much about the cost of Windows. Most of them are completely unaware of what Windows is or that it can even be purchased separately from a computer... much less how much it costs. Truth be told most of them purchase Windows with their computers and in doing so end up spending about $10 on it. Their number one concern is that it "just works." Linux works... but it doesn't "just work." In many cases it has to be MADE to work... unlike Windows.
Myself as a power user and a computer professional for almost 10 years have had more than my share of struggles with Linux. For the past 6 years I have run a small company file server using various distros of Linux. As time wound on I began to notice that some days I got plenty of work done, and on others I got practically none. I also noted that the days I got practical none done where the days I found I was the most stressed and tired at the end of the day. Linux was the reason. I would start my day and soon find myself "fixing" my file server that I hadn't realized was not setup right to allow networked printing from a Win9x machine or wouldn't allow me to access to my SQL server because of some idiosyncrasy with my new router (etc, etc). By the end of the day I might have fixed my file server but probably hadn't gotten much else done. More and more I started keeping files I use often on my gaming machine to reduce downtime until finally I wasn't even using my file server.
About a month ago I finally caved and purchased Windows 2003 Server. Within 10 minutes of hitting the desktop I had file sharing, dns, printer sharing, and sql running. On a whim I set up an active directory domain in 15 minutes. Friday I decided to setup an NIS Domain
It has nothing to do with whether Linux is free or not, but has everything to do with #1) the fact that almost 100% of all pre-installed PC comes with some sort of Windows. Your average user is NOT ever going to want to install an OS on their own. Unless there is some shift of balance away from the strategic advantage of #1, the dominance of MSW will not fade. #2) Due to #1, most people are already familiar and comfortable with Windows. Most people are inherently resistant to changes. You have to realize the arrival of GUI Linux came about a decade behind Windows 3.11, and this is a direct consequence of the fact that UNIX was (and still is in some regard) mainly built for a mainframe, CLI environment whereas MSW's main focus has always been GUI.
IMO there are another 2 issues that UNIX/Linux have: 1) Linux has too many different variants, which while is one of its strength, also happen to make matters confusing to new users. 2) UNIX/Linux's learning curve has always been higher than Windows. It also seem to demand some sort of programming experiences when running Unix/Solaris/Linux since most of the time you'd end up using the CLI. (e.g. I had to configure the install text and option parameters just to make sure it supported my AMDx2 64bit. Upon boot-up it did not even detect the wireless adapter etc.) You have to realize that there are obstacles that your average user will find insurmountable.
"The total cost of ownership has just 1000%."
I suggest you get your fat ass off the damn Slashdot and get back to English class.
I just can imagine my grandma, who barely knows how to use the mouse, dealing with linux.
Face it guys. Linux is still more difficult to use than Windows or Mac OS
Right now it's STILL an OS for (us) geeks
"I don't know that Ubuntu GNU/Linux isn't spreading."
Indeed. My current office is full of Linux machines. In my previous job pretty much everyone in the company had two or more Linux machines on their desk and we were aiming to sell tens of millions of them (which the company may well still do: of course Joe Sixpack won't realise that their MP3 player, car navigation system, or the surveillance camera watching them in their local mall is actually running Linux). In my previous job before that, again most of the work was done on Linux.
Linux is everywhere, and it's quite possible that there are more linux machines in the world than Windows machines when you include all the servers and embedded systems it's installed on. The only place it's comparatively rare is on the desktop for non-techies, and the only reason people think Linux _isn't_ spreading is because the non-techie desktop is the most visible part of the computing world.
Perceived costs has nothing to do with Linux's popularity problems. Firefox is free to use and it is doing quite well against Internet explorer. The value of the OS to the user and not the price tag is the critical source of the problem. Computer geeks (present company and all that) values Linux. The platform is an excellent platform for learning. People pursuing Computer Science degrees can study anything part of the platform with having to sign a contract. Companies have built fortunes on using Linux (Google anyone). However, Linux is not an easy tool to use and make productive. For those whose career and talents have nothing to do with computers yet need computers, they may just want something that works out of the box with no fuss. They want something with a large pool of software written for it that they are trained to use. Maybe, they just rather that the OS be there when they take the computer out of the box. The doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, and artists in the world just don't value Linux the same way the author does.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
No. No it's not. OpenOffice sucks. It's usability is worse than MS Office
Oddly enough, I've been using OpenOffice since its early StarOffice days (before it was bought out by Sun). Its kept its UI generally stable and I've never had to waste my time learning new menu layouts at each new version release. It's available where ever I might need it.
Personally, I always remove Microsoft Office and replace it with OpenOffice. OO's the known quantity. MSO is the one with the dodgy shifting target document formats.
it's compatibility filters regularly screw up simple files
If Microsoft doesn't care if its own Office app is compatible with older copies of Office, why should I? Need to transfer a document to someone else? Use PDF, RTF or TXT.
They DO care about WindowsMedia 10
Sucks to be them. Everyone else has heard of Videolan's VLC.
Also, if you require me to do any sysadmining whatsoever you've epicly failed
Ah, so you're the one who doesn't use Windows Update, clean the viruses from your PC or run defrag every once in a while.
You want linux to really be valuable to people
Nope. Personally, I want Microsoft to buy out the QNX folks and impliment Windows 7 as its GUI. Then create a nice sandboxed emulator to handle all the old Win32 app cruft.
Every year I try whatever the 'flavor of the year' is of Linux... and every year, at some point, it resorts to using the command line to get the stupidest crap to work - stuff that should always just work out of the box. With Ubuntu, it was getting my nVidia 6600 video card to run at some resolution above "Large Print Edition". This isn't some obscure network card or cable modem.. we're talking a well seasoned, plain-jane video card by the #1 manufacturer. The minute it resorts to that, Linux has failed for yet another year. I don't care who's fault it is, Linux failed. There's no way any significant portion of my customers are going to jump through these hoops to run my software on this OS, so why should I bother port my software to it?
And frankly, $200 bucks for an OEM OS install of Windows is money well spent. I rely on my OS to get work done as much as I rely on my car, and I've had my Windows XP system running without a reinstall longer than either of my cars have gone without a visit to the mechanic.
This is the ONE AND ONLY ONE reason: Linux needs a prosperous market of cross-platform applications that can smoothly walk a Windows user through the border of the two platforms. So, please support free cross-platform rapid applications development (RAD) tools such as Lazarus and Code::Blocks!!!
I never got cookies with Ubuntu.
We're talking real, edible cookies, right?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
No, the problem with Linux is that it's decentralised and developers are working all over the place doing whatever bits they want to do. It's a strength, but also a weakness.
Linux is a lot better than ever before, but some sort of focused development would solve a lot of the problems people complain about. Sadly there's no-one ponying up the dough so we're largely back to people doing whatever they feel like.
Linux is NOT more valuable to most end-users as far as getting things done. The fact that some people don't get that is part of the reason that Linux isn't going anywhere. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
Linux is all over the place. Can we get over the idea that Linux should be all things to all people? You will rarely find a tool of any kind that does everything well. All one needs to do to beat the general purpose tool is to specialize in an area.
Microsoft and Apple both make better desktop products. But Linux is easily the best choice of the three for many server applications, including embedded systems. When you need minor customization, Linux is king. With Linux, making small-audience targeted applications is easier. And it's made it to the point where you can not be a well-rounded data person without basic Linux skills. It's there, and it adds up to a lot of presence.
So can we cut it out with the "why is it failing" bit? You sound like Microsoft PR.
The market for any OS in general is huge. The market for an OS that allows near-total end user freedom is tiny.
Although I agree with the article, I would also like to add that in addition to people thinking that the more expensive a software license such as Microsoft's is compared to Linux's GPL; the majority of computer desktop users have no clue what good software is in the first place. They will always buy the OS they are more familiar with, in terms of both what the media has presented to them and of course their own personal experience. People are intimidated by their own ignorance of computers and don't share the hacker mentality of learning or trying to figure things out. According to this month's Harper's magazine, an article stated that the National Endowment of the Arts took a survey, where 43% of those polled admitted they have not read a book all year.
Mmmm ... cookies.
You're forgetting that for most users, it takes YEARS for a new OS to arrive. Think about the time between Win98 and WinXP, or WinXP and Vista (I leave out 2000, ME, and NT as they were never really targeted toward home users as such). Joe User is accustomed to waiting years for new releases, so when he says he tried Linux 6 months ago, he THINKS that he tried the latest and greatest.
And which distro did you try? Mandrake? Mandriva? Red Hat? Fedora? Ubuntu? Which version? This is way more than the average user wants to think about! He'll say, "I don't know. My friend told me to try Linux. Which one of those is Linux?" Ubuntu is great... but in 6 months when another distro comes out will you be touting that instead? Most consumers would rather just use whatever new OS has the name "Windows" in front of it.
Spreadable Linux? The key is an advertising campaign with Fabio: "I can't believe it's not Windows!"
I (kind of) agree with you re: Office and PhotoShop, but I'm stuck with an XP laptop at the moment, with iTunes, Windows MediaPlayer, RealPlayer and WinAmp - and I'm *really* missing Amarok.
I'm not a KDE-person (viva e17!), but I'll cheerfully install the KDE libraries just to have Amarok.
This is where the serious fun begins.
The problem of Linux is not the OS itself, but rather the fact that being free it attracts mostly users that would never want to pay for applications anyway.
If the users do not want to pay for applications, there is no market for the commercial application developer companies.
Of course some Linux users would not mind paying for commercial applications, but those are a minority of the Linux users that is not enough to justify the investments needed to produce commercial Linux applications.
Linux most successful markets are in the services like hosting and consulting. Linux users pay for such services, not because they want, but rather because they have no alternative to paid services.
This is not a Linux specific problem, but rather a Free/OSS software problem in general.
There is not much hope to change this other than moving towards SaaS (Software as a Service).
From business perspective, Linux has failed to penetrate Wall Street Desktops.
From house hold perspective, Linux is still not as easy as Windows (drivers, administration, applications etc)
From developer perspective, Who should decide whether a piece of code to run in KERNEL space or USER space
Tho he has given it some thought and at first glance it seems interesting, in reality it is an extremely sophomoric assessment.
/boot/grub menu.lst file.
/boo/grub/menu.lst file also modified inappropriately.
The reason it hasn't picked up steam to become the most popular desktop OS is due to many factors, the least of which is what he states. One issue that OSS has to overcome is the free as in beer. The vast majority of people have no idea of ever bringing the beer to the party. They'll never ever participate in expanding Linux and no one wants to have to constantly go back to the trough to feed the linux guru's for support. I use Linux every day all day, and I can tell you that it isn't stable enough yet. Software updates break software at a uch faster rate than under Windows. This is due to software being updated much more frequently, but also due to the constant feeding at the trough. An example is this: in the last 2 weeks Ubuntu updated the xserver core 2 times and each time it broke the ability to log into your workstation. Then after that, within the same 2 week period, they updated the kernel which then broke the video for those using the nvidia provided drivers. You don't see this happen under Windows. NO it isn't windows but you don't expect to have to go back to the trough 3 times in 2 weeks to get your problems resolved. This happened to an older retired guy that hates Microsoft and wanted to give Linux a try. How do you think he felt about the situation? He was queesy about giving it a try as is, but when 3 problems that disabled his OS in 2 weeks occured, he was understandably reluctant.
When giving feedback to Canonical about it there's absolutely no guarantee they won't do it again.
Each time they update my kernel I have to modify my
In the case of the older retired guy he had his
This is recent stuff. Other stuff over time is worse. But the idea is that though it is still good for a desktop user one must not do much modification from the default or the system become intolerant and the system fails when updates are available.
In the past, for instance, with mandrake (now mandriva) people paid a yearly subscription of $60.00. XP Home cost $99 as an upgrade. It has been in use by many for over 5 years. If someone paid the yearly fee for mandrake of $60.00 x 5 it would have cost them $300 to maintain their Linux. But XP Home would have cost them $99, less than 1/3 the cost.
For me, a small business owner, I use Linux all the time so my customers get a demo of what Linux can do on the desktop. They think it is just fantastic when they see it. So, why would they not adopt it? One reason is because they don't know it exists. Most people don't know that Linux exists. The second reason is that they already paid for Windows, so why would they want to abandon what they paid for when Linux, to them, is unproven and they won't be able to run their old software.
The author is very immature in his reasoning. He doesn't understand about the complexity of using FOSS where some of the zealots are still "all free or nothing" in their attitude. In every environment we can have commercial mixed with free. I expect that the games that come out, such as ET:QW (which has a native Linux client), I will pay for that. I don't expect the commercial organization to make software for me for free.
The software industry (as well as the hardware) commercial or not has the perception that the FOSS guys will write the drivers, etc, so there's no need to put any effort into it. You see this all the time. Why would they be willing to put effort into something when the foss boys are saying "all free or nothing" and then they write drivers (even if those drivers are only partial implementations)?
One can see the issue is very complex and not easily understood, and that it has very little to do with the perception that software that costs money is perceived to have greater value. The factor of it coming fro
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
So many good comments- sorry if this has been said. I think the issue is that if you pay for something, then someone can be held responsible for problems, tech support, etc. It is a perception, but if I pay good money for an OS, then I feel I have some power, weight, leverage if I need tech support (and need to get tough, ask for managers, etc.)
Watches are jewelry.
:). So the more expensive the "better", naturally it's got to have some base quality, but it doesn't actually have to be that functional or good.
Think peacock's plumage - to show fitness to potential mates and rivals
A cheap phone is probably better than most of those expensive watches for time keeping purposes.
Linux doesn't spread because
1) It doesn't come preinstalled on most systems (and if it does it's often not cheaper, sometimes you even have to pay _more_). No normal person is going to install it themselves. If people had to install OSX themselves it would never have got that much share (OSX has a higher share than Linux on notebooks).
2) Support for apps (especially games and things like Microsoft Office).
3) There's no coordinated marketing plan or strategy to herd the sheeple...
Microsoft has kind of shot themselves in the foot with Office 2007- it's more different from previous versions than Open Office is. Similarly Vista is a downgrade from XP. But because of 3) the opportunity won't really be exploited fully.
Not ours! At least not in the corporate desktop arena.
/.'ers. There are some of us that will test and spend countless hours; months and years in some cases, to expand our knowledge of an unfamiliar OS. But people like that are part of that "1%" group of users, and not your average one.
The reasons:
* As some have mentioned, most of us are set in our ways; including some fellow
* As you get older and your priorities change (ie. family, greater demand of your time from work, etc.), there's simply no spare time to learn anything new. Even if you manage to get some free time in, it would be to do something else other than learning a new OS.
* Marketability of your skills as an average office worker - Will your time spent honing your skills on GIMP, OpenOffice, Evolution, etc. improve your odds in being picked for the job over someone with skills in Windows apps? Quite the opposite! Why? A majority of corporations use Windows as their desktop OS of choice
* While Ubuntu and it's various flavors have garnered quite a bit of attention, there is still a great deal of work to be done in terns of getting to the point of saying "It Just Works!(tm)". Apple's advantage is that OS X is designed to work on core hardware manufactured by them, which makes it that much easier. Third party manufacturers are given access to APIs so they could develop apps/drivers to access their devices.
Side note : Why doesn't Canonical or some other major Linux backer venture into the hardware business, instead of getting into half-assed deals with the company's like Dell whose strings are pulled by the likes of Microsoft?
I could go on, but you get the point.
If Linux intends to make its way onto corporate desktops, it should start by establishing itself as the desktop of choice in elementary schools and later work its way up as those kids get older. That's how you build product loyalty and wider acceptance. Some of those kids will eventually be the IT managers and CEOs of major corporations.
As an example, take Apple's strategy over the past decade. Build your customer base from the ground up. They started with the iPod, built product loyalty and worked their way up the product line with sleek computers.
The result: An increasing number of college/university bound students are choosing Apple for their laptops. Check out this article for more details.
In the end, only time will tell...
on the hardware it supports. A few run primarily MS Windows on their Mac's, but they are a clear minority.
Comparing the marketshare of MacOS with MS Windows (for which almost all desktop computers are build), or Linux (which supports more hardware than any other operating system in existence) makes no sense.
Not ours! At least not in the corporate desktop arena.
/.'ers. There are some of us that will test and spend countless hours; months and years in some cases, to expand our knowledge of an unfamiliar OS. But people like that are part of that "1%" group of users, and not your average one.
The reasons:
* As some have mentioned, most of us are set in our ways; including some fellow
* As you get older and your priorities change (ie. family, greater demand of your time from work, etc.), there's simply no spare time to learn anything new. Even if you manage to get some free time in, it would be to do something else other than learning a new OS.
* Marketability of your skills as an average office worker - Will your time spent honing your skills on GIMP, OpenOffice, Evolution, etc. improve your odds in being picked for the job over someone with skills in Windows apps? Quite the opposite! Why? A majority of corporations use Windows as their desktop OS of choice
* While Ubuntu and it's various flavors have garnered quite a bit of attention, there is still a great deal of work to be done in terns of getting to the point of saying "It Just Works!(tm)". Apple's advantage is that OS X is designed to work on core hardware manufactured by them, which makes it that much easier. Third party manufacturers are given access to APIs so they could develop apps/drivers to access their devices.
Side note : Why doesn't Canonical or some other major Linux backer venture into the hardware business, instead of getting into half-assed deals with the company's like Dell whose strings are pulled by the likes of Microsoft?
I could go on, but you get the point.
If Linux intends to make its way onto corporate desktops, it should start by establishing itself as the desktop of choice in elementary schools and later work its way up as those kids get older. That's how you build product loyalty and wider acceptance. Some of those kids will eventually be the IT managers and CEOs of major corporations.
As an example, take Apple's strategy over the past decade. Build your customer base from the ground up. They started with the iPod, built product loyalty and worked their way up the product line with sleek computers.
The result: An increasing number of college/university bound students are choosing Apple for their laptops. Check out this article for more details.
In the end, only time will tell...
Wanna know why Linux ain't going anywhere on the desktop?
Who do you know who likes Linux? Yeah, those slashdot guys. The guys who bring you, and enjoy reading, slashdot. The guys who think there's a huge market of people just like them. The guys who think a "Next Generation ajaxified, buzzword compliant comment system" is something other than a disfunctional piece of crap. Let's examine their handiwork.
How do I read all the comments that have been collapsed to single-liners under a post? Used to be I clicked on the first one and I'd get all the posts on the same level. Now I apparently have to click on them one at a time. And when I do so, the scroll button on my mouse becomes useless. Hey, look at that, scroll the wheel and one of the one-liners scrolls up out of view. A scroll wheel for a single line of text. Neat.
But look at the neat map of posts in the left column. Oh, wait, I thought it was there...[scroll]...nope. Let me check another page. There it is, on top of previously-useful menus. On another page it's the only thing in the left column. On another it scrolls with the page (and covers the previously-useful menus).
According to the FAQ there's three comment formats. How do I switch? It must be so obvious I'm just missing it. Thresholds? The FAQ mentions sliders. Those must be so obvious I don't see them.
Maybe the guys who are responsible for this aren't people I can expect to hold an insightful discussion of why Linux isn't going anywhere on the desktop?
Yeah, I know, it's my fault. I shouldn't want it to work the way I want it to work, and it must be something I have misconfigured, and I should read more geekspeak FAQs and do some googling, and it must be I'm just trolling, and it must be this and it must be that. Anything, but it's certainly not that the new system just sucks rocks. Can't be that.
Lunux in '08! This is the year! Go, Team!
I think the biggest reasons against Linux are the following (some are from my own experience of trying to convert people to Linux):
1. Laziness and habit. Most average users don't care AT ALL to switch if what they use isn't broke. You can tell them what you want, they don't want to because they don't need to.
2. The "stability" argument. Windows is extremely stable on the desktop since 2000/XP. This was different with 9x, which was really bad in this regard.
This means that users are less likely to switch now than they were in the past.
My Windows XP didn't crash a single time in 3 years. It's also still the same installation.
3. They don't care at all about free software, open source, vendor independence. We are all regular consumers of "closed" products from big corporations in other areas of life anyway. It's all about what works for them, nothing else.
4. Linux doesn't come pre-installed on most computers, most vendors don't even give you a choice - it's Windows or nothing, and "Windows is better than nothing".
5. DirectX Games (i.e. 99% of all popular commercial quality games). Nuff said. Very big reason. Everyone I know likes to play a good game once in a while, including myself, which is about the only reason why I have Windows XP installed in parallel.
Sure, Wine works sometimes, but not always, and often it's a hassle to get a game set up with it.
And yes, we all know this isn't Linux' fault. But if it doesn't work, it's still a disadvantage.
6. Prejudice based on former times. Linux on the desktop was only for geeks several years ago, it's much better now, but there's still a lot of false or outdated information out there on the web and in peoples' heads.
Some people may also have tried some really old distribution, failed with it and now don't want to try it again with a newer version.
7. Price psychology: even if Windows isn't free, it FEELS free if you buy a new computer with Windows preinstalled, even if the price would be lower if there was no Windows installed.
8. Design. Vista and especially Mac OS X look better OUT OF THE BOX than all standard Gnome or KDE installations. This may sound insignificant but it isn't, there were 2 people I know who uninstalled Linux because "it was too ugly" for them. I bet there's many more out there who think that way.
Good design out of the box is important, because it affects the first impression people get. It's like men looking after hot women, not ugly or standard ones.
Apple is the company paying the most attention to design, and it shows... most of their products are very visually appealing, and also very successful.
Cancel/Allow? The XP puppy search, the always on boot-up sound etc etc etc. No MS does NOT listen to its customers, if it did Vista wouldn't be the dog it is.
The personal computer that ran MS-DOS and later Windows on a x86 has won the battle for dominance NOT through excellence, but by being on the whole not as completly crap as their competitors. The clone makers, MS and Intel/Amd have just avoided over the years making as many mistakes as their competitors.
During the recent discussion about OS/2 source code the simple analysis of why the OS failed was, "I wanted to try it, but couldn't find it anywhere (for free/pirated)". I and many another a "geek" would have loved to have tried it out, but it was hard to "pirate" so we never did, so we didn't ever get to use it and learn how good (or bad) it really was. Meanwhile how many of us back then could get a copy of MS software? For years my entire social circle got its MS software from one guys MSDN (or whatever) subscription. Piracy helped MS software spread to the point where it was the most widely used software, NOT because it was best, but simply because it was available.
This has led to MS software becoming the norm in a lot of peoples eyes and software that does it differently is then "wrong". It goes to the point where you claim that MS does it right and listens to its customers. No it doesn't. That it is easy to use.
The most common failing with would be designers like you is to that you seem to think that you are absolutely right, that there is ONE way to do things and that everyone should fall to your feet and follow your guidance.
That is simply not the way linux development works. There are dozens of window managers that all work slightly differently precisly because nobody can agree on what is the best way to do things. MS is easier in that way to use. MS tells you "this is the way it is, deal with it" and that leads to a standard. MS software is NOT easier to use then linux, people are just more used to it. You would be suprised for how much this count.
MS has done nothing BUT telling users what is best for them and flatly refused to listen.
Go ahead, call Bill Gates and tell him to drop UAC, good luck.
Now go ahead and chance whatever opensource program you don't like.
Linux is about freedom, that includes the freedom of the developer to ignore people who want to turn everything into a MS clone, but at least you got the freedom to change things yourselve. Has MS ever listened to you?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I was hoping it would be a Chad Vader skit.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
This is the real reason.
People don't buy Windows, they buy "A Computer". They don't know or care what an OS is.
No sig today...
The reason linux will never make it mainstream is because of the difficulty for even the most tech savvy users to get it up and running right. Sure there have been advances like mandrive, ubuntu, knoppix live cd, but those really only get the system on the computer. You then have to go through the hours, days, weeks, learning where everything is, banging your head against your keyboard because it says paper jam when there is no paper jam.... Wait.. Ok, so I exaggerate, but still the point is linux is not user friendly in the slightest. Most people today are into this beautiful thing called a GUI and to really get linux to run right you have to learn terminal and coding, and that's too much to ask the typical user, hell half the time it's too much to ask the tech. When you boot windows it's almost always the same thing unless the system is seriously corrupted. When you boot linux it's a crapshoot of what it's going to look like, where everything is, what kernel is being run, how the hell to get the software rpms to work, it's a big headache. The way I always help people in making a decision is this:
Do you want to game? Do you want support? Do you want it to always work the way you want? Then Install windows.
Do you like to tinker? Do you like complete control over your computer? Do you not mind getting into the technical aspect when it tells you for the 40 thousandth time your wireless card is not compatible? If so then use Linux.
Your mileage may vary but this is almost 90% true for all computer users.
I use windows at home to develop some software for fun (like a "game of life" I am building right now), and to game a bit. I would certainly like to try to develop a bit under linux, but can't really. I tried linux how many time now ? Only to find some piece of hardware or software that I had to manually configure. Every time I bite to the "linux is so much easier now" only to be bitten back (from "search for the correct setting, how-the-heck-do-I-use-this, what switch should I use the MAN page is too cluttered, and naturally a few "go read the man page newbie"). True it is a bit better now, I remember having problem with basic stuff like graphic card, how to auto-mount and network driver, not anymore. Last time I tried 2 years ago I could not get sound with my computer. Maybe I will try again. I heard ubuntu is really easy.
But the point I am trying to make is that I develop, I use a lot of the windows command prompt (use a lot of program in batch mode). I *used* to develop under ksh QM package under fortran. Linux should not be such a PITA for me. But it still is. Until somebody comes up with a "winlux" with : *one* gui, and every conf file switchable with button (and check for the user on the fly that the value are not silly), with autoconfiguration of every stuff from graphic to network controler (I remember darkly YAST did something like that), and that by default everything is mounted , in other word more windows user friendly like, I doubt linux will make heyday anywhere.
The older I got, the less I wanted to put up with hacking my system, as opposed to "work out of the box".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If this "perceived value" theory held any water, MS would be out of business and Sun would be the monopoly.
Sun's OS was once coveted, but nobody used because it was too expensive. Now that you can get it free for any old PCs, still nobody runs it. Sun's so desperate to sell desktops that its entry-level Ultra is an AMD machine they'll install anything from Linux to Windows on, not just Solaris.
Nope, the reason folks don't switch away from Windows isn't a big mystery; it's the human condition: laziness. Or, if that hits too close to home, call it inertia, resistance to change, fear of the unknown, herd mentality, call it what you will.
The only way to overcome the Windows inertia would be a heavily-funded, big-name PC maker willing to ditch Windows to risk becoming another Apple, built around Linux-or-nothing on well-designed hardware. Then, a ton of universities teaching everything primarily on Linux so the supply of Linux-savvy workers would increase. Then, other PC makers following suit in a way Apple currently doesn't allow, each carving its own unique niche rather than considering themselves artless cloners selling cheap knock-offs. Even if that's the reality, distort the reality with an inspired design.
"We don't do Windows" is simply too risky a slogan for IT lemmings to grok. So many vendors try to copy Apple, so few seem to be willing to do what it takes to be a better Apple.
*whine* "The PC business is just a commodity now *sniffle* The monopoly is too powerful to go up against *sob* I can't even blow my nose without paying homage to Redmond! *tears* I hate what's been done to my industry!"
Shut up, pathetic pansy. *yawn* We're giving you dang software for free, so go build some great hardware to run it on and give Ballmer and Jobs the finger. If you can't figure out how to do it, your MBA isn't worth the recycled oilrag it's printed on. If you're an IT pro who can't do Linux, your skills aren't as marketable as the guy who can, so stop whining and learn. Any CEO or CTO of a PC manufacturer without the brains, vision, or cajones to take the Apple business model to Linux needs to be fired by their directors at the next meeting, because they're sit idly by while some other company starts the inevitable revolution.
If an Anonymous Coward can figure it out, it can't be rocket science.
Mod parent up.
Look, Linux doesn't get any traction on the desktop because the desktop apps just aren't very good. That's been the problem with Unix, and then Linux, for twenty years. The desktop apps (except for Interleaf, the word processor which was a decade ahead of its time) were painful on Sun workstations in the mid-1980s, and they're still worse than either the Windows or Mac world.
Incidentally, it's worthwhile to look at classic Mac apps to understand how to do a GUI properly. When you don't have a command line at all, you have to think harder about how things should work. (I'm speaking of the user appearance; the underlying mechanisms of the classic MacOS were awful.) There's an annoying tendency in Linux apps to provide a half-baked GUI that does half the job. Too many GUI apps are "one-way"; that is, the GUI is really faking some kind of text parameter, but doesn't really understand what comes back from whatever it's talking to.
I don't see Linux going anywhere on the desktop. There was an opportunity around 2002, when XP was late, sucked, and had annoying DRM, but the window was missed.
>> the reason is simple; Linux is free, and humans tend not to equate free things with being valuable. and I always thought it's because my camera, scanner, wifi and graphic card doesn't work
You most likely know the type.
Enters a friend of mine. New to Linux. Reasonably clever, manages to install, then wants to run Windows games under Linux. He learns about wine and wants to know if it will do what he wants it to do.
"No problem," he thinks, "there is this thing called the community and I will go and ask!"
And he did. In polite words. Telling people about his system setup, about his idea to change to Linux, then asking a number of questions about distributions (which one?), wine and performance.
Answers included things like:
- "Go away, windows boy!" (no further comments)
- "RTFM!" (no further comments)
- "Use Google." (including the common "Oh no, another Windows user..." quote)
It was made very clear to him, in all but two answers, that he was not welcome, the wrong kind of user, morally inferior for wanting to play non-free games.
Two people actually jumped in and told him that, yes, Windows was actually better in supporting Windows games and wine wouldn't really help there. Linux would not make sense here. Heresy takes courage. :)
I am a bit of a late starter, installed my first SLS when kernel versions were around 0.98, the file system was minix and you had to hex-edit sectors to set your boot device. If you haven't been there, you don't want to know what you had to do to make X run. I remember a different kind of Linux crowd from that time. "Snotty" was not part of that.
Nowadays, my t-shirt would probably read: "I was root. It becomes boring. Now I just fired root for beeing cheeky and hired Admin because he is polite, solves my problems and will not risk my business on alpha code."
Linux is a great OS - and my friend is now learning how to use a Linux server as a game server (for windows games), web server and FTP server. He is doing fine, even with bash, as he is not stupid - just untrained. His web interface for game servers is not looking too bad...
But like would be easier if the "WHOOOA! I am root!" kids (on a single user system, probably running a boot-from-DVD Knoppix or a SuSE Live DVD) learned to shut up unless they had something helpful to say. They are not doing Linux any good.
Anything that is valuable and still free must be (*drumroll*) Communism! Never mind that the Finns kicked the nuts of some russkis during WWII. There still speaking a slavic language so they must be contaminated with some kind of marxism.
Mod flamebait, see if I care.
Break the sound barrier - bring the noise.
Has anyone worked in a company that has pre-installed e.g. Ubuntu? Are there any hurdles or restrictions? Does the company have to pay a royalty to Canonical?
What if the company wanted to modify it so there's a first time boot-up screen that lets the user decide whether to accept the EULA (GPL for Ubuntu, right?) and use it or to decline it and have the harddisk quick-formatted. Are there any limitations? Does this fall under "commercial use" of Ubuntu (even though the OS itself is not actually "sold", only the computer it is on)?
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Unless you have someone standing next to you guiding you through your first experience with Linux (for the first several days/weeks) things will feel fairly hostile.
There's a general feeling on the internet that if you don't run Linux then you're a noob, but noobs can't figure out how to use Linux because they're noobs. Many people aren't willing to put up with the "shame" of being a linux noob and not knowing anything - they'd rather use Windows, where everyone can hobble by with almost no computer skills.
If you're a Linux noob, it's a very negative feeling. There are many very helpful forums that will help you in any way they can, but the few trolls are enough to ruin the experience and make you feel like an idiot when you're just trying to learn the ropes.
If you're a Windows noob, it's no big deal - so is everyone else. And chances are you aren't on help forums anyway - the problems are usually minor and livable. If you have a more serious problem, you're on the phone with some sort of tech support where you're less likely to be called an idiot (most call centers have active monitoring, the employee never knows when someone else is listening in).
That's definitely true. I didn't mean to demean the efforts these companies have put in for pushing linux and supporting it. I guess the point I was trying to make is that until there is Google Linux or Mozilla Linux or Adobe Linux out there, or better yet one of the groups such as Ubuntu starts investing in the marketing and brand awareness it needs to make it a household name, Mom and Pop PC owner is never going to take a risk on it, even if it is superior...
...maybe you don't want it to spread...
I don't know a ton about the issue but I can tell you the MAIN reason I won't switch to Linux - computer games. Yes, yes, I know that wine supposedly does a good job of emulating windows for games etc, but it's just a hassle and there is the off chance that some games just won't work. Also, operating system-switching is a pain in general. People only do it when they see something that makes their OS look like crap. (IE. Win98 -> WinXP). But I think the big problem is a lot of people are REALLY comfortable with XP. XP Does everything I want it to, and it does it pretty well. I'm happy. That's why I don't switch.
demand increases as price goes down... with one very important caveat. all else must remain equal. don't forget that caveat b/c it is *extremely* important. all else doesn't always remain equal. for example, if the price of $10k fur is marked down to $1k, some folks might think it is a fake and not be interested. or damaged goods. or stolen. or whatever. linux is gaining market share, but it is different and people need an *incentive* to do different things. their incentive to learn windows was they wanted to be employable - so they learned windows even if they *hated* it. business doesn't move away from windows due to the incompatibility issues caused by msft brass in order to maintain monopoly like control over the business desktop. the consumer market will go where the business market goes. if business went 100% linux tomorrow, nobody would remember msft in about 3 years. the incentive for me to move to linux was that i value freedom, saving a few extra bucks and learning new things. i like the road less traveled. that is probably why i chose postgres over pgsql and i ended up trying the zone diet based on a glowing referral. i'm very happy with all three choices, too. if linux wants to compete with msft, they need the business desktop in a big way. applications are important here and msft brass did a great job lockign most companies into msft dependent applications - so this is a tough sell.
Industry standard programs.
Killer Apps.
.torrents are too complicated with the extra step of going to a tracker website and clicking on a torrent download before you get to the client doing the downloading. This is despite the monthly system restore that the Dell/HP/Compaq technician has to walk them through to clean off all the spyware they got that way (using limewire or bearshare and surfing low quality porn).
Jobs said it, and he was ABSOLUTELY right. Open Office is great, but businesses and schools use MS Office. The end.
Joe Schmoe computer user wants to make crappy Power Point presentations, use convuluted Excel spreadsheets and surf for porn and pirated music downloads. The average uniformed luser prefers Limewire for getting their ill-gotten booty because
Those not interested in office and internet use, that might delve deeper into looking at actual system performance, software and other factors, fall into other categories:
Gamers
Content Creators (multimedia)
Server/Database/Misc IT stuff
Of those, the first always goes Windows. The second can go Windows or Mac. The third is the only one that has the education and freedom of apps available to choose otherwise.
I pic Windows everytime because I do all of the above and don't care to waste time rebooting into a different OS to change tasks. Virtualization to do so is still a waste of system resources as far as I am concerned.
Linux's best hope is the next version of MS Office being completely online. Then you might see wider acceptance.
Always the same story...
Around 1828, after Greece revolted and got independent from Turkish enslavement, Greece's new governor Ioannis Kapodistrias, in order to feed the people, introduced the potato to Greece and large shipments of potatoes were distributed to the people for free. Nobody even bothered to taste it. Kapodistrias was smart: He gathered back all the potato quantities and locked in large containers, and also put armed guardians to 'guard' it, as if it was something extremely valuable. Quickly, interest was sparked among the Greeks, and soon they started looting the containers (under the guards eyes (who they were told to overlook)) in order to eat the forbidden fruit...
The moral: If you want linux to spread, lock it, and also distribute the necessary cracks. But there is also a more subtle moral: Do you really want this kind of stupid people for linux users?
I have had too many (real non-IT-pro) people I have tried to expose to linux give me feedback on the system, and here's the real scoop:
1. it is too difficult to install new applications. Yes, even installing Firefox is a challenge for a noob... now try to do it on a generic Linux distro.
2. Where ARE the apps I just installed? WTF... why aren't the in the 'start menu'? Try to explain THIS to someone who has been using windows.
3. logical navigation of folders: Advanced users may know where everything is, but the average tool looks in 'Program Files', or 'My Documents'. So they just have no clue what the Linux folders are.
Maybe this is the time to admit that Linux IS a great OS (yes, it is), but we have not done enough to enlighten the AVERAGE computer user. **Unless this ever becomes an important requirement, Linux will continue to be the FREE system, while others will be able to charge a premium.
Personally, I don't care if an OS is free, or cost $$ (it's not my $$ after-all). I just need 80% + of the users to be using it without calling me every 5 minutes.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
Thank you for agreeing with me. :-)
It does spread.
If it is about price, then Solaris, SCO Unix, AT&T Unix, A/UX, and a whole lot of other *nix should have been hugely popular. technically, hey were all vastly superior to windows as well. go figure. niyam bhushan
It's been a while since I've used linux. I don't particularly care for XP, but I use it on a daily basis because everything supports it. As an engineer, it's a lot more important to get the job done than to have a great OS and support the open source community. I've looking at buying an Apple laptop, and I may do that. Worst case, I could dual boot XP.
After reading through some of the comments, however, I became interested in giving it another go. The comments suggest that Ubuntu would be a good one to try. I downloaded the appropriate Ubuntu distro CD (x64 for my 64-bit AMD machine here at home) and tried to install it. I have already had enough time to completely evaluate Ubuntu on my machine, because the install CD will not get past the loading screen. When the progress bar is complete, the screen goes black. I let the machine sit there for half an hour: black screen. Different monitor: black screen. Built-in video (previously disabled) instead of video card: black screen.
In the past I've found linux to be such a pain in the ass that I considered it to be not just not user-friendly, but actively user-hostile. Ubuntu may be a great distro and perfect for beginners, but since I can't get it to install, it's about par for the course with my past linux experiences.
This is why linux hasn't spread. The user experience--for people who aren't linux hobbyists--is terrible. Free has nothing to do with it, and the author's pop psychology conclusion is horse shit.
-podom
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
You could argue this point from many sides and create all kinds of elaborate theories, but the fact remains that the majority of computer users have not heard of Linux. Of course digging deeper you can find that those who do hear about it, are hesitant to try it. But until the initial probably is dealt with all of those are moot points.
I don't use Linux because I don't like it much. Its not user friendly. And I'm a geek!
Is the problem. People are stupid, the young even dumber than the old. You really don't expect the damaged half wits that the North American experience produces to do anything even remotely complex ... do you?
every so called 'realistic' reporting is telling us that everyone makes decisions based on their perceptions. Stock market, elections, choosing a consumer product. If that's the case has the population become a bunch of numbheaded drones or its part of the propaganda to isolate people and feel helpless?
The people here buy their computer in parts, put them together, install their own OS and then configure it like they want.
'Normal' people go to a store, but a box, plug it in and run it.
Most of them do not know what they are running and are not even interested. They do not care wether it is Vista, XP, 3.1, BSD or OSX, as long as it works out of the box.
I have seen people who have bought Macs, because they looked nice. The fact that it was completely different from Windows did not stop them one second.
As long as it runs, people do not care.
price is not even an issue. I see people buying overpriced PC's all the time. All they do is surf and email. No clue what the monitor or what the PC is. No idea what the speed their HD turns.
If you want to know why you do not sell, look at who your targeted audience is. Your targeted audience is not us, it is your mother and your grandmother. Do they run Linux? Probably, if you install it for them.
So compare the short term advantages of Linux compared to Windows or even a Mac. And with short term, I am thinking about the first 15 minutes after unpacking your PC.
One is up and running and if it does not work, I go back to the store. The other I need to install, hope it works and if it doesn't, I am screwed.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I just checked, his printer is in the mostly category, so it'll work fine for normal printing.
The fact is I find that most printers that aren't "bottom of the range" or "multifunction" work fine with Linux though some, like this one, have annoying setup issues. Of the problem printer classes it's almost purely a case of documentation; if the maker doesn't keep their technical documentation a "death first" secret drivers appear VERY quickly.
I've got an oldish thinkpad which I was planning to turn into a STB. My choices were MS MediaCenter on XP or vista, or MythTV. I'd installed Ubuntu and that was quite happily running my email, web and music. Hardware - wifi, grphics and sound were all working etc (and might I add all out the box with no issues at all). So off I go to find this MythTV thing... Finally spot it in the repository and select it, it selects dependencies and off it installs - so far so good. Loads up the installer, says it needs a MySQL db (fair enough) and then it says it can't find it. I know MySQL is installed, the little services app says it's running, ports and all the rest of that stuff are correct, but it still denies me. This is where it all goes wrong, I spend 10 minutes trying to work out where all this stuff is installed, try to find config files, see if anything in them is wrong and then... I've got no idea what to do next. Linux has got much much more user friendly over the last few years - as far as to get you up and running initially. For devices with limited functionality or where change isn't going to be common, this is wonderful (OLPC etc). The problem is if you ever want to try and do something interesting you're just left hanging clueless (not saying it's worse than windows, but I'm familiar with windows and not Linux). Not sure what the answer is, but *shrugs*
Oh, if just Linux had been proprietary like the other Unix lookalikes of the time, it might today have enjoyed the same propagation on the desktop as, say, Coherent or Xinu.
BTW: Linux does ship today with more computer based products than MS Windows, just not on the most visible platform of them all, the PC desktop.
Windows is about clicking your mouse. Linux is more about choosing from 17 different programs that seem to do the same, bot don't really, so I have to check them all out, only to find that another program has a feature that I might need in the future, and having to live with the burden of choice, having to make that choice 37 times at least in the first few days/hours/weeks, searching for days for answers to questions such as 'how do I automatically open a file of a certain type with a certain program', writing scripts, command prompts, /dev/null/, /root, /bin, /home, /user, /sbin, /var, /user/bin, /user/home/bin, compiling your own software, package conflicts, unsupported hardware, unsupported software, and on... and on... and on...
I don't want a fully customizable desktop! I don't want to create my own computing experience! I don't want to made constantly aware that I might not be using the optimal configuration for my machine! I'm though reading crappy man-pages, going though 289 command line options, only to find out the princess is in another castle (while actually she isn't in a castle at all, and only the old village idiot on a web page far far away knows where she is, maybe)!
A should I have the time to figure all of this out, where does it get me? Absolutely f***ing nowhere!
Problem is the arrogance of the Linux fanboys, wanting to do everying NOT like Microsoft, because 'Micro$oft is bad, we are 1337', hence adding another year or two to the already formidable Linux learning curve. And let me remind you of the fact that a computer is a tool. Having managed to use the tool, after about a couple of years IS NOT A GOAL, it's a waste of my valuable time. Do you see screwdrivers with 15 dials and switches just so that it can be regular and philips at the same time, while being able to use it around a corner, displaying time in unicode, singing a tune for my entertainment, asking me about what color it has to be as I take it out of the box (I DON'T CARE, JUST PICK ONE!!!!), usable as a lighter, and possibly as a magic wand somewhere in the future, which, however, would require me to contact the manufacturer a number of times and reading up on how to get it done, not with any guarantee of succes ('but hey, isn't this fun, spending hours and hours, days and weeks learning how to use me?')
Go look up 'usability' in the dictionary.
And do not try to disprove any of my claims by coming up with statistically irrelevant counterexamples. This is what Linux is about, and will continue to be so.
SCO said so!
It's simple. Offer Linux for 300 dollars in stores, or for free on the web. If these mcNewbies want to pay for it, then by all means. :)
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
Windows doesn't play DVDs either.
At work someone has a Windows PC and gets lots of different types of media (she's in the PR sde of work). Won't play 60% of the time, plays 100% of the time on Linux.
Similarly with postscript or bitmap images.
"""quote
:)))
/s
They DO care about WindowsMedia 10 though. Stop making excuses and fix that problem.)
"""end quote
As soon as that problem is fixed, MS is going to introduce new and incompatible format,
just in order to force Linux programmers to always play catch-up. Not a way to go.
Open standards should be used. Like in normal industry.
Imagine if some idiot kept changing AWG (American wire gage) standards every few years.
What, your house is on fire? Blame MicroSoftWire.
By the way, if you have actually paid for your Windows+MsOffice+Antivirus+AntiCrapware+...
you probably wouldn't be so upbeat. It comes to about $1000 total per PC.
Don't believe me?
Go to MS web site and actually check their prices.
I'll be glad to sell you my services once your screen fills up with 100's of pop-up baloons
format c:
If you want to show someone the real value of GNU/Linux, show him, what the FSF is asking for their Deluxe Distributions: https://agia.fsf.org/order/
(reminder: free as in freedom, not as in free beer)
The answer is because it is not even close to being ready for 'everyone'. Joe Blow who knows nothing about computers still can't fire up Linux then go find himself a random lame game to play or even a photo editor.
Tech/Reviews blog
Distros like normal Ubuntu are successful because they are full of proprietary code. And people call it linux, but it isn't.
It's what I'm used to. I always thought Windows'es GUI beat most Linux WMs for the simple fact that there was only one and you couldn't change it much. So you don't think about changing it, and it works quite good. All the shortcuts become subconscious.
I have a lot invested in Windows software that isn't available natively on Linux. There isn't much you can do about that, but think about this: There really isn't any reason why applications shouldn't be supported on Windows, Linux and MacOS. It's all a matter of popularity. So while Linux can't always offer a working port of commercial products, I'm sure that'll come in the next few years. (If that's not good enough, discard the idea of running Linux for now.)
Installing software. Have you tried Ubuntu? (All of your worries don't even come into the picture of Joe Average's computer experience. They're a product of your past bad experience with the instability with Linux distros.
Do I trust the people who seem to build and redistribute packages on random websites? I don't know.
I also downloaded and compiled some apps myself because I couldn't find packages for certain things for the version of Fedora I was using. Are regular consumers expected to do this? Perhaps not. At this stage, people are expected to at least have the courage to open a terminal and follow random advice on a website. But are regular consumers expected to install random commercial apps in Windows? My girlfriend surely can't (read: won't learn).
Accessing my Windows files was a bit of a PITA. Ubuntu automatically mounts all your NTFS drives and places an icon on the GNOME desktop with a link to a graphical browser. The only difference between this and Windows is that the graphics look better. Also, in the default Ubuntu, portable drives are detected upon insertion and an annoying "Whadda ya wanna do?" menu pops up. (I sympathise with you, though. I tried accessing my NTFS drives some years ago on Gentoo, and its "write" mode garbled up the partition. NTFS support nowadays is stable.)
[...] Then I tried editing some conf files from the shell. With vi. Enough said. So don't? Vi isn't required to run an operational Linux. All of this tweaking doesn't even compare to some of the similar tweaking in Windows where you have to reverse engineer DLLs or *shiver* search the registry database.
Which desktop environment do I want to use? I have no clue. This was mainly why I hated the Linux GUIs, too much choice. Now I stick with the default. I think it's GNOME and a bunch of GNOME apps, but I frankly don't care because I don't have to care. And installing KDE apps in my graphical install manager (Windows doesn't have this), I don't have to think twice about dependencies.
I think what's made Ubuntu successful is the acknowledgement that most people use their computers for the exact same thing: Browsing the 'net, reading webmail, writing documents/spreadsheets/presentations and listening to music synced with their portable music players. Most things beyond that is niché. A friend of mine lives in a collective where everyone was a Windows user until he moved in. Now they all use Linux and don't pretend to know the difference except "it's the other thing with the funnier small games."
My $.04
Take off every 'ZIG' !!
Can I have Compy McNewb's email address, please ? I have some bottles of fresh air for him, only $10 a gulp.
Or could it be lack of support? As a Tech Support Rep I have to say that Linux is not supported by us at all. That attitude kind of makes it difficult to convince people that it is easy to use. But, Gateway won't help me if I have it installed how can it be as easy as Windows? Soooo....here's my two cents. Until you get both OEM's and ISP's to support Linux it just won't make mainstream.
This is exactly what happened to me in Bulgaria - I got caught up in a discussion regarding open and closed Operating Systems and they kept telling me that the free choices didn't appear attractive because they didn't have a price. Back then (like 6 years ago), I thought this was some kind of post-communistic overreaction, but reading the same argument here makes me doubt that. Nobody wanted to follow my point that price and use are two entirely different concepts.
Those answers certainly brought back memories! It's a large part of the reason why I decided to put Linux on the back burner 'til after XP finally dies.
I thought the problem was my stupid questions, then a buddy of mine who makes a lot of money by knowing a lot about software explained that my questions were reasonable. The people responding to them were assholes. They might even have known what they were doing...I never saw any proof one way or the other.
It's past time for the Linux community to do a little housecleaning. Maybe set up an area of the various community sites, newsgroups, etc. for newcomers and people who have the patience to deal with them. And kick the jerk-offs right out. It's what happens to them in real life, after all, and they're used to it.
In the end analysis, even if these pathetic little drama queens manage to make the occasional contribution to Linux development, having to put up with them isn't worth the hassle. Somebody else will come up with the same thing sooner rather than later, and without all the strutting and self-congratulation. As anybody who's ever held a real job in the real world knows, nobody is irreplaceable.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
RHEL starts at $350/yr. If you're looking to pay for an OS, with Linux it is pretty easy to match or exceed the prices Microsoft charges for Windows. When you get Linux for free you get zero official support, when you pay far above what you'd pay for a typical desktop Windows installation you get decent support (hate to say, but it is inferior to the support you get from Microsoft on their low-end products). When you pay as much as a Windows enterprise installation, you can get excellent (in my experience) support.
I prefer not to pay for support because I do not like to depend on anyone when I have a problem. But I'm the exception, not the rule. I find hitting google with ubuntu questions solves my problems more often than calling tech support for either RHEL or Windows XP/Vista.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Well, I don't advise to exactly *do* this, but it's probably a concrete example of how to value what is got at a free or very low price.
Let's make an equivalent to breathable air...
Think it's not valuable? Here's a nice plastic bag around your head. Wait a few seconds... Still think free isn't valuable? ]:-)
The reason I don't use Linux on my main machine is very simple, my games don't work
When vista came, I decided to give it a try, so I installed Vista, and after getting annoyed for a few hours I downloaded and installed Ubuntu. I spent some time in Ubuntu and do trust me when I say, I wanted nothing more than getting everything to run under Ubuntu. After a few days of using it I was happy, everything I used to do in XP could be done in Ubuntu, except for gaming.
I don't play games that much, but I do like logging in to an MMO I've been playing for a few years every now and then (SWG). After searching a bit on the web I actually bough Cedega and installed it. After a few hours I was able to log in to SWG, but whenever I tried to go into the space part, it crashed. Went to the Cedega forums and found that the space part was not supported. I also found that another game I play from time to time was working, but it was really slow, the FPS was horrible (and my computer is far above average).
I decided that what I need from an OS is that everything I'd like to use should work. I wanted to use Ubuntu and was considering running XP in VMWare under Ubuntu, but in the end decided that Ubuntu simply wasn't usable for me.
I _strongly_ believe that if games would work better under Linux (and maybe they do and it's just me who is missing something, in which case I am happy to be corrected), Linux would really grow as a desktop OS!
If a person like me, who I can add is running two Linux servers at home (one Ubuntu server and one Debian server) cannot get everything to work, and with everything I obviously mean the games, then what chance does the average-Joe have?
Even if games isn't everything, playing games is something a lot of people like to do every now and then, they need to work for Linux to be a good desktop OS.
Wow. The excuses keep getting more and more pathetic. A few months ago I came across an article blaming piracy for the failure of Linux to be more widely used. If only people couldn't get pirated copies of Windows, *THEN* everyone would be using Linux. Now, we're told that it's all about "perception". Utter rubbish.
But let's assume that this ridiculous argument about perception and "the curse of being free" is true. What about business? Companies love to cut costs. They are obsessed with cutting costs. The typical corporate executive would sell his mother to cut costs. So why isn't every business switching to Linux? I work for a very large company that just bought more than 20,000 new computers -- why didn't they save a few million dollars and get them without Windows?
Why? Because (a) Linux on the desktop is inferior and (b) there is no cost savings.
The only way that Linux is "free" or "cheaper than Windows" is if you install and support it yourself. Is the CEO of my company going to say to some IT guy -- "Why don't you download the latest Ubuntu ISO and install it on all 20,000 of our computers". Of course not. He's going to want support and that means something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux which costs just as much as Windows and doesn't run any of the applications we use.
Ever wonder why companies hire so many contractors and consultants, when it would actually be much cheaper to let their own employees do the work? Accountability. If a contractor or consultant fucks up, you can go back to his company and demand that they fix the problem and/or pay you back for the fuck up -- or sue them if you don't get the fix you want. If one of your employees fucks up, the most you can do is fire him.
The same goes for software. If you want support, Linux costs just as much as Windows and doesn't give you anything that's better/faster/easier. At best, Linux is more or less the same as Windows so why change?
There have been much improvements lately but it is still hard for end users. Ubuntu really tries not to be, but still.
Assuming you get past the installation point, there are a number of things that are not user friendly.
Applications have a horrible UI. Really, Linux has by far the worst looking apps. Users don't use bad-looking apps, regardless what that they do.
Users don't want to type commands in a terminal. By each command line you tell someone to do, God kills a new Linux user and makes a windows user instead.
WiFi with Samba are not easy to set up. Before you yell at me, I know YOU can, and I know users can't.
It has too many config options. Many config options clutter the screen and they end reading nothing.
Users don't care about squeezing every single processor cycle, the don't even know there is one, and they shouldn't know.
Users don't know what a hard drive is and don't need to know, so don't even ask about partitioning.
Probably the worst one: If something goes wrong, it doesn't degrade too gracefully. You'll probably have to type some lines in the terminal making God kill a dozen new Linux users until you fix it.
Have you seen an iPod fail? It doesn't give you a mem dump, nor a blue screen. It displays a "sad iPod" icon and a URL to Apple's tech support. That's all the users need to know.
I'm looking to get dual monitors working OK :
Linux (from a forum post, yet to get it to work):-
- sh
./ati-driver-versuon.run
- aticonfig --initial --dual-head --screen-layout=above
- sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx
- rcxdm restart
- sometimes need reboot
Windows:Until Linux gets better driver support so it works out of the box, it's fighting an uphill battle with the non geek.
I read on CNN not too long ago (but am too lazy to dig up the article) about an experiment where groups of layman were given wines to taste and had prices placed in front of every glass. All groups concluded that the more expensive ones tasted better - even though the researchers had placed the labels randomly for every group. So once again people perceived something as better simply because it was more expensive. They even concluded that in a sense you might enjoy a more expensive wine more simply because you've parted with more money to get it.
You need at least one hour to install Windows. But Windows doesn't come with apps. So how many hours does it actually take you to install a whole operating environment in Windows? Depending on how many programs you need I would guess anything starting at 3 to 5 hours going up to 10 when you start running into problems, because vendor supplied drivers start attacking each other. With XP that time has been coming down, but with Vista I suppose you could double that depending on the hardware you use. Not to mention that for a lot of hardware drivers for Vista don't even exist yet.
Not knowing exactly how to set up networking with XP machines (which isn't always staightforward), because I hadn't done so in a long time I remeber once spending 2 hours before I got it working.
Actually I would argue that the "just works" now applies to a much larger share of Linux cases than of Windows cases. Especially when you have to install from scratch.
Your arguments are good, but not worth +5 Informative.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
PSD: who cares.
...
HTML: you are joking, right?
EPS: really...
PNG: oh go on.
Reaaallly
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The reasons for Linux's so far modest adoption are pretty simple.
For Linux to become more popular, two things have to happen. It has to become much more widely available, and it has to become much more attuned to delivering what non-technical PC users actually want regardless of whether the devs approve. Until then
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Total bollocks.
Linux isn't popular for three reasons.
A) Linux, by and large, IS NOT USER FRIENDLY. This is the single biggest problem. You can shout "Ubuntu!" til you're blue in the face, but the fact is it isn't particularly intuitive. To get most things working, you'll need to dig into config files and read man pages, most people don't want to.
C) The most popular software/hardware does not run easily on Linux. Sure you can download Open Source replacements, but again, for most people, its more trouble than its worth.
B) It is near impossible to find it as OEM software with new machines. If you did, then the whole package would cost LESS than one with Windows.
It's unfortunate, but I still think we have a while to wait before we see a viable new OS for home users, and as things are moving more and more toward remotely hosted applications, we may never get there.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Agree 100% - it's all about the apps, ask any gamer. Desktop Linux advocates hate to admit this, because it makes desktop adoption seem hopeless. Windows advocates hate to admit this becasue they like to pretend that Windows is a higher quality OS.
The following is what I think F/OSS financial software is missing. All of the following is based my limited understanding, and my opinions. Please correct me if I am wrong about any of this.
* Cost advantage: QuickBooks simple start is free:
http://quickbooks.intuit.com/product/accounting-software/free-accounting-software.jhtml
Or I can buy the full version of QuickBooks in only $128:
http://www.qbpro2008.com/quickbooks-2008-coupons-for-amazon/
Seems to me that any cost advantage of using a foss alternative is negligible.
* Ease of use: Somewhat debatable. But some people site this as a primary reason for Intuit's amazing success with QuickBooks - supposedly up to 92% of small businesses use QuickBooks. Although, I have to wonder how the number of foss users can be accurately counted?
* Integration with online banking: my understanding is that only intuit or msft products can easily integrate with online banking. Not absolutely sure about that.
* Payroll: very regional, and changes often == not well suited for foss.
* Taxes: somewhat regional, and changes often == not well suited for foss.
* Wide acceptance: I think most businesses are much more comfortable using products that are accepted standards.
* Wealth of available add-ons: Intuit has a very active community of 3rd party developers. You can buy practically any kind of an add-on you can imagine. These add-ons cost money, but at least they are available.
* Major company: I think a lot of businesses are not comfortable with a product unless there is a major company behind that product. I have to admit, even I am not comfortable with software products that are essentially one man operations.
* Support: I can always hire somebody who knows quickbooks, or find a "ProAdvisor" consultant, or I can get support from the company, and there are hundreds - if not thousands - of developers who specialize in developing for quickbooks. I can not see where that is true for any project.
* Training availability and costs. I can hire people who already know quickbooks. If I hire somebody to work on some foss alternative, then there will be a significant training expense. Of course, there is also the issue of training availability.
* Documentation: If I had to pick one thing that kills the usefulness of more foss projects than anything else, this would win in a slam-dunk. Of course, this varies among projects, some foss projects have great documentation. But, I can always find plenty of books, or other documentation for popular proprietary financial apps.
* Many accountants, maybe as many as 200,000, use QB and recommend it to their clients. Some accountants will charge much more for files that are not in QB format.
* QB has much better 3rd party integration. For example, ecommerce packages like oscommerce, and magento, work with quickbooks, not foss alternatives. Msft accounting works with ebay. I can not find that sort of integration with foss software.
For use in a business, a platform has to be supportable--windows techs are everywhere, or you can call MS if you need help. Not so with Linux. Unless you are a 'Nix shop, you have no business with it. I won't even do business with web application developers using it on applicances--what happens when Apache has a security problem and needs to be reloaded? Who's going to pay for the uninstall/reinstall it and reload the vendor's app? With windows, patches are always flowing, and no reinstall of apps.
This post has a good point that your average consumer (such as myself) will want addressed. Why are there 15 different notepad programs? Is the one installed on Ubuntu not the one with all the notepad features that I need? Why are there 5 different Word Processing programs? Is Abiword better than Open Office?
Your average computer user doesn't care about which operating system they use. It's like when average people argue about Mac vs PC, no one ever talks about how the OS are different, but instead they name off programs that the other one doesn't use. Or they throw out myths that they've heard on TV, like you can't edit on a PC. Which your average consumer doesn't know if it's true or not. The point I'm making is that software I think is the bigger issue than the OS itself. I have a computer running Ubuntu and I have to say that it's the best OS I've used and it's way easier than I thought it would be, but I don't use it for much because the software on it is lacking. Don't get me wrong there is tons of software available for it, but I need some good video editing software to make it a computer I would use everyday.
Can I bum a sig?
Indeed, Linux is fine as it is right now. Why should it spread? and more specifically, why should it surpass Windows? why the competition with Windows?
It comes free with all new Macintoshes, and upgrades only cost $129--far less than that Microsoft-produced knockoff. Plus, it's actually Unix, for those who care enough to use the very best.
"Linux is free, and humans tend not to equate free things with being valuable."
Right. This is why Internet Explorer never caught on and Netscape Navigator still rules the roost.
This is also why you will never see anyone making free offers in advertising.
This is also why the paid for versions of linux a clearly way more popular than the ones you can get at no charge.
And just so everyone knows, I have a version of lunix that will cost you a cool million dollars for each copy you get from me. One of the most valuable operating systems in the known world. Get yours today! Don't delay. Supplies are limited. And time is limited too.
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
I don't think that most people put that much thinking into which computer they buy. A friend said that she wants a PC instead of a Mac because, "I'm used to them and don't want to relearn." Another bought a Mac because, "I'm sick of viruses and it looks cool." I bought an Eee PC because it was cheap an kind of cool.
But here's the thing with Linux and bear in mind that I love running Linux and have been tinkering with it off and on since 1999: I still can't get my HP printer to work with the damn thing! Perhaps if I sat down and put several hours into learning the CUPS system I might, but I just want the damn thing to work. So, for now, when I want to print something I use my XP laptop.
The Eee PC is a good start at getting Linux out there--it's small, it's different, it's cool--but the problem isn't some mindset of "Linux feels less valuable to me" but one of "does this work out of the box?"
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
>> Linux is free, and humans tend not to equate free things with being valuable.
.
That's why peer to peer downloading of mp3 is so hugely unpopular
I got the real-world list of issues from a magical place, in order of priority:
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1. It's not as common as a preinstalled OS with OEMs.
2. It doesn't run Windows software (well enough).
3. It doesn't look and function exactly as Windows.
4. It doesn't work with all hardware that Windows works with.
823. It's free, so people perceive it as inferior.
Not only is it free it's also *shock* *horror* LEGAL. An illegal pirate copy of WindowsXP has much more street cred than the goody two shoes linux option. I ordered 6 ubuntu cds to give to people on my course here in Ireland who are attending a hardware maintenance course. Not one of them even put the disc in the machine! Why? Cos it's legal! Therefore I propose two new linux distros based on Linux Mint. 1) Illegal Linux (complete with activation key scribbled on the cd case) 2) Thousand dollar Linux (linux that is sold in the shops for $1,000) This was typed on an ASUS eeepc running Ubuntu 7.10.
This makes a lot of sense, in a perverse kind of way.
I've always said that piracy doesn't damage the people whose products are pirated. Think about it this way: John Thomas wants a lightweight office suite to write letters, do his accounts and keep track of his music collection. In a world where there is no piracy and no Open Source, he could buy Microsoft Office for £500, or he could buy something called CheapOffice for £50 and save £450. Or -- if we bring piracy into the equation -- he could pirate Microsoft Office and save £500, or he could pirate CheapOffice and save £50. It's a no-brainer: he is going to pirate Microsoft Office. Multiply that by all the John Thomases out there and the makers of CheapOffice end up going out of business, entirely due to piracy -- and yet nobody ever has to make one single pirate copy of CheapOffice!
Now factor in Open Source software, which costs nothing (until you need help with it). John Thomas could get OpenOffice.org for nothing, again saving £500 vs. the cost of Microsoft Office. But the modern manifestation of the caveman hunter-gatherer instinct says "paying full price for something is cheating". If you pay nothing for OpenOffice.org, which costs nothing, you're effectively paying the full price. Whereas if you pay nothing for Microsoft Office, which costs £500, you're paying £500 less than the full price.
Large businesses aren't so driven by primitive instincts. They could choose between Microsoft Office, CheapOffice and OpenOffice.org on their own merits. Microsoft, however, play dirty tricks: they keep the file formats used by Office a closely-guarded secret, thus preserving an unfair advantage over CheapOffice and OpenOffice.org (who have to rely on a process akin to trying to learn to speak French by sitting in a café in Paris, listening to what people ask for and seeing what they get given). They also spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the legality of using products whose authors have given their blessing to the world to distribute them far and wide and use them often.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Give game makers a reason to produce all their PC games on Linux and Windows (they won't ignore Windows just yet) and in 3 years there'll be nothing but Linux boxes as enthusiast machines and when the less technically apt members of the enthusiast's family come calling he/she will say nothing but Linux.
Now, how to do that is a huge condundrum. There are tons of different approaches like "take every good thing that DirectX does and learn from every stupid thing it did and beat them at their own game" or "revamp a WINE-like approach again", but those approaches and their similar ideas have shortcomings mostly related to attempting to imitate something from the Windows world.
I really think the only way to get all the games on Linux, for the first few years, would be for all the Linux based companies to get together with the Open Source development networks/alliances/groups and simply straight port all first party games. This is, of course, the brute force approach. The problem is that there are tons of smart, motivated people in Linux; however, they have an equal number of goals - some prefer the clustering aspects, some the file serving aspects, some the desktop, some .
Without games, there will always be Windows boxes. Perhaps the 'super WINE' approach would achieve the best results even if it would require long term maintenance and would be a weak spot.
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People have no trouble 'installing' free demoware like McAfee and thinking they have some value even though they let it run out and it's junk as a result. No the reason that Linux has difficulty encroaching on windows is because people want a fast yet low-end machine that does all the multimedia and Office crap out of the box with zero extra buttons.
Parent is a well known troll since 2003 or perhaps earlier. Search on Google for "gnu protective license" and you'll see it show up in the first few results.
Troll, please correct yourself. GPL stands for GNU Public License. If you're going to repost this stuff again, I want to see it corrected. Understand?
I once had a signature.
Fifteen years after the launch of the IBM PC.
The PC is an office machine in 1980. It is a viable gaming platform no later than King's Quest in 1984.
In 1995 Windows 95 is accepted with wild enthusiasm by users who would never again willingly touch a command line. The BASIC interpreter is gone - and with it the last connections to the micro's hobbyist roots.
In 1996 AOL adopts flat-rate pricing and the people go on-line and stay online. In 1997 they discover instant messaging and the mp3.
Linux wasn't there when the PC took its final shape in the mass consumer market.
The OSX and Windows user shares almost nothing in common with the Geek. He has never looked at a PC in quite the same way, he has never used a PC in quite the same way.
But that doesn't mean you stop offering knowledge.
I remember many times in school and work places where an insulting psychological ploy was dumped upon everybody designed to make the herd run in one direction or another, and each time I'd laugh aloud at the crass obviousness of it. --And I'd immediately look left and right to make eye contact with the people around me and share the joke, only to see people running in exactly the direction they were told to run.
I also learned that when you point out the manipulation, the herd's reaction is to get angry with you or laugh at you even as they run over the cliff.
Whatever. Eventually their laughter and abuse ceases to have any effect, and you decide that it's your job to continue to point out the ploys and to not fall for them yourself, and to generally just get on with your day. The hardest part is to be patient and caring in spite of everything, and to remember above all that the right to run over a cliff through ignorance is a highly valuable commodity, and that repeated pain is a very necessary component in the learning process. --Without the experience of pain, an offered solution looks like nonsense.
-FL
Look at McDonalds
Look at TV
Look at every freaking thing Walmart sells
People Want Crap. They'll go out of their way to get crap, even when
something better is cheaper and easier to get.
No wonder they want Windows.
I'll touch on the "curse of being free" in a moment, but to preface this I'd like to make a statement about what you get when you buy Windows, because it's a little more subjective than stating "you get a glitchy OS that's bloated and suseptable to viruses."
When you purchase Windows, you purchase:
* - Customer support
* - Virtually guaranteed support for all hardware and software you buy
* - Something you're familiar with
* - Something (and this is a subjective) that looks aesthetically pleasing
* - The ability to call your best friends son "who's just a wiz with computers!" for advice, how to do things in Office, etc etc.
* - The ability to configure most of the settings on your computer without feeling like you're pulling teeth.
Linux still has a bad image to it. It's seen as that "dorky, computer nerd" OS for programmers and hackers. I've been saying this for years, it most certainly is the "curse of being free." It's a bad perception in society, but things that are free or cheap usually have a built in stigma that there's a reason that it's free. And, in Linux's case, I kinda believe there is. No one's really taken it under their wings, invested time and money into it, and tried to turn it into an OS that they could attempt to box, put it on a shelf, and expect anyone to buy. Red Hat did it and withdrew more or less. Ubuntu could do this, but it looks like they're not going to. Free is great, but when it's something as technical as using a new OS, people would much rather pay, oh, $100, get a "free OS" with free future updates, and have phone tech support, know what vendors their software are coming from, etc. To many people, the ability to get tech support from the vendor versus communities on the internet is a make or break situation.
People don't like uncertainty...and a free, open source OS is just that. Uncertainty. While it's more complex than this, think of it this way. If I offered you two jobs, the first job salaried at $75k a year with a certain future doing things you know how to do (or can easily learn how to do) or a job at $100k with an uncertain future doing things that you've never done before that are intimidating, which one would you pick? The majority will pick $75k which is probably much more than they're already making to begin with while some will take a chance with the higher salaried job. Sure, it's a risk, but a risk with clear advantages if it works out.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I was saying this 7 years ago. But did any of you listen?
You gotta give Microsoft credit for listening to customers' ideas before they ignore them. And I've never seen a Microsoft bug you couldn't eventually buy a fix for, all the way back to MS C V4. And not even Ubuntu supports my Compaq Presario notebook screen out of the box, although I'm given to understand that I can devote the better part of an evening making it work with tools in the distribution. Puh-leeze.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
And how long does it take to do a windows install, find all the drivers, add all of the updates and patches, etc...? If you're lucky, two hours.
Your nit's are both incorrect
There are two OEM versions for XP, one is loosely tied to the purchase of some kind of hardware, motherboard or Cpu, but not physically locked to it, this form requires activation but is much more lenient on what hardware qualifies as still being original. Many hardware manufacturers ship this out because it is actually in many ways better than the other form.
The other OEM version is physically locked to a code in the BIOS of the machine, If installed to the machine with the BIOS code it will require no activation. If you install it on another machine the installation will work and it will enter activation mode, but unfortunately you will be unable to activate it, thus making you have to find and reinstall the correct OEM, this sucks when you have a decent amount of machines, but not enough to make volume licensing worthwhile. Also if your motherboard goes, it must be replaced by the OEM with a proper lock, or you are going to have to buy another license of XP.
AN OEM version may include the drivers, but there is no requirement and often they are not included, besides being out of date if they are, and not covering any changes you've made to the hardware
If you have a number of machines to update just set a local mirror of your distribution for a repository for local machines. I do this with Debian with apt-mirror, also apt-proxy.
I don't want to repeat all the arguments that have been used ad nauseum on Slashdot, so I'll try something hopefully new:
When compared to XP, Linux GUI applications are noticeably slower than on Windows. The SAME applications, e.g. Firefox 1.5.0.3 on Windows XP and Ubuntu Dapper Drake (so that you don't troll me about not trying the latest Firefox 3 nightlies which should be much faster). The same goes for OpenOffice, the Gimp etc. Of course native Windows apps used with Wine are even worse because of the API emulation overhead.
It seems that either QT, or GTK2, or both, or maybe X11 itself have inferior performance WRT to rendering the user interface, or maybe GCC doesn't do sufficient work with code optimization. The result for the end user is that on the same machine Linux works SLOWER.
I don't think that any of the six Linux boxes that I have installed in my home show up on anyone's market share analysis.
Most of the traditional marketshare measurements are done based on boxes sold with pre-installed OS's or other sales-based tracking methods. Only the Dell, Wal-Mart, EeePC (and a few others) would make these lists. That's still pretty small, but growing.
But consider that all of those retail Linux boxes that I mentioned above were introduced recently. I think we are seeing just the start of a new trend.
Oh, and all of the above ignores servers, where Linux has a very respectable, and well documented, share of the market.
And have you ever looked at the list of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. Linux has almost a monopoly.
I think Linux users have cursed themselves in the "spreading Linux" department, for the time being. If you walk up to someone on the street and ask them about Linux, you'll invariably hear something along the lines of "Only geeks use it". Linux users have perpetrated the "We're better than you because we use the command line" idea for quite awhile, and exacerbated the problem by not creating GUI-usable tools that equate with the CLI. While it's getting a lot better now, especially with the idea Ubuntu's trying to get across (heck, even Gentoo has a LiveCD with a GUI installer, something I never thought I'd see), looking up a "How To Do so-and-so" generally and invariably involves "Pull up a terminal and type...". Even if that wasn't the case, it's going to take a good while or a concentrated advertising effort to try and reverse this public preconception of what Linux is. I mean, as a counterpoint to that, look at the public conception of Mac. It's based on Unix, and yet because they've spent so much time pushing it as the "It just works, anyone can use it" operating system that the only reason it didn't do as well as Windows back in the day was the exorbitant hardware prices, and even that's coming down somewhat.
The reasons why Linux is no use :
1/ No Photoshop
2/ No GAMES
3/ No MS Office
Now I'm on Macintosh/Hackintosh, I can use real software. Like Photoshop and MS Office. (I suck too much at games to ever enjoy them.)
Why not GIMP and OpenOffice?
Because they both suck. GIMP is unusable and lacks major features. (No CMYK? WTF?) And OpenOffice takes an hour to load.
And don't come talking to me of gaming on Linux. When Wine works right out of the box, yes. Maybe. Or in the alternate reality where a virtual PC (vmware etc) has hardware 3D. (This necessitates to download and half-install a Windows anyway, though.)
I'll keep OSX on my Apple and -compatibles, thanks. (Hint : Intel chipset + Intel CPU + nVidia GPU = Mac)
No package dependency hell, no half-baked "will finish between my studies and my first job" software, no "we don't ship the settings for the mobos sensors even though we do have them", no "these drivers support half a thousand obsolete webcams that no one makes anymore", no "this has been compiled with GCC2.95 and an alternative libc", no "recompile your kernel without support for your TV tuner if you want to ever use the controller card that interfaces to the HDs you bought to record TV".
When Linux is INTEGRATED and works RIGHT, NOW, as in OUT-OF-THE-FUCKING-BOX, then I'll use it again. If it has the software I need to GET WORK DONE : Adobe Suite and MS Office.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
that came with your machine?
damaged by dogma
5. Microsoft Word
4. Microsoft Excel
3. Microsoft PowerPoint
2. Microsoft Outlook
1. Microsoft Exchange
Honorable Mention: Internet Explorer
Like it or not, linux isn't going anywhere on the desktop without these. Apple finally got a boost on #2 with Office 2k8 but still lacks 1. They also lack all the apps that just fit so nicely with all the other MS crap like SharePoint. You also have hundreds of thousands of MCSEs running around who, with little real education can manage large numbers of installations and, finally, MS is entrenched. That's no small mountain to climb either especially when you can buy a Dell for about $600 preloaded with the latest MS OS.
And please, don't tell me how great OO is. I use it and it doesn't matter. The masses don't use it. They also don't care if it can open Office files just fine. Apple played that tune for years to no avail. It's an MS world. Until the masses get tired of Vista, DRM, word format changes, security guffaws and all of the other really really bad stuff that MS does, they aren't going to care about linux.
Oh, and unless I can hop online to Dell and buy the exact same computer (across the board not just one model) with linux pre-installed at a reduced price, linux isn't any more free than MS. If I have to build a PC myself to save the money, that's not going to fly with the masses either.
Sorry if this sounds harsh. I'd love to see linux take off but I don't see it happening in the near future. Look at the Apple Air Book. It costs more. Maybe price isn't the deciding factor.
Anyone remember the character Cypher from that movie? He was sick of the real world, his crappy life , crappy food and everything being a constant battle. He wanted to go back into the Matrix.
different quizzes are there?
Some may be old enough to remember Turbo Pascal. Back when Microsoft and Digital Research were selling Pascal compilers for DOS for a few hundred dollars or more -- in the days before C took off on that platorm -- fast Turbo Pascal hit the market for $39.95. They sold bunches. I sure fewer people would have acquired Turbo Pascal if it had been released for no cost with a free license of some sort.
Linux is not held back as much by the "it's free" factor as it is by its unavailability in places where many people look for software. I know that sounds incongruous to everyone here, but the world is full of people who expect software to come in a shiny box sold by a store in the mall.
That, of course, is marketing, something that Turbo Pascal had and Linux has never had. More precisely, it's something no single commercial Linux distribution has ever taken seriously: market Linux to a mainstream audience. (Plenty of distributions have decalred they were targeting the mainstream audience, but they never bothered to tell the mainstream.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The reason why linux isn't spreading is that "typical pc users are afraid of or don't think they need linux". Does a housewife (just an example of a typical user) who just wants to surf the web or do email really care about learning how to work with hard drives or try to learn how to install and work with a whole new o/s system? Doubt it! I build my own pc's but if the one I'm using would have came with windows pre-installed, I probably wouldn't bother with linux either. I've only been using linux for a couple of weeks and the transition hasn't been easy. It took trying serveral disros to get me up and going and there's still a few things I'm working on. Learning how to do command lines can be frustrating and initimidating at first. Let's face it, doing command lines is something that you need to know if your going to use linux. I'm going to tough it out because it's something I want to learn and do, but a lot of people don't care if what their using now gets them by. Most windows users can turn a computer on and use a mouse. If that's enough to get them by, then thats all they care about. Yeah, I know windows has many, many flaws but if thats what their pc's came installed with, then that's what their going to use. More factory built pc's with linux pre-installed is about the only way to give linux a real boost. Let's face it, most o/s's have came along way, but they still have a long way to go before their secure and easy for everyone to use at the same time.
Windows is really made for average joe and if you want to go advance you can but the problem with linux is that even though it does alow you to do everything you can imagine but it just does not facilitate average joe in getting things done. From installation, design to usage everything is geared towards typical linux geek.
Isn't it obvious from how it is bloated with all the software that is either for network administrator or a computer programer?
That is exactly the type of advice you get when you ask for Linux help, and it soooooo clarifies things for Joe User.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Software that appeals to mainstream users is quintissential wholistic and designed top-down, and this clashes directly with the atomist, bottom-up engineering ideals of the unix culture upon which FLOSS is based.
Freedom and cost have nothing to do with it; it's just usually easier to blame capitalist boogeymen than question the teachings of Thompson and Ritchie and push for real cultural change in the FLOSS community.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
No matter how hard you try linux will never grow to be the primary OS in homes. However buisness are different. So I think what we should strive for is better cross platform computability. This will allow those who want to run Linux with its better security, better multi userability, better server like features, better programmability, etc use it and give other who want to try it more choice. Wine is a step in the right direction. Another step in the right direction would be for Microsoft to drop there server lines and give the real server OSes some breathing room
It would be less of a competitive advantage for me if everyone did. As it stands, my competitors are mostly encumbered with Vista, XP, and all the virii and spyware and security risks that come with them.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Mod parent up. You shouldn't be told to RTFM when asking why enabling your modem disables your soundcard. Or be ragged on for using a GUI tool to configure something like Samba when you should know that it doesn't expose every option in the /etc config file. Or be told that the data files you have been building over time are worthless because you were too much of an ass to use the Linux Free equivalent of the Windows application (even though it wasn't even in Alpha when you started your business, and still only has 75% of the functionality the Windows application has). Joe User will happily pay the Microsoft Tax, and most business do also, in part to not deal with the 15 root kiddies.
The Ubuntu community forums, happily, seem to be frequented by more polite human beings, and the Wiki is pretty well maintained. Even so, you will have to wander around the wilderness to solve problems like ATI compatibility on 3+ yr hold notebooks. In the Windows world, you hunt down the vendor, find the hidden support page, and generally, after a day or two will get a link to a driver that 90% of the time will address your problem.
Side Note: A previous post's point about hardware vendors support Windows, and Linux supports hardware, was also dead-on. IMHO, this is part of the issue. You can argue that the Linux model works well; but I remember the bad old DOS days, specifically Word Perfect 5.1, Lotus 123, etc. We take printer drivers for granted now (in Windows and Linux), but that wasn't always the case. In WP, you had to worry about if your HP-compatible or Epson-compatible printer was truly compatible. If it wasn't, sometimes you could find a working driver on the bulletin boards, sometimes the printer vendor would release the driver, and sometimes you had to live with reduced functionality. One of the main reasons Windows 3.1 because was a hit because, mostly, you didn't have to worry about fonts or printer drivers any more.
I've known several non-techie, non-programmer types who've tried Linux. No dice. Linux is still miles away from being consistent enough, polished enough, and feature-rich enough for average folks to use.
Remember this: Once an average user needs to go to the command line: Game Over. The command line is not a user interface that average folks are going to want to use. Ever.
Assuming, for a minute, that the distro is polished enough that the command line can be safely avoided: Still no dice. Apps are still too wildly inconsistent and quirky (not to mention buggy) for average use.
How many times, in this forum, do I have to listen to the techie set rise up with some pathetic excuse for Linux? Desktop Linux is still primarily built by geeks, for geeks. As such, average users are going to stay away in droves.
Me? I'll stick with Mac OS X
Taken a different way, perhaps branding in linux might be good. Let's say your company is Accelerology and you put Ubuntu on your corporate systems. But come to find out Ubuntu doesn't have a driver for your gravitometer. You could pay Ubuntu to develop the Accelerology driver for the gravitometer.
That way, you get the driver you need, Ubuntu gets some cash, the linux codebase expands, and you get a little bit of branding and name recognition within a highly focused audience. As a business owner, I would be interested in attaching my name to something that would be mentioned over and over for years--it's like how Kleenex became the common word for "tissue."
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Every time my friends upgrade Windows half the hardware fails.
Funny that does not happen with Ubuntu (or most other popular Linux distros).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Thank you. I was wondering if I was being too subtle.
What stuff are you smoking? All that shiny Web 2.0 doodle stuff is at the mercy of my root account.
Who are the alpha geeks then?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That is a hard audience to which to explain such advanced concepts. Or anything at all frankly. I applaud your concern for people with severe learning disabilities.
Back in the enormous majority, my mother is 70 (hi mum!), has an average education and can deal with this.
I frankly don't know which Joe Users you are talking about.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The first result to the insightful question "which linux distro should I choose?" is a blog article in which Ubuntu is mentioned at around 8 times.
Any person with normal cognitive capabilities would get a clue from that....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Just take a look at top 500. Windows or Mac can't compete there for obivous reasons. Neither can they parley in ultra-cheap segment of PC market. Wal-Marts 200$ PC, EEE thing... Mobile devices platforms are on the move - Android, LiMo, OpenMoko, Qtopia.
.doc support in OOO: many don't seem to understand whose fault it really is. But ignorance isn't a defect in OS. None of the reasons is. Habit, manufacturers/software companies behavior, software patents (dvd, mp3 support) can be a reason not to switch to linux, but they are not signs of Linux' inferioriry towards Windows. In fact, in many areas such as user interface, security, stability, ease to istall of system and programs Linux distibutions are superior. It's not enough, however if you have to fight against non-technical issues in order to penetrate PC market.
PC segment is the hardest to take for many reasons mentioned in this thread. But think about it - hardware support isn't really a Linux issue - it's manufacturers who don't support anything than Windows. Linux does in fact very good job providing support for officially unsupported hardware. Same with games/software. It isn't like Linux is a system impossible to write games/accounting software/photoshop for. Besides, last time I looked, there were more linux players on QuakeWars servers than Windows ones. Still, wine does a fairly good job supporting the unsupported. Same as with the
The Linux community has been promoting Linux for the desktop for years now, and the name Linux has gained wide recognition. However, instead of actually focusing on making Linux ready for the desktop, they implemented all kinds of fancy new features (a new scheduler, wow!) and left the home user to his own devices forcing him to compile software, read man-pages on playing mp3 files, use a command prompt, deal with package dependencies, etc. etc. etc. And now the name Linux has become a synonym with 'difficult', 'lot of work' 'can't do what I want', 'for experts' and things like that. A lot of people have tried it, only to be disappointed time and again. They have lost faith, And nothing is going to change that!
So, that's that for Linux on the desktop. Now, supposedly, there are a lot of other areas where Linux is successful. I'm venturing in unfamiliar territory here, but how long will that last? It's only a matter of time before Microsoft create decent OS rivaling Linux in these areas. And as soon as that moment arrives, the large group of Linux users that were forced to use it, only because Windows couldn't handle the job, will start to migrate backwards. Sure, Linux will undoubtedly be able to do it faster or more secure, and for a while, that will convince some people to stick to Linux, but Microsoft will catch up.
In conclusion, Linux is dead, and has only itself to blame. It has always, and continues to do so even now, disregarded usability and user friendliness. So, my dear Linux community, please stop whining about your product's supposed superiority. Technically, I'm sure your right, but practically, you're very far from it.
I have an eeepc. For this reason, I've had an experience with a pre-installed linux machine that offered decent functionality.
It had Windows FLP on it within two months. Here are the various reasons why:
Google Talk - Google Talk is a wonderful application. Just because I can use Pidgin's jabber protocol to communicate over GTalk's networks doesn't mean I like the fact that the client is slow, awkward, and may never have working file transfer. (File Transfer is nice)
SDL - SDL is presented as the end-all solution for porting game-y windows applications to linux. Here's the problem: It's incredibly slow and inefficient. It's riddled with bugs and unsolveable feature snafus that relate to their "lowest common denominator" approach to platform support. If SDL excites you, you should try DirectX. SDL brings even the strongest system to its knees.
Wine - is a nightmare. I would really rather have native software.
KDE - is ugly. Look at applications like kopete- it's like every message box is kword. Xandros for eeepc ships with a lean mean version of kde that is based on an older release. It's passable because it does not use konqueror, but xandros file manager. It's still ugly as hell.
GNOME - is REALLY REALLY slow. I mean, jesus. I can't believe linux people can cite Vista's performance issues with a straight face.
Drivers - are fine, if your hardware is mostly in the range of 1-4 years old. The eee did not have driver or codec issues. It was well stocked.
Firefox - Why do I need 512 mb of ram to run a web browser. It's still not very fast, either. This must be the most wasteful application I've ever run- it's just awful. With Windows, I can run IE7 when I need browser-specific AJAX crap and Opera for most of my browsing. Fast web browsers are more than just a dream.
OpenOffice.org - Since I live in reality, I need to use MSOOXML documents to get work done. By putting Windows on my machine, I was able to use Openoffice.org, Novell Edition. It's just excellent. Sun's Star Office is too much of a war machine and not enough of a product.
Windows FLP - Once I got my hands on a copy of this, Linux was gone. A full XP interface using about 64 mb of ram with an 800 mb install? This needs to be made available to the public. So far, this windows system does everything the default Xandros does, but better, faster (wifi connections, sleep/wake behavior, applications, media, everything...)
Linux is still like a low-end free alternative. It's great-- for cloud computing. Sometimes I am just not connected, though. I tried very hard to make Linux work on my little lappy, but I just couldn't stand the nightmare of trying to find crappy, alpha-beta alternatives to anything I need. I either need to use bleeding edge, unstable software for its competitive features, or old, non-competitive but stable software. Windows is both feature rich and stable.
Speaking from why I haven't switched... I guarantee if you could walk into a store and see two copies of a given piece of software one with a [linux] tag, and one with a [windows] tag, people would be a million times more willing to use linux.
When I can go into any software vendor and find the latest-greatest-game in a linux box, that's when it will be "year of linux on the desktop"(tm) I guarantee it.
You're horribly misrepresenting Windows by acting as though every Windows user is a complete idiot. Let me ask you something, how is the average joe going to find out what in the heck Synaptic is if they don't know enough about computer to know the difference between downloading and installing? I have no idea what Synaptic is, but I could download and install FF in 30 seconds on a windows box.
There are 2 main problems with Linux right now that stop the average joe from wanting it. Installation issue (Windows has them as well but since it normally comes pre-loaded the average joe has never seen them. And, while is seems like heresy, Windows has far less installation issues, if only because the hardware is made for it) and fanboys who don't understand how someone can't figure out how to use a command line tool with the proper switch options in order to enable their 'insert absolutely necessary component of a computer here' so they can use Linux, I mean a child could do this!
Windows is far simpler to use than Linux right now, sorry but that's the facts. Linux is far more useful than Windows but it's still not easy enough for primetime.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
So, let's see:
1/ No Photoshop
Sure, if a company needs Photoshop, Linux is out. But how many PS installations does a regular company needs, unless it is a graphics shop? One, maybe two.
2/ No GAMES
Companies don't want people to play games.
3/ No MS Office
So you simply use OpenOffice. And it doesn't take "an hour to load". On my desktop (a simple AMD 3200) it takes 12 seconds to load the first time, the second time 2 seconds.
No package dependency hell
Yes, and 1999 wants it's fud back.
no half-baked "will finish between my studies and my first job" software
You can find that kind of software for any os, also for Macs.
no "we don't ship the settings for the mobos sensors even though we do have them"
What!? Ship settings?
"these drivers support half a thousand obsolete webcams that no one makes anymore"
What's wrong with that? It's very much better than not having the drivers. And how are the obsolete webcam drivers for Mac doing?
"this has been compiled with GCC2.95 and an alternative libc"
That is why one uses the packages for _one_ distribution. And don't try too install binaries from unknown sources, please.
"recompile your kernel without support for your TV tuner if you want to ever use the controller card that interfaces to the HDs you bought to record TV"
Did this happen to you, or did you just try to think of something weird?
"When Linux is INTEGRATED and works RIGHT, NOW, as in OUT-OF-THE-FUCKING-BOX, then I'll use it again."
You wanted a pre-installed box? No problem, you even have choice these days.
"If it has the software I need to GET WORK DONE : Adobe Suite and MS Office."
Oh, ok. Goodbye.
Well, having a Hackintosh is pretty illegal.
And when I'll have a Mac OS X that will work "OUT-OF-THE-FUCKING-BOX" on my current hardware and with legal permissions too, then we'll talk about Mac OS vs Linux.
Until then please acknowledge the fact that what makes Mac OS X great is the open-source software that it ships with.
That's a silly explanation. People don't like free stuff? I don't buy it.
How about the fact that Microsoft is the predominant platform, therefore it (still) has the most compatible applications? How about that most people are already familiar with Windows, so have no incentive to learn something new? How about that people hardly ever actually buy Windows anyway, but rather get it essentially for free on their new computer? How about that many people either have never heard of Linux or have heard of it but think it's only for computer geeks and not for the average user? How about the fact that despite its pitfalls, Windows (at least XP) is actually more stable and reliable for the average user?
There are obviously some good qualities of Linux that can help it gain users, such as flexibility and freedom, but those qualities still have all those others to overcome before they can make Linux the predominant operating system.
Don't get me wrong - I enjoy Linux and it's not as though I think it should be willfully obtuse or anything - but I think it's worth re-examining, why do we (supposedly?) want Linux to be a huge popular success? Why should we feel bad if it isn't? Is that really the best priority to be pursuing?
What I enjoy about the system is that it's good for me. I can operate it well with the keyboard, it's great for all kinds of tinkering, and it's generally a system that stays out of my way and lets me do my thing.
Of course that's not for everybody. What I've just described is a fine system for a computer hobbyist. People are always quite aware that "average users" have different needs than the people who are into computers for their own sake - but have we programmers rejected the idea that the converse is true? That computer hobbyists are better served by a system that gives them the elbow room they desire for free-range tinkering?
Naturally there are people who would benefit from having very user-friendly software packages on Linux - mainly people who want to sell computers with that software on it. I don't have a problem with them - but serving that group isn't my main interest, either....
What I want is a good system for me. I think that even in that, Linux could do with some major improvement - for starters, "computer hobbyists" may have different needs than "average users" but all the same poor documentation and obtuse or inconsistent interfaces (or blatantly faulty code) can be just as much trouble for hobbyists - we just have a greater tendency to rationalize the problem, or ignore it.
Bow-ties are cool.
I'm tired of this stupid meme! People were saying this back in the 1990s, and they were just as wrong then as they are now.
Guess what? Linux is still in its early-adoption phase in a lot of markets. As for any early-adoption phase, there will be plenty of people who do not act as early-adopters, and who will have all sorts of reasons for this. There is no need to mess with a good product just because some people are not early adopters.
If you can't fathom how something that has zero or near-zero marginal cost might be offered at zero or near-zero price, then your opinion does not matter in the long run. You will eventually be forced to adapt, or your competitors (who invariably scored higher in Economics 101) will eat your lunch.
http://outcampaign.org/
Huh. I just installed Ubuntu on a friend's computer last weekend, and he certainly found OpenOffice to be useful. The install went off without a hitch, detected all hardware, took less than an hour. The desktop is integrated and works right, out of the box. He now has all the software he needs.
How many decades has it been since you tried Linux? Or OpenOffice? I've used Photoshop since version 3 days back in the 80s, and I find GIMP to be an acceptable substitute for many tasks. If you find the UI funky, use GIMPshop. Yeah, no CMYK sucks, but there is still a great deal you can do without it.
As for me, I work on Linux servers all day long, and the only thing I do with computers when I get home is play games. Guess which OS I have? There are legitimate reasons not to switch, but nowadays the ones you list are not among them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Polite, perhaps, but often clueless. See grandparent post about the people who hang out in forums not really knowing anything.
I've been running Linux for many years... heck, I was using Unix in the 1970's. I was a Slackware user for many years, and have most of my machines converted over to Gentoo now. So... I installed Edubuntu on my daughter's machine (she loves Edubuntu, BTW. Nice package selection for kids.) Anyway, I had some "getting started" kind of questions about Ubuntu, not obvious ones, but "experienced Linux user encountering different system organization" questions.
Most of my questions were met with dead silence. I guess keeping your mouth shut when you are clueless is being polite, but the net effect was the community was no help to me.
Anyway, despite the fact that Edubuntu is a very nicely done package for kids, it convinced me never to put Ubuntu on a production machine. Why? 1) The packages are stone-age stale. 2) The forums are of little use to me.
That is not the reason why Linux failed to achieve critical mass on the desktop. I've been using Linux in parellel to Windows for the last 15 years and it is great as a server but as a desktop it doesn't measure up to Windows or MacOS-X in terms of multimedia and speciality software (e.g., Molecular Biology). Most software on Linux, being open source, is a "80/20 project" and the missing 80% functionality is unfortunately important from a user's point of view ("The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little 'extra'."). To me, the consumer Unix is MacOS-X but even that OS sometimes fails to deliver and it is too expensive compared to Windows. Therefore, as much as I despise the MS way of doing business I have no choice but to go with what they offer.
Well stated! Another thing that makes me angry is when people use what is known as elite speak. They think they are being clever but are just being stupid in a trendy way.
At least you didn't have this guy's experience. I guess in some cases you literally 'sign your soul away' in those EULA's.
I'm not an Apple fan, but its computers and OSX are gaining popularity even though they have some of the same problems that linux does. Maybe something can be learned from Apple?
I just showed that to my roommate who is also doing a computing degree. He said "What the fuck does that all mean?
.. :)
Do you seriously expect us to believe that someone who is doing a 'computing degree' showed absolutly no interest in a new and novel system. Come off it, I suspect the only kind of MSCP he will be suitably qualified in, is as a 'sandwich artist'
Re:Or it is not spreading
davecb5620@gmail.com
Linux is successful in environments where the average user has little or no engagement with the OS.
The OS in tucked away in box that manages the office telephone network It has a single job to do that no one but the Geek - who is also tucked away in a box somewhere - understands.
The yokels, Ma and Pa Kettle, as another poster called them, have a remarkably good ear for picking up on what the Geek really thinks of them. That does not translate into a warm reception for what is preeminently the Geek's OS.
Operating System Market Share for January, 2008
If you buy a copy of Leopard, then you're not technically doing anything illegal when running a Hackintosh. You're likely in breach of the EULA, but breaking a contract is not illegal per se. That doesn't mean Apple can't sue / revoke your right to use OS X, but jail time / a criminal record / cops knocking at your door, none of those are going to happen.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I've been using Linux based systems for about 9 years now. *Linux* is fine but the desktop environments that run on top of it are not. It's 2008 and and after spending a long day at work fixing problems on the server I just don't have the energy to pretend that desktop Linux works acceptably.
The user experience even on the more polished DE's is still uneven. The patchwork of disparate projects that make Linux-based systems so powerful also working against us. You never have the feeling that you're using a single system with a single design philosophy, and you aren't.
KDE (my DE of choice) is great but you never shake the feeling that you're using something that's simply clamped onto the system. There's no clear over-arching design. Some things work, some things don't.
It's that kind of inconsistency that I suspect is something the average user will be turned off by. Vista, even with it's flaws is still more consistently *Vista* then any Linux-based distro I've seen.
It's like everyone's afraid to truly deviate from the norm, so we end up with 100's of slight variations of the same theme. But their all propagating the same short-comings.
Quack, quack.
Updated hourly. The Nokia 800 and the Asus eee have both been in the Top 10 for computers for months.
1/ No Photoshop
2/ No GAMES
3/ No MS Office
Now I'm on Macintosh/Hackintosh, I can use real software. Like Photoshop and MS Office. (I suck too much at games to ever enjoy them.)
Why not GIMP and OpenOffice?
Because they both suck. GIMP is unusable and lacks major features. (No CMYK? WTF?) Since I do semi-professional photography and exclusively use Linux to do so (and have done for years), I'll reply to the only vaguely sensible remark you made. Besides CMYK being useless in photography (although it's useful in prepress which is another matter). Gimp *has* CMYK support though. However it doesn't have Pantone support. Which can be a problem if you need it for prepress work.
What the Gimp *does* lack for photo editing is support of more than 8bit per pixel colour depth (so it's either CinePaint or Krita). But then I almost never edit my photos in a bitmap editor. It's almost always done in a photo manipulation program such as Bibble or RawTherapee or the digiKam editors (courtesy of the KiPi plugins mostly).
Apart from that, Gimp works just fine of course. It probably does help that the last time I used Photoshop it was on an SGI with the elderly Mac OS 7 (or so) interface ported with some obscure hack into Irix. So I never really had to "forget" the Photoshop ways. I'd certainly waste hours poking at all the menus and icons if I had to try it again today (which presumably goes to show that it must suck too I guess).
Anyway repeating hearsay FUD doesn't really help making you look good on forums...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
1. you still have to know too much to use Linux [yes i have used it, and Ubuntu, and a couple of other flavors, and they still suck]
2. without a massive business base, writing applications for Linux for a living is not attractive. 'free' software means zero revenue, which attracts only hobbyists and hardcore bit-heads, not the vast mass of professional programmers
3. when something goes wrong, there must be someone to call to fix it
the third item is the killer flaw in almost all 'free' software. If I didn't have to pay anyone to use it, then no one is responsible when it doesn't work. Free software means "free of responsibility for flaws". This is too much of a risk for most businesses.
By the way, if all you want to do is browse the web, send email, play mp3 files, and the other typical "dumb user" things, get a Macintosh.
No, pre-installed has very little to do with it. And, in fact, IMO preinstalling would cause Teh Lunix an even bigger image problem than it has now.
For example, let's say a non-computer using family goes to Wal-Mart, picks up a few games and utilities in the software section, then grabs a $250 Lunix machine. They get it home... the kids notice it's not like anything they used at their school or friend's house... and BOOM! they go to install the software they purchased. Big... problem... none of it works.
Why? OMG... they realize they got suckered. Here they wanted a computer, and they got a machine which won't let them do anything except maybe surf the internet. They can't use any software they buy. They can't use a majority of hardware. Making any configuration changes is going to be a living nightmare, since Teh Lunix doesn't do Plug and Play. In most ways, Teh Lunix on Teh Desktop is stil chasing Windows 95's tail lights, especially from the consumer's point of view.
And who is this family going to call to complain? They can't call Microsoft, because MS isn't even involved. They can't call up Lunix, since there is no company providing support. Heck, they can't even call the PC store around the corner, since being the PC savvy guys they are, THEY don't do anything with Teh Lunix either.
So what ends up happening? The family decides the $250 computer isn't even worth that, and returns it to Wal-Mart. Wally World now has an open box on a computer they can't sell and aren't making any money on anyway... and this factors heavily into their future decisions regarding computers with Teh Lunix on it.
ALL this is a really longwinded way of saying... there's just NO consumer demand for Teh Lunix. If there were, stores would be MORE THAN HAPPY to offer the OS. As it is, Teh Lunix is stagnant at less than 2% of computer users. Pre-installed computers... that's a non-starter idea. Don't you think a real company like Red Hat would have loved to see something like this? Even THEY know it's a non-starter.
If someone hates Microsoft so bad... they just go to the Apple store and get a computer using OSX. The fact is, there's no consumer niche for Teh Lunix, and there's no popular support. Forcefeeding it onto the market isn't the magically solution.
But all these realities... FOSSies don't want to hear it. And all the votes to mod me down as a troll or whatever just prove my point. It's impossible to have a frank discussion of WHY Lunix fails, since the site doing the biggest cheerleading for Teh Lunix refuses to look at reality.
As an Average Joe Computer Newbie I don't see linux as being any worse than windows, but at least I know how to use windows. Linux just seems as if it would be very complex and unnecessary to switch to.
I don't think being free is the issue. First although knowledge about Linux is growing the vast majority of people have never heard of it and the few that have have no idea what it is about and have no exposure to it on the desktop. Second I find that most people don't know Windows is so expensive because it came with their computer, which by the way seems to be the real issue as to why Linux isn't more popular. People that end up having to buy Windows are appalled when they learn the price.
Time makes more converts than reason
Do we use Gnome or KDE? Will a program under Gnome work if I switch to KDE?
Will all my hardware work under Linux? (Last time I tried a year ago, I could not get Kubuntu to work with network PCMCIA cards, both RJ-45 and wireless). The fact that I even have to hassle and research how to do this puts people off.
Can you play games on Linux? Not good ones (this isn't perception, unfortunately. This is fact).
Office: The perception (I have heard this) is that office tools will always be behind Microsoft Office - always playing catch-up. Its like Google office tools - they are very nice, but many still don't really trust them. Personally, I don't think so - both sets of tools are very useable. But the fact that this is even a question in some peoples' minds will put them off. And there isn't a concerted effort to correct people.
There are many others, but mostly I put it down to (lack of) marketing and organization. When a newbie thinks of imaging software and you compare the terms "Photoshop" to "GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program" - which do you think he'll immediately identify first with? And when he/she starts looking at the mish-mash of unknown or unheard-of applications, many of them with unclear installation instructions (it is free software, after all), do you not think that a sour feeling will start creeping at the back of his mind. Look at the list of applications when you install a distro. Some of those names do not inspire confidence. A user will look at "Konqueror" and scratch his head. Some things are just plain unintuitive.
I like Linux for what it represents. But there is a learning curve for any normal, untutored user (99% of the population) who has to make the switch, and the experience starts to loose its shine among the myriad of unclear choices and technical considerations that have to be made.
but for who? Manufacturers?
I think the discussion (which is kind of ongoing really) is regarding the desktop.
And if you're honest with yourself for a second while a Linux system can be *great* for doing a lot of things, when it comes to the hum-drum or the mindless/day-to-day you'll still find yourself pulling hair over tasks you've learned to take for granted most everywhere else.
And then there's the philosophic battles which require I have a special repository enabled (you know if I didn't use Linux I wouldn't know or care what a repository is?) just to install Flash. Major distros don't include MP3 or DVD support out of the box.
Kernel drivers break and/or require recompiles or upgrades frequently.
If you think about it everywhere that Linux based operating systems come into contact with third-party vendors the situation is strained.
But the average users doesn't care about any of this. They just don't like Linux.
Quack, quack.
We can't live with Windows dominating us forever. There's no reason to give Microsoft this huge market forever. We will, if competition is true, see better products. Even if people are set in their ways there's really very little validity to your logic that we should just accept Widnows because it is the best way to hone our skills, to sell ourselves, and to make a living.
It may be true now, but in the long run it is fatalistic.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
(You are correct, however, that CMYK support is a very limited-audience feature; 99% of the people whining that GIMP doesn't have it would never have any valid use for it. Unfortunately there are also some of us who do do print work that does require CMYK support, and we can't use GIMP for that.)
Krita would be an attractive alternative, if it worked properly. Unfortunately the current "stable" version is buggy and missing vast swathes of features. Some interesting ideas in there, but unusable in its current state.
"Illegal" doesn't always mean "criminal".
:-)
Stealing's illegal and is criminal. Breach of agreement is illegal, it's just that it's covered under
Civil law instead of criminal law and carries differing penalties, etc.
Once you realize this, things make more sense. And yes, owning a Hackintosh could be deemed as illegal
if there's any enforceability of the licensing agreements on Leopard possible. If usage implies acceptance
of the terms of licensing, you accepted to ONLY use MacOS on an APPLE machine. If you're not, you may
not be allowed to use the software and could be sued for the breach of the agreement you entered into
by USING the software.
In the end, I'd say it's a bit better to do Linux or *BSD as there's none of those gotchas in the mix.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You could have skipped the article completely by using a more accurate title: "Why Linux isn't spreading - the curse of being complicated and arcane." Don't get me wrong, I love Ubuntu, and Linux is rock-solid in most cases. Immensely valuable. But my nerd alarm goes off even during the INSTALLER for most distros. Pick a graphics card. Pick a resolution. Pick a refresh rate. How do you want to partition your hard drive? What format do you want for the partitions? Blah blah blah. Dammit, I just want to install an OS! Maybe you, me, and the next techie guy doesn't mind debating the virtues of ext4 over ext3, how big your swap partition should be and where to put it. Maybe a lot of people don't mind selecting their model of graphics card and setting resolution manually. It's all about choice, right? "Oh noes, don't lock me into one way of doing things! Freedom, baby!" Yeah, fine, but Joe Blow doesn't even know what a partition is, doesn't give a crap what filesystem he uses, and has no clue what graphics card the geek at the computer shop put in his beige box. Man, I'm not saying cut down on the power and flexibility of Linux, but out of the box it needs to be so simple your grandma could install and use it before it's going to take off. I'm talking about downloading a file that's a few megs, running it, and it automatically repartitions your drive, installs linux, and sets up your machine for dual-booting, with all drivers installed and working for your hardware, no extra configuration necessary. Because until that happens, 99% of the world can't be bothered to go through the gauntlet required to switch to an alternative OS.
If you knew nothing about Linux, which one would you buy?
Put that in the same context of a new user. One that knows Windows because they use it at work.
This great cacophony of distros and variants is so overwhelming that in the end, the regular Joe E Consumer just says. "I'll have what he's having"
You want Linux to be adopted make Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, SUSE and all the others make one definitive version. Take the guessing out of the equation.
Look at Vista. They have an even smaller number of versions and people have no idea. It was an awful move by Microsoft, you think it;s a better move for Linux?
1 home, 1 pro and 1 enterprise. That;s it that's all and that's that.
Heh you just made his point. If I have to know all that just to use the damn thing then I'm not going to use it. :)
After all, isn't that why newspapers are not free? Most of their money comes from advertising, but they must still retain credibility by having a price tag.
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
Just because you spent more money on it doesn't make it a Lamborghini. lol.
I completely agree with regards to not feeding into Microsoft's stronghold. I'm constantly sitting down with friends/family/customers and booting up different Live CDs (ie. Fedora 8, U/Kubuntu, Freespire, etc.) to show them how much Linux has progressed in recent years and invite them to use it in their spare time to see for themselves how functional it is.
There is validity to my explanation in so far as the "average office worker" is concerned; which is the group I was referring to. Unfortunately, reality dictates that if the average office worker applying for a job doesn't have "Windows/MS Office" skills, they don't stand a chance in hell of getting hired. So to pay the bills, one MUST learn the software most businesses run to be a viable candidate. Short of opening your own company, that's just the way it's going to be for some time to come.
I don't like it anymore than you do, but we're in the middle of a transition period with regards to Linux and its stride into the business desktop arena. European countries and some states in the U.S. are making strides to introduce OSS solutions, so it's definitely heading in the right direction. Changing business infrastructures is not going to happen overnight; it's just not a reasonable expectation. And given that the U.S. economy is not doing too well, regardless of what's said on the major news channels, many companies are holding on to capital as much as possible.
Perhaps that clarified things a bit?
All you have to know is that you missed my point.
At work I have used MS Outlook for 5 years now, and it hasn't crashed on me as far as I can remember. But then I only use it for email and for keeping appointments. The servers (also Windows) did go down once or twice in that period. A nuisance to be sure, but not crippling.
If it makes you feel better, I consider MS Outlook's GUI opaque and not very well designed. This does not change the fact that using the GUI I can reliably do simple things with it, without having to remember any commands, and that I can safely ignore all the rest of its functionality.
My intention is not to talk down Linux, on the contrary. What I hope to achieve is to make people understand the importance of good and above all largely standardised GUIs for standard productivity software in furthering the uptake of Linux. That's the focus of this thread: as in "We gave people dozens of shiny Linux distributions, and what do you know ... they won't switch. How come?".
Counter to Linux hobbyists, for many of whom I suspect that *using* Linux is a goal in itself, I think that the average end-user uses his computer to actually do something. Such users simply have no wish, and no patience, to invest heavily in learning Linux or Linux/Unix specific applications (All those CLI-based tools and such idiosyncratic control-sequence rich programs as VI and Emacs come to mind) ... and they shouldn't have to.
In this respect I consider that Linus Torwald's opinion that the Linux kernel is no longer where the main action is when it comes to acceptance or non-acceptance of Linux insightful. The Kernel is good enough (although it still needs work in the area of user-responsiveness under heavy background loads), and end-users have little or nothing to do with the Kernel in any event. It's there, but you shouldn't notice it and it should just work. It's the Windows manager (KDE or Gnome), the GUI to the OS, and the applications that determine Linux uptake now.
At this stage I might add that the tone of the responses on a typical Linux forum might put people off. In this respect I believe the rant by a certain anonymous coward in this thread which basically states: "we-don't-work-for-you-and-we-don't-care-if-you-use-our-software-and-you-should -just-learn-how-it-all-works", nicely illustrates the mentality of certain members of the Linux community. It doesn't take all that many of such responses to drive someone off who is posting uninformed (but to the poster important and perhaps puzzling) questions and perhaps complaints in the help section of a forum.
I for one need CMYK, indeed. I'm doing package designs, and I'd better be very, very sure the color that will be printed will look right, next to the pantone I have to use for brand recognition.
;-)
So, no, this is not nitpicking. Some of us do have a use for Just That
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Nah, the real reason Linux use isn't spreading is that Windows (and Mac) are "just good enough". If all you want is to check email and surf the web, there's no reason to learn an entirely new system. This is the real reason why Windows is maintaining its market share, and also the reason Vista went over like a lead balloon.
p.s. Of course, Linux and *BSD ARE spreading! Just because it's not on your grandmother's desktop does not mean it's languishing. *NIX dominates the server market, and is making significant inroads into business desktop for small to medium firms.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
>...Until they have to write their master's thesis with tons of tables, a dynamic table of contents, and more formatting
.doc format, but for some reason damned impossible to open with openoffice due to weird placement of a column that obscures the name. Very annoying. However, she is using this to write the text portion of her dissertation, nothing fancy. When it comes time to format she can use the school lab computers if needed, keeping the file on a backed-up pendrive.
>sections than you can shake 116 pages of stick at...
Agreed -- anybody that has used any semi-advanced feature such as Excel's pivot-tables (OO's data-pilot) will tell you that the frustration factor is high with both, but MUCH higher with openoffice. My hospital sends me schedules that are in
>Has she just started using computers in the past 2 weeks? Because I'm pretty frightened if she had trouble with the
>absolute most basic functions.
>Does she have trouble driving blue cars as well? Because she is used to red and yellow ones.
Uh, dude, this is why you don't have a girlfriend. Most girls I know want to fiddle with computers as much as you would want to spend 2 hours talking about nuances of interior design. Seriously though, she just didn't scroll down in the Save As drop-down far enough... I told her that it is in there somewhere and she then found it on her own. In her mind she was thinking "different program = different filetype" which I find many non-computer people do, and was ready to give up at the drop of a hat, as many people also do. There is a good post about default file formats above, but I agree with this defaulting to an open standard. Heh, remember when it was hard to transfer files between a PC and a Mac?
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
1000 comments on a story that does not involve Apple or Microsoft.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
On the other hand, if First Sale rule is considered to apply, then you can do anything you want with it including modify it and sell it so long as you do not misrepresent it.
So far, it has not been sufficiently demonstrated that anything else is true.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sure, if a company needs Photoshop, Linux is out. But how many PS installations does a regular company needs, unless it is a graphics shop? One, maybe two.
Photoshop is just shorthand for "every mature application that hasn't been ported to Linux." The graphics pro, the small businessman, the home user, each has his own list of essentials.
Try searching Linspire's CNR library for a Print Shop clone.
2/ No GAMES
Companies don't want people to play games.
But you'll find games in schools and in the home and in the military. America's Army is used as a recruiting tool. SimCity was an early port to OLPC.
3/ No MS Office
So you simply use OpenOffice
Or not. Microsoft used a jigsaw puzzle as a logo for its Office system - and there are a lot of pieces in that box that the Geek forgets to mention when he talks about OpenOffice.org. Office Accounting Exoress
Many other users have pointed out some of the FUD in this post, but I'll talk about some of the valid points it mentions, such as MS Office. After using Linux exclusively for more than 6 years as both my desktop and server OS, I recently got yanked back into Windows land thanks to a new job. They allow me to bring my Linux laptop to work, but it has proven to be difficult for some things. For one, complicated MS Office documents that I need to collaborate with others on. In the past, I had no need to work on any MS Office document that is this complex, and little irritations such as mis-aligned image here and a weird looking font there do occur from time to time, because I am using OpenOffice. Now, I fully believe that OpenOffice is ultimately the superior product both in licensing and quality, but not so to the average marketing guy who lives and breaths MS Office (little rant: how good is a product when templates created in Office 2007 isn't fully compatible with Office 2003!?!)
Another thing that forces me to run Windows in VMware on my Linux laptop, is our corporate VPN that only works with Windows. It's 2008, and to my surprise, there are still a lot of major vendors out there that only support Windows.
As for the Photoshop comment, I am not a professional artist, but from what I have seen, most people who do enough art work own a Mac anyway.
I remain optimistic about the future of Linux, I continue to meet more and more people who are interested in learning about Linux, few of them have taken the initiative to install Fedora or Ubuntu on their computers to play around with. While not a lot of people are making a mad dash to switch to using Linux as their main desktop platform, thanks to virtualization technologies, I believe there are more people out there now that use Linux as their "secondary" OS, i.e. a virtual instance on their Windows laptop. I hope as these people spend more time with Linux, they will eventually switch over to using Linux as the primary OS, and only use Windows when they have to (like me).
Sorry, I have to interject on this. He grossly mis-stated the steps necessary. Presumably he's talking about Ubuntu, as Synaptic is the front end for APT, which is Debian based, and of course n00b's as they are so affectionately known are not going to be running stable Debian (devel-cycle . . . does not appear to mean speed) and anyone suggesting an unfamiliar computer user to run anything not on the stable tree... anyways, I have a point. Besides, Ubuntu by default ships with FF, so wtf?
1) Go to the Applications menu in the upper left (by defualt on Ubuntu, not Kubuntu or Xubuntu), then down at the bottom of that menu is an option Add/Remove Programs (this should be the third thing a user on Ubuntu should be shown, first is turn it on, second is use the mouse, third, "here's the programs menu")
2) Type firefox when the screen loads (my cursor defaults to the search box immediately)
3) Check Firefox and click install at the bottom of the screen.
Now, depending on the configuration of the system, it'll probably ask for a password since it's modifying the system, and there might even be some dependency stuff. I've hacked my own box, so I forget how a base install acts. Anyways, then we have to understand the language that it shows on screen when it says "Done, click below to launch app, or close windows"
Granted, that was not so hard. But his windows analogies were fairly spot on. I'ld say that PEOPLE are complete idiots, although individuals are pretty damned smart. Just everyone forgets how to read when they use computers anymore.
2^3 * 31 * 647
People have asked, over and over again, for the GIMP devs to add CMYK. As I understand it, the devs are concerned about doing it right, without stepping on patents. You don't understand the issue with CMYK. There is not just one way to do it. CMY is the spectral opposite of RGB, you get that, right? Conversion between RGB and CMY is simple, just invert the values. So, I ask again: what is the K for? If you don't know that, you don't know what the problem is AT ALL.
Here's a hint: it isn't the conversion, per se. It's about the calibration to a specific printer and set of inks. And most of those calibrations are patented. Are you starting to understand the issue yet?
You can't just 'print it out' to see what it will look like. There isn't just one CMYK, there are many. Depending on what printer you use, things will look different. Hell, on some printers like the ones I used, the humidity, temperature, and number of prints since the last time you recharged the ink could all make a difference. That is why calibration of monitors and printers to the same standard is important. I'm not going to do your research for you, if you want to know what professional use, JFGI. Or ask a current professional, I haven't been in that business for over a decade.
Look, you obviously don't know anything about the field. The fact that you continue to argue is laughable to anyone who does. Not only that, but I've stated that I like GIMP. You aren't going to 'convert' me. I've been using Open Source since software since 1995. I use it at work. Right now I administer 30 Linux servers. You don't need to convince me how awesome it is, I know. All you are doing is giving Open Source, and GIMP in particular a bad name, by being over zealous, under informed, and unwilling to listen to honest criticism. You're worse than twitter.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Add:
4/Not workplace standard.
Remember the Win9x/NT/Office 97 days when you could just grab the same software you used at work and load it on your home machine with little effort? The TIME you invested learning to use it at work meant you were comfortable with it at home. Joe Average doesn't want to invest extra time learning a new OS.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The true value of Linux (and any Open Source O/S) is that it can never be end-of-lifed on you. You guys who love Microsoft Windows XP, face it, it's been declared a dead matter and in time it will be taken away from you.
I'll always have Linux, even if I have to write the drivers myself, but hey, I can! I have all the source code. I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro that I bought for my wife and I don't kid myself, Apple can take it away any time they choose.
Linux hasn't caught up "as a desktop environment" simply because its utter garbage in comparison to Windows or Mac. That include ALL linux distributions
It takes some pimply faced hacker to get a barely half-ass multimedia setup able to play "most" of the media formats.
Consumers don't give a shit whether a format is proprietary or not, they just want it to "WORK"
You can't even get accelerated graphic with any kind of slightly more complicated multi-head configuration (Try three screens, and enable effects / aiglx)
Evolution is a sloppy and poor attempt at creating an outlook equivalent, its a buggy, slow and unstable piece of shit especially when connecting to Exchange or Groupwise.
There are no real applications, project/visio available
WINE is buggy no one in their right mind would want to run a program in a wine environment over Windows unless you have something to prove.
Development: Simple, Visual Studio 2005, equivalent? Not. The closest well integrated development suite is Trolltechs QT and its very limited in comparison.
As a server, why? when I have windows 2003/SQL ent 2005/IIS/asp/.net/perl/Visual Studio 2005 to tie up any loose ends I may need.
VMware is about the only good thing about any Linux distribution.
In short, no one is using linux because IT FUCKING !!!!>>> SUCKS !!!!
I know, I've used it for 10 fucking years and the ONLY reason I still run it, (via fedora core 8) is because of my twisted love hate relationship with Unix. I would run FBSD if it could host vmware.
There's your answer.
Dude, parent says something more than FiredFox browser. E.g. to setup stupid Linksys WiFi card takes ages to figure out WTF is going on when access point is seen, but card does not works. I mean, in Mac you plug stuff and it fucking works. In Linux you can not setup it properly without hammering it.
Right. And OSX even easier than Windows. So who needs Linux then anyway? If average Joe buys a computer in the shop, he considers a price, pays and don't gives a shit. What does average Joe with Linux? Right: deletes unusable OS and installs Windows, where plenty of incredible software, installation is nice from user's point of view (it is crap only from tech point of view) and everything "suddenly clicks".
Linux is free because someone's time has no value. Once someone realise that 1 hour costs some nice amount of US dollars (or EUR), he/she will definitely fuck Linux on desktop, buy a Vista or (better) Mac and do not give a shit of command line crap, but will focus on own job. Besides, command line in Mac works absolutely same, but with the difference that it is not needed for system setup. ;-)
To be clear: I use all of them: Mac, Linux, Solaris and QNX. I have no problem with Linux. But this is because I am not average Joe in this case.
Installing Ubuntu is a lot easier than installing Windows. It is not, however, easier than buying a computer preloaded with Windows.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Awesome stuff your moderators are on.
Yes, Gimp has no WTF separation. Yes, Photoshop has no script-fu either. Weren't you talking about GETTING WORK DONE?
No support from vendors refusing to let out information? How is that different from "no drivers for your old hardware in the new OS?" How is it different from: "I spent money on office, and an update won't let me see old files without even warning me"? Or "Spent money on my mac office and a scripting language is not going to be ported?"
Now for the LOL stuff: Dependency hell? I resolved it in 2001, just tried a different distro, called debian. Wasn't that hard. Not harder than downloading and getting a hackintosh to work.
Now for the ROTFL stuff: A HACKINTOSH? Good for the basement. IRL, where real work is done, hacked OSs are not feasible. You don't want people in uniform seizing your hardware and data do you? You don't want the latest update bork your hacked installation for two weeks until the hackers code around it, do you? You don't use only a couple programs which seem to run smoothly until you use a new filter.
Be fair and talk about macs only. Which means paying apple for its hardware, which is fair, i did it too for years. Which means also that you depend on apple strategies. Apple makes only 13" cheap lappies, or likes more bloat in leopard making your tibook obsolete? Too bad, get Linux or else.
Anyway thanks for the good laugh, mods.
The reason why Linux doesn't spread is reflected in the attitude of this article.
Another reason I see is that many people, especially here in the US, still have good ol' dial-up for Internet access. Therefore it takes a looooong time to download an .iso and burn it to disc. Where I live, I am in a broadband no-man's-land between Solarus in Wisconsin Rapids and Charter in Stevens Point: and neither want to come into my neighborhood. When I went to get OpenSuse 10.3 that I am typing this on, I went to download the .iso from school as I was going to MSTC at the time. The first time I got Linux, I bought Suse 9.3 Professional from Plover, WI, Best Buy back in 2005. I had dial-up (and still do) and didn't want to wait God-knows-how-long to download. I installed it (after a few attempts) and the driver for the Nvidia card in the Dell at the time, and it worked well.
I have used other distros before, including Mandrake/Mandriva, Fedora, Ubuntu, and PCLinuxOS, but I seem to come back to (Open)Suse. It behaves well with my modem for both internet access and Yast software management and updates. The only trouble is that the Xgl won work on the ATI X1600 PRO card. I'm still working on getting it to work though.
I'm replying to the above post because it is a good example of the poor attitudes that are keeping Linux down. The first step is to admit that there are things that need to be done - not to pretend like things are perfect and to imply that someone that can't use it is a retard. Further, pointing out things that suck in other OSs isn't a good argument - this isn't a competition to be as good as the others - Linux should aspire to be the best.
My issues with Linux are not a result of my stupidity, and even if it were, the problem with adoption is that an OS should be able to overcome a degree of stupidity. No package dependency hell Yes, and 1999 wants it's fud back. I haven't run Linux (Mandriva)in a year but package dependency hell at that time was still very real. "this has been compiled with GCC2.95 and an alternative libc" That is why one uses the packages for _one_ distribution. And don't try too install binaries from unknown sources, please. When you can't find the dependencies what do you do? I don't have the time to assemble all the components and compile.
I faced the Windows equivalent of dependency hell when I was coding. The fact I had to face DLL hell when I was coding really indicates a major issue with the Linux distribution system. In windows the burden is on the software vendor to make things work out of the box. In Linux, the burden is on the user. Yes, there are cool tools that have made this tons easier. However, in Linux when the tools break down (say, the "approved source" doesn't have the dependency yet or their servers are hosed), its the user's problem not the vendor's.
There is hope though, I've heard good things about other distros. I have been meaning to try Ubuntu and will likely be installing it after an upcoming test.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
Is that really all you've got?
And there's still KOffice.
Give it a year. There's already support for OpenGL on Windows via VirtualBox, and if you're running a VM on a Mac with hardware acceleration, keep in mind that Parallels is pretty much using Wine's Direct3D wrappers.
Welcome to Ubuntu.
Unless, of course, you're holding it to a higher standard of OUT-OF-THE-FUCKING-BOX-ness than your Mac, which didn't come with Photoshop, did it?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Thats funny, Windows 64-bit was the reason I went from dual boot to a full Linux(Ubuntu) install, I couldn't download anything with IE or firefox, not to mention the fact that nothing worked, and I bought Windows 64-bit "pro"... what a joke. I installed Ubuntu used automatix and everything was working in an hour... I could use WOW and counters-strike easy(after wine install which was quick).... no problems, also when i needed wireless it was already working..
The main reason linux and other open-source software like blender, gimp and openoffice never really "took off" with consumers has little to do with this idea that the "free" nature of these items makes them irrelevent to the end user. (Actually, it sounds a lot like an excuse open source developers came up with to justify all the wasted time and effort they put into a product they'll never truly get any actual recognition out of.)
The real reason they don't overtake their commercial counterparts is primarily due to a lack of proper quality assurance testing and oversight. Instead, these items are developed by hardcore computer programmers who are only subject to ridicule from other programmers working on the same project with practically zero consequences for not complying with the ideas of others whom they really don't care about. (It's not like you can get "fired" from an open source project when you created it or can just branch it off.) In short, the price of entry (in terms of effort) involved with learning how to use an open source software package is just too high to justify the immediate monetary savings when most commercial software can actually be learned to a usable state in only a few hours even without the manual in hand. (Hell, even a monkey could stumble their way through most of the commercial apps out there simply by pounding on the keys and chewing the mouse.) These applications generally aren't better than their open source counterparts in their capabilities, but the bulk of their capabilities are generally much more accessible right from the start.
To counter this, it's going to take an entirely new mindset from the open source community to bring in the consumer crowds. This means giving up your l33t-ness in favor of humility. You'll need to learn how to compromise with real-world people besides the ones in your project trees. Prepare yourself to pander to the least common denominator instead of worshipping efficiency. Be ready to plagerize your ass off. If a commercial app's interface works for the consumer, use it in your software instead of going all Blender on it. Finally, create clear, easy to read documentation using short words and lots of examples for everything. If it takes more intelligence than your average 8-year old can muster to learn your software's basic features within a day, then you've failed the test.
8==8 Bones 8==8
No doubt MS Office is good, but on the Mac, until last month it loaded no faster than OO or Neo (and of course you have to shell out again to get the UB that they should have provided for free a year ago). I agree that GIMP's a monster with a steep training curve and no lightweight version a la Image Well or Seashore or PS Elements on the mac platform. But I've been around PCs since the 80's, where we all started out on the command line with DOS 3 or whatever; and Linux is a reminder that things can be done safely and simply, while also teaching me that most of the hyper-tech stuff that's shilled to me by Redmond and Cupertino is stuff I don't really need after all. What most folks need from an office suite can be easily done online now, and if you're a professional who needs a top-flight image editor you're going to wind up on the Mac anyway. But for Joe Windowsuser, I think PCLinuxOS (amazing product), MEPIS 7, or any flavor of Ubuntu is a no-brainer: they all do at least 90% of what you'd expect a PC to do for essentials, is far safer, and doesn't cost a dime. In the context of that article's point, folks are going to have to get used to the fact that they've been sold on a largely manufactured set of needs these past 20 years, and also realize that there are larger issues at stake here, such as the future of the planet and our benighted species. Do I need a new $3K Air with a solid state HD when I can run YDL on an old iBook with nary a complaint? Do I need a new Dellienware monster when I run PCLOS on a seven-year old Gateway that groans even under the weight of XP Home? I don't remember Mr. Moore saying in his famous law that you need to buy a new box every 18 mos., but that's been the spin put on it by the corporations. Linux offers an alternative to this cult of waste and destruction; not to mention a more productive model of capitalism than we've had from the monsters of the west coast. Mozilla, Canonical, Red Hat, and plenty of other open source businesses are doing just fine without having to build a cult of hegemony around themselves. As the current recession deepens, I predict that people will realize that FOSS is pretty much exactly the sort of thing they need amid increasingly straitened economies. Linux is the first wave of a tide that will define business in the 21st century: companies will have to sell service rather than products; modestly-priced support for what's here now rather than megabucks gouging for the next-big-thing.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
THANK FUCKING RIDDANCE. Go back to your FUCKING MAC. Oh and go suck somemore Steve Jobs ASS and the gunk dribbling out of it
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# I have no brain
I didn't see a point. Your so-called point about PS is stupid because a company doesn't want 20 different OSes. The rest is just dumb crap that is completly ignorent of TFA.
http://www.mhall119.com
Hey I love linux. I deploy telecommunications applications that run on the platform. In many ways, it is better suited for my needs than Windows. It really is ground zero for application, shell and web scripting development. But come on, do we really need all eleventy billion packages? How many do you actually use on a regular basis? This ever growing package collection strikes me of jack-of-all-trades, master on none.
Probably the most powerful thing about linux is the shell script (BASH, shell, PERL, etc..) The bottom line is that these things (and largely Linux) are exclusively for GEEKS; and there simply are far fewer geeks buying and using computers and software than grandmothers and sales managers. And geeks don't generally don't like to spend ANY money on software so they will NEVER make you rich. Linux cannot escape this reality.
Besides, Mac and Windows have always done better at marketing and selling software to the masses. Mac has always been the user-friendly king. Linux just can't shine a candle to Mac in this regard. And windows is ground zero for cutting edge hardware development by virtue of its huge install base and widespread adoption by the business community (largely because of its OEM relationship with IBM back in the day). Because of this, windows will ALWAYS have the gaming industry in its back-pocket. Let's face it, Linux has a backseat with low-level development. Drivers get ported from windows to linux as a second priority often by the second-string development team.
So linux is left the utility knife of operating systems. Its ever growing amorphous blob of packages reducing it every worsening mediocrity.
James
Beverly, MA
"Anyone remember the character Cypher from that movie? He was sick of the real world, his crappy life , crappy food and everything being a constant battle. He wanted to go back into the Matrix."
He must have forgotten that back in the Matrix, all he ever seemed to do was involuntarily post junk mail to people, in between phoning up random marketing companies to tell them what he was interested in.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Just had to say this is the funniest post I've read in a long time. So much for the writers guild strike. :)
I completely agree and would add that it happens not only with linux, but almost every free/open source community. I also think that linux won't spread more while open source doesn't spread too. The first thing that must be changed is not publicity, marketing, manufacturers' pre-installing it or not; the so-called support communities must change their behavior towards new users first. Linux spreading won't grow an inch if, for example, manufacturers take part on this process by pre-installing linux on Desktop Computers and when "new comers" dig any community for further information on how to do this or that, they're practically expelled from irc channels, forums and every other mean for help. In fact, it gets even more and more bad publicity, once people tend to feel it easier to discourage or say a bad thing about something they tried and didn't like it than spreading good words about something that they tried and liked.
God is Real as long as it's not declared as Integer.
"It was made very clear to him, in all but two answers, that he was not welcome, the wrong kind of user, morally inferior for wanting to play non-free games."
It's not that at all. He just doesn't know how to ask questions. ESR says it a lot better than I ever could. That essay is literally life changing. Read the whole thing.
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
In my experience, the open source environment has changed remarkably in the ten years I have been exposed to it. The amount of relevant information that can be found by a simple google search is staggering. That is the first stop, and is far quicker and more considerate of other people's time than posting to a forum.
Typing "wine " into google and scanning even the first page of results should have given your friend a good idea of whether he could have played the games he wanted to or not.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
"The Ubuntu community forums, happily, seem to be frequented by more polite human beings, and the Wiki is pretty well maintained."
It's less that they are frequented by more polite human beings, and more that they have a good moderation policy and good moderators.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
OMG we have to get teh SCO UnixWare! itz teh morez so itz teh betterz!
Is that really all you've got?
Not to mention that on my compact 12" laptop, off the grid, with the CPU in economy mode and with a slow HD, Open Office takes all of five seconds to create a blank window (never started this session).I'm not that starved for time that I mind a 5 second wait.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Luckily, it turns out -when you have a serious look at these- that most of these apps will run virtualized. If you just need a few simple Windows apps, QEMU is a perfect and easy solution. Obviously Wine can help you out sometimes, but I consider Wine too much of a hot-or-miss solution. Xen or the prorietary VMWare are excellent.
A problem with the virtualization approach is the scalability. It's just not suited for a (very) small set-up. One home user just doesn't use a server and doesn't want to run 2 OSes on his desktop. You also know this, hence your "graphics pro, the small businessman, the home user" list.
However, the moment a business is bigger than (very) small, these solutions suddenly become feasible. Provided the person responsible for the IT infrastructure is knowledgeable enough, otherwise Microsoft products will be an expensive fall-back.
And then there are the businesses that have many simple desktops and no legacy applications (-that just have to have their own Windows), these are perfect for linux desktops. Think customer services, banks, insurance companies, public services etc. Many of the apps these organisations use already are web (intranet) based. You'll find that this segment of the market is *big*.
But I do know many organisations have dug themselves deep into the Microsoft trap. That stuff you mention, that's why I also take lock-in into account when selecting software. Microsoft certainly isn't stupid and it's product line is one big interlocking mechanism designed to pull in the customer and integrate even more IT. Is that maybe the meaning of that puzzle logo?
Anyway, it's obvious there's a segment of the market were the Linux desktop has difficulty competing with the Microsoft infrastructure, but that does not mean that Linux cannot compete. And, likewise, there are whole segments were Linux on the desktop is a perfect solution. And in these segments of the market people are looking at or implementing Linux desktops, as we speak.
And the "graphics pro"? He's a lost case, for now.
The home user? If he (or she, yeah right) wants to play the latest and greatest games, he's a lost case. But remember that the high-end gaming market is _small_, it's the on-line gaming (flash-games) and simple games market that is _huge_ (something you won't easy realise when reading the stuff here). Otherwise a Linux desktop is perfect for email, document editing, and browsing (the stuff most home users do), and a boat load of simple games.
The problem is inertia, people wanting that all applications work exactly the same to what they are used to, irrespective of any tangible benefits that could be obtained by learning the new interface.
Expose a completely new person to any given kind of software and he will not be so judgmental about the quality of a GUI.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have used Linux as my desktop for 10 years. I have never missed the applications you are mentioning.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Windows does not necessarily play DVDs out of the box neither, I have had to install software for this purpose in th past (until XP), similar for MP3 (it may be different in Vista, I declare I avoid that stuff like the plague).
I have spent the same 2 hours getting similar functionality from Windows boxes, so I frankly don't see why this point needs to be made.
The biggest difference is that in WIndows that is normally hidden from you, but it is not much easier if undertaken by a regular user.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I can compile whatever you throw at me. Honest, I compiled an X server for Sun3 machines at some distant point in the past. As well as Linux kernels galore and compilers themselves.
Get this: I have not compiled a single program for the last 4 years I would say.
Those times as the mainstream Linux experience are gone. Done. Dusted. Finito. Eso es todo amigos.
Cappice?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I would just like to chime in that though OpenOffice loads slowly on my P4, 3GHz, 1.5GB RAM Win XP machine, it does load within about 8 seconds on my P3, 800MHz, 128MB RAM Xubuntu machine.
I also think Linux adoption is very much like adoption of alternate energy. Once it comes standard on more computers, it will probably gain quite a bit of acceptance...particularly with distros like Ubuntu which I confess have proven reliable, stable and easy to use for me compared to previous distros (no offense to them.) When that acceptance has picked up, more and better software will probably become available.
Unfortunately, though there's a ton of software out there now, none of it is as "pretty" as most Win or Mac software, and none of it has the marketing that makes it recognizable to most people. People are comforted when they see the slick program that they've heard everyone is using (the commercial or ad in the magazine told them so.)
Linux adoption will require preinstalled out-of-the-box, a more helpful linux community willing to communicate simply and clearly (this is getting better), stronger and more unified configuration tools that do not require the console (this is also getting better), and either a few amazing Linux only games or some serious productivity software that never gets in the way of the person using it (I'm talking to you, DAW makers...I shouldn't have to configure an external program before configuring the internal program that has to connect to the external program, etc...I just want to record, edit, mix and hear the results!) Easier and better Wine compatibility wouldn't hurt either.
In fairness, I think Linux has come a long way, and I use it quite a bit now (as does my girlfriend, who moves effortlessly between Linux and Windows.) Ubuntu really is quite wonderful, Wine is getting better all the time, and even the games are becoming quite playable and enjoyable.
My girlfriend, of course, would be much happier if OpenOffice wasn't usurping her bullet options all the time...but then I'd be much happier if the new MS Office wasn't designed for fans of mystery meat navigation.
Do You Experiment?
All Linux installations are done with GUI. Happy now?
/. I would say it is a pretty sad distraction, you should try playing tetris or something else.
But unlike Windows, you have the possibility to drop to a command line if something is not working during install time (pretty rare, I have installed Linux many times and have still to drop to a CL in the last 4 or 5 years).
Amazing how some people try to make an obvious positive feature appear like a hindrance.
If your hobby is spreading vulgar lies in
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You could not troll with the installation "problem" and now you move to the drivers and popular applications.
Trolling at its lamest.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Associating value with price may seem stupid at first, but it may just be habit people learn throughout life which helps them save on brainpower. On many occasions, people may see items which cost significantly more than the alternatives for reasons they cannot immediately recognise. Then, they later find out through research or experience that there are good reasons (not immediately obvious to a newbie) why they cost more. ADSL from either Telstra or Optus here in Australia seems horribly overpriced at first, until you've either experienced or read about the reliability of the cheapest competitors.
Or they might be lazy and assume the product is being sold in an almost perfectly competitive market,[1] in which case the more expensive one must be better because otherwise the company pushing it would go out of business really soon; something I've done in substitution for real research many times before.
People are being offered free things all the time. Free screensavers, which install trojans on their computers. Free newspapers, which turn out to be full of ads and relatively little news (like the MX). Free try-out sessions, which turn out to be little more than marketing sessions for the latest self-help product. In this kind of environment, it's probably natural that they're suspicious of software being offered for free.
Personally, I care not that Linux hasn't spread like wildfire. If we tried to cater to clueless Jane Doe[2] users, Linux would turn into what Windows is today. I'd rather Linux distributors stick to catering to people who don't suspend all logic the moment they touch a keyboard, and are intelligent enough to find solutions to their own problems (and maybe make a forum post about it for the benefit of others).
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[1] A reasonable assumption when you see lots of manufacturers selling a particular product.
[2] From personal experience, a greater proportion of them are female, though that may just be a result of the "Why learn when I can get boys to do it for me" attitude prevalent amongst my age group.
Outlook is the small twin evil of Exchange.
Remove Exchange out of the equation and Outlook is a non issue.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Linux needs instant support for any new app or game that comes out, just like Windows has, or it will never succeed. Got it? Now stop bending over backwards coming up with theory after theory about why Linux fails, because you KNOW.
De facto, Windows is also percieved to be free because of piracy and preinstallation. You can buy Linux, no problem at all, with competitive prices, and Ubuntu support as well. But this false cheapness is beginning to crumble - a friend came the other day and asked me to give him Ubuntu for his sister's computer. He installed Windows at first, but his validation key was false, then he got another WinXP image, installed it, but it came with a virus built in. Than he called me to help him on installing Ubuntu. If there is a perception that free is worse, than in the OS case it's a false one.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
The problem might be that he does not speak much English. He used Google to some extent, this is how he ended up in that forum.
I doubt that learning how to ask the correct question is anything but sheer bullshit from a "customer" point of view. Remember that the main issue here is treatment of the uninitiated - and not everbbody wants to join a religion...
[bitter rant]
1) There's no such *thing* as Linux. Linux is a hundred or so things, that come and go as the developers work through their programming ADD. Pair down to just ONE version of Linux so that someone can go to Best Buy and ask for it. "Hi, I'm here to buy Linux", "Aisle 9, third shelf". Make that happen and Linux will be competitive. Or just go on doing what ISN'T working; 3 dozen pet projects that take turns being the next W1nBL0Z'S killer (for the next month or two).
2) There's bugger all games for it. When Linux can run Half-Life 2, NWN, PlanetSide, BioShock and so on, let me know and i'll switch immediately. It also needs to run MS Office. OO.o is NOT an acceptable alternative yet. i use it at work as much as i can, but can only do so for things i have no intention of sharing. Sure i can convert from odt to doc, but it will be a mess and i'll have to fix it. i might as well have used word from the start
3) Hardware and up to date drivers.
4) Interoperability with the rest of the world is still a major problem, this is also one of the reason's i find macs loathsome. Great you've got your status symbol... so who are you going to talk to? Other pretentious snobs who over paid for a shiny white box that looks like everyone else's is about all you've got. It's like learning Lojban, sure, it's cool or something, but you can only use it with other losers.
i want to make the switch. i want to throw my XP install disc into a fire. But Linux is still just a novelty for nerds.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
http://www.mhall119.com
Installation issues are irrelevant when the vast majority of Windows users own a PC which came with Windows pre-installed. That simple fact, that it is practically impossible to buy a PC that does not have Windows pre-installed, is the main reason that Linux has such trouble gaining traction on the desktop. Most computer users are not industrious enough to wipe a machine and reinstall a different OS on it. All they want to do is go to the store, put down their credit card, bring home a system, plug it in, and use it. Sure they could get Ubuntu pre-installed on a Dell machine, but they even have to make an extra effort to do that, and most people take the path of least resistance.
You call this a sig?
if it was expensive then price would be a valid argument.
Ive used linux quite a few times.
sure i'm picking up how the command line works. i can do all kinds of stuff with it. but even the command line lacks standardization. i usually get fed up for the rest of the week when i have to deal with the command line. an example of lack of standardization is the solutions you read about on forums. when i just look at the solutions, it only strengthens my view of linux lacking structure.
to me it looks like one big unstandardized mess. i have to dive in to one manual after the other for almost every program i really need. this is very wasteful of my time! sure you can argue that windows is installed on every pc and that people don't know better than windows...
but those are just circumstances. Linux has Office suites. maybe there is incompatibility with microsoft's suites. but they weren't made for microsoft things so i don't think its valid to complain about the Office suite in linux from that angle.
what i want to see is not the development of more little little tools but the development of more standardization (standardizing tools?). everyone keeps bringing out their distributions with little or no improvement ( some Not Invented Here Syndrome is taking place here with epic proportions ).
problem solving in windows is also no cakewalk. the registry is frikin mess. NO I DON"T USE MAC (dual boot linux and win).
with standardization the user could still be left at the command line. USER FRIENDLINESS is the big issue. i can't even visualize how the inside works even though linux is suppose to be so open about everything. i don't think solving problems is so bad. but if it's done in a weird environment then things get hopeless. if the user could visualize what exactly is wrong, she will be more determined to solve the problem, knowing more or less what is wrong. window's is also not scoring very high in this area. maybe its just some tools that are missing to preform these kinds of jobs (NOT A WHOLE DISTRO). see it's the mindset of the user/developers thats the problem. and then there is the jokes like "if you use anything more sophisticated than VI then thats a signs of a weak mind" sure thats funny and i can laugh at that, but at the end of the day IT AIN'T FUNNY!
in the near future i will also be a developer and i am having doubts about developing for linux. i really don't care for things like already existing software for bad systems. i say if the system is bad, get rid of it or fix. and maybe thats partly why we are in this mess. i'm not really satisfied with very much right now. linux seems to have all the little building blocks for greater functionality but i don't think it should stay like that at all... i'm not childishly gonna pick sides. there are problems period, and no one is fixing jack.
it's way too easy to blame the nobility linux
Linux isn't free; it requires an investment of time and effort. The minimum would be the time taken to adapt to a new or different UI, similar to upgrading a commercial OS if all else is compatible. The maximum for most end users tends to come in the form of those things that dominate the ubuntu forums; things like getting fancy sound setups and video cards working, those odd devices that don't enjoy full support, and finding ways to make software from other platforms function correctly.
By contrast, the customer who sees value in something with a price tag is generally the big-box retailer computer shopper stereotype; they have no clue what they're doing, they don't really want to learn (or don't believe they're capable of learning), and so they get fleeced at the time of purchase (with all the add-ons that the sales reps foist on them) and several more times over the life of the computer, whether it's by software vendors (anti-virus or anti-malware vendors primarily who prey on insecurity) or technicians if things go wrong farther down the road when the machine is out of warranty. Ignorance is extremely costly, whether it's a car, home, or computer. Those who don't know how to maintain and repair their investments are at the mercy of those who do.
At the end of the day, I've found my investment in Linux to be worth every second. Every time I have to try to install the newest drivers on a bleeding-edge video chipset, I learn something. Same with installing software that's usually not designed to run under Linux natively. The value is there, though. My system is more stable than it's ever been. It boots twice as fast as Windows XP, but that hardly matters as rarely as I ever need to reboot it. I can play WoW and Steam games such as Portal. I can watch LOST from ABC's website in the XP virtual machine (that's its sole purpose these days). I just don't recognize or accept the "constraints of Linux" the way a lot of the Linux-complainers do, and I've found myself losing sympathy for them; I'll just shrug and smile. I guess if they don't see the value and aren't willing to put-in an honest effort, I shouldn't stand in their way of paying the Microsoft-tax. For those who do want to make Linux work and aren't looking just looking for something to complain about, I make it clear that they can ask me stuff and I'll do what I can to help them, free of charge, of course...that's my way of adding value to the project and community. For those who don't see the value in the community, there's not much I can really say; part of Linux seems to be contributing to the cause, either by being willing to ask for and receive help, or by helping others. It's the community-effort that makes Linux derivatives the most priceless OSes out there.
For commercial OS users who need help fixing Windows and Mac problems though, whether it's removing spyware or investigating whether dodgy software or hardware is causing the machine to not perform the way it should, my rate is $75/hour, 2-hour minimum onsite. I still try to impart the knowledge to my end users that will help them to help themselves in the future, which is a whole lot more than most technicians and the Windows culture in general fosters, which is more helplessness (and Mac culture is even worse). I'm all too happy to help them upgrade to "free" if they express interest in an alternative to Windows because they know it's bad. The Mac users never seem to have any doubts, and have no problem paying and paying.
I would have thought its because you have to do so much damned work to make Linux work for you. Write your own config files, download packages, recompile the kernel. Windows just works without all that effort.
No, really !
Point for point:
1.- Bullshit. Honestly. Tell us which normal task requires access to the CLI. Package installation? No, there is a GUI. Patches? GUI. CD/DVD burning? GUI. File management? GUI. Programming? GUI. Basic system administration? GUI. User account management? GUI. So go on, fight your corner, because a corner is where people insisting on this point are.
2.- Which hardware is hard to install in Linux? Hardware crippled to work with Windows only? Well yeah, tell the Mac fanboys how that goes with their machines. So lets see: mice, keyboard and monitors are mostly plug and play (monitors weren't in the past), the immense majority of USB mass storage devices work, most digital cameras will be recognized as such, as will do most scanners. Modems? If they are real modems, yeah, no problem, if not you may still be able to use them. CD/DVD players and burners? Yeah, covered. Network cards? I can't remember last time one did not work out of the box.
The hard bits: graphic cards and WiFi cards. With time they will come. I have had projects in which the requirement was Linux using WiFi, we looked for a manufacturer explicitly supporting Linux and he got the contract. We will get there, but your original blanket statement is tired and outdated. Somebody migrating an existing machine to XP or (goodness protects him) Vista may find that half his hardware is no longer supported. This normally does not happen with Linux.
3.- No pro-audio applications? You are joking, so I'll let this one pass. There are several applications that can quite happily handle multichannel recording for example, but I am not expert in the field, but I know you are worng. For the casual user Audacity is more than enough for audio management. As for Games, you say "hard to come by IF they are ported to Linux", well, you are obviously missing some trends, I never saw companies porting all their games ro Apple machine neither. So exactly what is your point? There are plenty of very good Linux games out there. But certainly if you chose games running in WIndows and then point to Linux saying "look Linux sucks!" frankly you are being childish. There are certainly some holes in application availability, but this tends to be now in applications for seasoned users or specialist in niche markets. Linux rules in other fields like oil exploration, movie production and grid computing, but we are not going to say that Windows or OSX suck for that reason alone, would we?
4.- Elitism (me rolls eyes, thinks about Apple fanboys). Honestly, grow a thicker skin. There are plenty of people out there ready to help. If somebody tell you to RTFM is it too much to reply "yes, I did". Honestly, you gloss over the point that lots of newbies haven't read the most basic docs. I don't condone unpolitness, but I have never experienced it and am quite able to ignore the idiots. That is not a Linux problem, it is a social problem, and that is seen in pretty much any popular forum (look at slashdot for example).
Finally your credentials don't give more weight to your argument. I could display mine and they would crush yours, but that is not the point. Let the arguments speak for themselves. As for your wife tell her that my 70 year old mother has been using Ubuntu as her desktop for a couple of years now. OK, she is not working any longer and her needs are very basic, but she is open minded and willing to learn (and lets not forget that she saved a goo load o money in the bargain) , examples like that should put the rest all these inane blanket assertions about Linux not being ready for the desktop.
Linux is ready for many desktops, maybe not yours (for mine it was ready 10 years ago).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Guys, get a job in a big company, janitor will do, that will show you how stupid some of your comments are.
,ahem, penetration will be.
In my company we have in excess of 500 Linux desktops and around 1300 Linux machines in total (no, we are not an ISP).
We can't tell you about it in full for many different reasons, but claiming that Linux is not popular in the enterprise is pure balooney.
As big as that figure is, most of our desktops are Windows (I would say 90% of them) and what keeps us attached to Windows is not better quality or ease of use. It is inertia (and some of us suspect friendship between MS executives and ours, but that is idle speculation). When we think about migrating 9000+ users to something else nobody wants to even think about it. The lock in is very strong.
But if you think the suits are not paying attention, you are sorely mistaken. Sooner or later they will ask how it comes those 500 Linux desktops have been quietly running for 2 years without any major incident, costing less that their Windows equivalents.
Amongst the technical elite in the firm there is little question that a Linux desktop would work fine, and most techies have either OSX or Linux on their laptops and are constantly demanding the same facilities on their corporate desktops.
If you think Linux at the desktop is not happening you are completely deluded. The question is not if, it is when and how big the
http://www.turboprint.de/english.html
I would be shocked if your printer is not supported.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Which takes us to the ultimate conclusion: the monopoly has not been quashed and the company holding it keeps abusing it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A couple of month ago, a UK manager from Microsoft did a presentation on MS and blogging. VERY interesting. "No, we do not mind our staff to blog. And it is a great way to listen to what our customers really want. A number of design decisions were made the way they were because of that feedback and this will not change."
Microsoft is starting to listen to users. The Linux community, whatever it is, appears to only listen to elitists.
MS finally found a way to fight Linux...
Thomas takes a Linux discs, not Ubuntu ;-)
why should I care? I use it. I like it. It's there for free - go get it/master it/install it. It IS way more convenient to use than windows _for_me_. Why would I insist on _you_ using it? Why do I care?
;-)
Linux distributor sales, you say? I don't have any shares.
The longer Linux keeps its low profile the longer it does not have compromised 'official repositories'
My case is a big, closed one. Coolermaster Stacker STC-01, black. No fuckin'neons, it's a machine I built to use, not show off. Using watercooling, of course - I would never trust a dual-four-cores to those toy copper fans.
And I didn't get to negotiate the license agreement. It's not an agreement. I bought Loepard the day it went on sale, upgraded the Macs and installed in on the GUID disk of my Hackintosh.
It's my job to build computers. And when I see a $3200 computer that's already obsolete (as in nV 7300 GT, DDR2@667MHz, in 2008), I laugh all the harder when it's a Mac. Like when I see an idiot order the most expensive wine without even looking at the year, because I'm a wine geek too.
Can YOU tell the difference between my state-of-the-art computer running OSX, and the overpriced obsolete Mac? Not without looking at the case. Not even by listing the components.
Thus, you fail it.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
most tech heads miss something that is the real problem... its just not as easy to use as windows... average joe cant install software... im a composer/producer not a computer geek although using computers alot i have more knowledge than most people and i just dont think its as easy, what normal person can install software from a command prompt? and a package manager is not an install wizard... is it really that hard to make linux user friendly? it has no chance of taking on windows without wizards for every little thing. in terms of priorities, user friendly is not high enough on linux's list and it will never ever take on windows or osx until its as easy to use...ubuntu installation was easy for me and 95% percent of drivers were found but thats not enough... pre-installation wont mean anything when average joe cant do bugger all with his new computer... he will take it back and swap it for a windows machine...
OMGZ! LINUX HAZ PONIES!!!
Linux' window of mainstream opportunity opened in probably late 1998, and closed in around 2006.
The analogy here that I could make is a piece of fruit growing on a tree. It steadily ripens, fattens, and grows too heavy to remain attached to the branch supporting it.
Eventually there are only two directions to go in; for someone to come along, pick the fruit, and take it off to where it can be properly prepared and used, or to fall to the ground and rot.
Guess which outcome happened here? Those elements of mainstream society that were interested waited, and waited, and waited for Linux's conventional user/developer base to get their shit together, grow up, stop with the constant infighting, show some sign of being able to play with the grownups, and more importantly, develop a genuinely viable, saleable product.
It never happened, and the world only has so much of an attention span. The lion's share of the blame for that can also be very safely laid at the feet of the FSF and their spiritual kin, IMHO.
The closest we've got is Ubuntu, a perpetually "not-quite-there-yet," system whose approach to making Linux easy is to use has largely been to attempt to turn it into a single-use (or close to) appliance. Even worse where normal people are concerned, the organisation that sponsors it is non-commercial.
I haven't been to this site in several months, and apparently not much has changed. People are still caught in cognitive dissonance where Linux is concerned.
They want it to become popular, but only among people who think in exactly the same way they do. They want it to become popular, but there will be blood and Hell's fury to pay if it so much as remotely looks as though that is going to involve making money.
The simple fact is, I've stopped caring about Linux, and so have most other people. You've had your chance, guys.
You blew it.
Cant we just agree that windows users are simple everyday-dumbasses that tends to see the world as "i own more l337 w4r35 than all my friends, therefor im going to heaven to burn ozzy osbourne cds with god" simply becuse the dont have a clue as of what to do with their pointless lives..?
There is nothing insightful here. "Hard to install", "hard to use", "hard to maintain"....wow...criticisms of Linux that were starting to get old and tired and irrelevant five years ago and there are STILL hundreds of tired old posts on these topics. JUST STOP ALREADY! The points were made, they have been addressed, they are irrelevant. NEXT!
/. one time about being a victim of the "cheap Chinese bursting capacitor" motherboard issue on my Win2k box...I got a replacement on recall, but
Let me ask you something, how is the average joe going to find out what in the heck Synaptic is if they don't know enough about computer to know the difference between downloading and installing?
Why would the "average user" need to know what synaptic is? All they need to know is how to click "Add or remove programs" off a pull-down menu in contemporary Linux-based OSes (Ubuntu in particular really has me impressed actually). It actually seems easier than the windows equivalent in my opinion. In Windows, I've encountered such baffling things as "installing windows installer"...you have to install an installer before installing your program? WTF? Why? In Ubuntu the installer is there and it just works. There is no "dependency hell" either; the Canonical folks have packaged everything up for you and if the program you want needs another package it gives a nice little reminder that what you selected uses such-and-such other program so it'll install both...and it tells you before you click OK.
For that matter, why would an average user even need to know the difference between download and install with the big Linux OSes anymore either? In Ubuntu it all happens at once anyways.
You identify 2 issues with Linux...two tired, old obsolete issues:
And, while is seems like heresy, Windows has far less installation issues, if only because the hardware is made for it)
Eh, try telling that to someone who actually has to install Windows. Believe me, Windows has installation issues. Average users just don't have to install as much because, MSFT being the monopolist it is, its products are pre-installed...but let me tell you the average PC user most definitely cannot cope with a great deal of issues Windows has...especially during an upgrade. Upgrading NT-kernel based Windows (2000 to XP, XP to Vista) has more issues than upgrading Ubuntu. For one thing, doing an OS upgrade equivalent to the aforementioned upgrade can be done through Ubuntu's equivalent to "windows update"...not the case with Windows. For another, "DRIVER dependency hell" has been a problem for Windows in the past (when my sister upgraded from 2000, the upgrade process left the 2000 drivers in place, and the printer driver crashed continuously until the problem was manually resolved).
It gets worse too--MSFT has a nasty habit of too-quickly obsoleting hardware. Computer peripherals have a notoriously short production lifespan, and discontinued products remain in common use for a long time. This is a big reason why Vista adoption outside of new PC purchases has been pretty dismally slow and why so many people wish to downgrade. Perfectly good printers, scanners, webcams, wireless NICs that are not that old but not made anymore were ignored by MSFT and many XP drivers break in Vista...so in the case of Vista the "hardware was designed for it" is false. Today, Linux has FAR better legacy hardware support than does Windows.
Then there is this little gem:
fanboys who don't understand how someone can't figure out how to use a command line tool with the proper switch options in order to enable their 'insert absolutely necessary component of a computer here' so they can use Linux
Often when I point out a shortcoming of Windows I get a MSFT fanboy chiming in with a "well you're just ignorant...just open a command prompt/regedit/mmc and....", or defending Windows' inability to load into at least safe mode when you have to replace a motherboard. I related my experience on
"I doubt that learning how to ask the correct question is anything but sheer bullshit from a "customer" point of view."
How much did he pay for Wine?
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
So what? - His question was polite - Google did not really deliver - He asked in something called a "suport" forum. Most answers were masturbatory. Tell me why anyone would spend time reading threads in a support forum (a support forum is where people come when they lack knowledge and seek enlightenment) but then just use them to unload heaps of insults on people. Tell me why ANYone should be interested in learning about Linux if little, insecure kids use this to run (micro-) dick size wars. "I am better than you and you are too stupid to even understand why" is neither polite nor professional. Anyone writing anything to that account immediately loses all credibility with grownups - but there might be a niche for this kind of cyber-trailer trash. But I think we agree that Windows does a number of things much better than Linux ever will. (And vice versa - but that is not the point here.)
I had to meta-mod another post in this group, and I just wanted to thank you for one of the most thorough and well thought out responses to the standard criticisms. I have no idea why you are not +5, and I have no mod points right now, but I did want to say thank you. I'm saving this one for future reference...
Delightful! I only use windows (XP-Pro) because I need some specific medical/health care programs that do not run under Linux and even Wine won't run, drat it!!!
I am not a nOOb. I am not an advanced geek, though I do aspire to geekdom. I am a mid-level tech oriented doctor who is so fed up with Winblow$ I could scream. I have been using SuSE Linux for ~6 years now and it was the principal server I set up in our office until it closed in 06. Since Novell sold out to Winblow$ I have been looking at other distros, particularly Kubuntu. I really like the KDE desktop. Yes, I will continue with the dual boot systems until I can find Linux equivalents to my major health related programs. If I were a programmer this would be fairly straightforward, The programs would be reverse engineered and ported. Alas, I'm not.
I CHOOSE to remain with Linux, despite some of the technical issues because, unlike Winblow$, it is transparent and I can truly secure it to any extent I like. I have just completed a book using Open Office and while there are some quirks I had no major complaints other than the extreme difficulty in contacting OO folks when I needed information. Forums are too time consuming in real life, mostly. I do look forward to the day when Linux is the standard. I hope that I live that long.
In Service & In Health,
Captain Cautious
If you want the truth it is quite simple, there are many programs and products that are married to Microsoft and will never go with linux, also one thing I consider absurd but it is true is that there are so many programs and modules available for Linux that most average guys feel overwhelmed with the choices and possibilities, they go to windows where only one choice is offered they feel happy they dont have to make each decision for each software they want to use.