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The REAL Reason We Use Linux
Vlad Dolezal writes "We tell people we use Linux because it's secure. Or because it's free, because it's customizable, because it has excellent community support... But all of that is just marketing BS. We tell that to non-Linux users because they wouldn't understand the REAL reason." The answer to his question probably won't surprise you.
If the editors didn't strip away the story link from the article when they posted it, yes?
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Well, to be THAT powerful you have to use other commands, because it's probably because the process is in an interruptible state, relevant post here:
http://www.wplug.org/pipermail/wplug/2004-June/022380.html
Baboons are cute.
I tried using Linux multiple times from when I downloaded my first copy of Red Hat in 1999 or so, through some attempts with Mandrake and SuSe. None of them "just worked" - driver support was missing, programs didn't work as expected (or work at all), etc, etc.
I've used Linux since I got started on Slackware in the mid 90s. Apart from drivers, after about 1998 or so, I haven't had any broken-out-of-the-box experiences, and that includes Redhat and Redhat-derivatives in the same time period you are talking about.
What kind of problems are you talking about? What is "etc, etc"? You make it sound like there were masses upon masses of problems, but in my experience, so long as you aren't expecting it to be a 100% duplicate of Windows and use supported hardware, there isn't anything serious to complain about at all.
I use Linux because proprietary apps suck to high heaven, and if you want to run OSS (desktop) apps, Linux is by far the best system.
There's a horribly perverse system of incentives pervading the economics of proprietary apps. A user buying a proprietary GUI app typically has no way of knowing whether it's slow and/or buggy until he's already bought it. Performance is hard to judge until you have it loaded on your own system, and bugginess is hard to judge because the vendor does their best to keep bugs secret, and generally succeeds very well. Because buyers can't make decisions based on performance and quality, they tend to buy based on features. So vendors have a huge economic incentive to bloat their feature list, and push slow, buggy products out the door.
Two experiences that helped to sour me completely on proprietary software:
I teach physics at a community college. Recently I started working on a project to clean up the horribly messed up software situation in our student computer labs. Perfect example of what a mistake it can be to hitch your wagon to proprietary software. We have all these proprietary Windows apps. Every app has a different licensing scheme, and some of them have no explicitly stated licensing scheme at all (e.g., CD-ROMs that came with textbooks). Nobody can find half the original disks and licenses. Some software was bought to run on DOS or Windows 95, and isn't compatible with Windows XP. Some software is abandonware. In one case, faculty are downloading a particular piece of DOS abandonware/shareware from an untrusted third-party site every time they need to teach a particular activity -- can't ask IT to permanently install it, because the vendor is gone, so random people are just posting the .EXE on their web sites, without so much as a checksum. The whole thing is a nightmare.
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Uh, what? My Windows system (it's my company's laptop, OK?) has emacs, and (thanks to cygwin) grep, sed, awk, and shell commands for file management. No hacking or ill-behaved emulator, and no issues.
Actually, Linux is also a superior programming environment for languages like C. A friend of mine is pulling his hair out because he's writing an app on Windows and lots of standard functions are implemented differently than everywhere else (eg. errno being replaced by WSAGetLastError) and MinGW apparently suffers from ages-old bugs like vsnprintf returning -1 if the supplied buffer is too small - which was fixed after glibc-2.0.
Under Linux you can be reasonably sure that everything works as intended by the C/C++/POSIX standard. That's a huge asset.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Walruses. Walruses argue very successfully with penguins.
Note: The author meant the reason why Linux users use Linux, not reasons why your boss should pay to deploy Linux in your company. If you're looking for the latter, find an IT rag that PHBs would read.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
You have to accept that for various reasons, a number of companies aren't willing to do OSS and that includes drivers. You also have to accept that Linux is by far the minority OS out there. Well, given that, you need to make it easy for a company to release a driver for Linux, in binary form, that will then continue to work for a long time. The problem is that the ABI isn't stable, it gets changed all the time so people who want to do binary drivers of various types have to change them all the time. The best example is graphics drivers. Every time there's a minor kernel update or a minor X update, that necessitates a new video driver. Fortunately, ATi and nVidia seem to be willing to do that, but you can see how companies might get a little sick of it. A graphics driver released for XP when it first came out still works just fine today, and will still work fine after the upcoming SP3.
So I can see why companies may not be so willing to support Linux. It isn't going to be high priority anyhow since there are simply way less Linux users than Windows users. However if it is going to end up occupying a whole bunch more resources, because you have to release new versions all the time, well then you just say "screw it" and don't have support.
I love linux because its so transparent. Im an avid Windows user and work mostly with Windows machines but i cant stop admiring the complete transparacy of Linux. While an error in Windows usually demands a reinstall and the logs tell me absolutely nothing in Linux i can actually find the culprit and mend the error in a very short time.
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>> Yes, and I've also had Linux do the same thing. It didn't give an error, but no matter how many times I "kill -9"ed it the process never paid attention to the command and carried on churning away. I guess that's the process rather than the OS, but it's still not always "all-powerful root".
The reason is typically because the process is a Zombie process that no longer 'truly' exists. To remove it from the process list you'll need to kill the parent process. (See http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum40/1032.htm last comment for more details on what Zombie / Defunct process's really mean).
With windows it never makes any sense when a process refuses to die - at least with Linux I know there's a reason (and if you understand the details - they make sense).
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
The fact that you rant on about graphics drivers and MP3 suggests one thing.... Never mind.
All the "major" distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc) ship with the X.org drivers for Nvidia and ATI. They are accelerated and work for the majority of users. AFIK both drivers will do dual head and TV out now as well. There's little need for the binary drivers unless you want uber 3D support (and really, at the moment Linux apps don't generally make great use of 3D).
The lack of MP3 is easily fixed in Ubuntu and Fedora. The wiki page for both explains the reasons for not shipping it (so they don't get sued out of existence). They also give the solution (open the GUI tool, add this thing, check that box install mp3 software and binary video drivers if you want them).
It's not a perfect solution, but what do you expect from something you can obtain for free? You're not going to pay the Ubuntu or Fedora projects so why should they pay licensing fees for the few things that you would expect to have in your distro but can't unless someone pays greedy patent holders? They're not stopping you from having them, but they are advising people to consider alternate formats in the interest of sending a message to greedy patent holders.
Windows is certainly far from perfect too. I can't install it on a machine then connect that machine to the Internet to get updates and download the requisite software because within a few minutes the POS operating system has been pwne3d by some worm/botnet/1337 h4x0rz. Oh did I mention that out of the box it's pretty much useless without thousands of dollars of other people's software? IF you are going to use all free software (FF, Thunderbird, OO.o, etc) then why not just use Linux because that's where it's all meant to run anyway.
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So basically you want the windows registry for LINUX!?!?
The Windows registry is not a database. It's an unstructured tree. There are no indices, no tables, no record structures, and no locking. You can't look up anything, other than by brute force.
Windows isn't perfect, but it's so far ahead of linux on the normal every day desktop experience it just isn't funny.
That's ridiculous. Sure you might have to spend 15 minutes setting up mp3 support or nvidia drivers the first time you install a system, but once you do it works and it works well. There are many basic desktop features that windows just doesn't support at all. Off the top of my head, virtual desktops, window shading, focus following mouse, keep on top, package management. Shit, you can't even have 2 users logged on at the same time if you're on a domain. These are basic features that I rely on every day that just don't work on windows.
Sure there are kludgy work arounds for windows: MSVDM crashes my software. VirtuaWin is incompatible with X-mouse, X-mouse doesn't work with photoshop. I use windows every day at work, and linux every home, and the linux desktop far outclasses windows in every way that matters. At least linux has an excuse, there are legal issues that prevent implementation of a few features. Windows has no excuse at all.
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Examples?
Thats off the top of my head. And give me a break about the MP3 thing, windows media player is no saint, it can't play DVD's without a codec either, and it will do the usual windows routine of offering to find a codec that it of course can not. But it will waste your time looking for it. You have to hunt and search for codecs in Windows for lots of different formats. For example I use flac, its included in my distro by default, but windows? Nope.
So lets get serious: Windows, by default, is so far behind linux with a good desktop environment, that its not even in the running.
And for the record, I am not an Ubuntu fan, and don't think it's a good example of a powerful environment, albeit an easy one to use.
You'd be surprised to know how many of the devs actually work for some very large companies. Just read the source and note the emails to get an idea of who works where. I did.
And I'm in the middle of a recompile right now, just to completely tune my kernel to my box.
C|N>K
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Fuck focus following the mouse, how about NOT ALLOWING APPS TO STEAL FOCUS!!!
I've started creating docs in Open Office, and saving them in MS Office format, solely due to the fact that in Ubuntu I can tell the OS to NEVER steal focus, no "download completed" dialog boxes cocking up my painful hunt & peck typing style...
My mum is 70 and can use Ubuntu, she would not recognize a CLI if it hit her.
Lo and behold, she can install packages and say yes to the machine when new software needs to be installed.
It revolts me to hear other people whining about the CLI...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.