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What Will Linux Be Capable Of, 3 Years Down the Road?
An anonymous reader writes "In a prediction of the open-source future, InfoWeek speculates on What Linux Will Look Like In 2012. The most outlandish scenario foresees Linux forsaking its free usage model to embrace more paid distros where you get free Linux along with (much-needed) licenses to use patent-restricted codecs. Also predicted is an advance for the desktop based on — surprise — good acceptance for KDE 4. Finally, Linux is seen as making its biggest imprint not on the PC, but on mobile devices, eventually powering 40 million smartphones and netbooks. Do you agree? And what do you see for Linux in 4 years?"
I'll go out on a limb here and guess that Linux will still look like a penguin.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
1998 Nope
2000 Nope
2002 Nope
2004 Nope
2006 Nope
2008 Nope
2011 YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
Something like this: 1010111010000010 1010111101011010 0101101010110100 1101111001010101 0001101111010101 1010110101001001
based on â" surprise â" good acceptance for KDE 4.
Definitely agree there. KDE4 is going to dramatically improve very quickly. They've made a huge development investment in the underlying libraries, and that will come to fruition this year (and already has somewhat with KDE 4.1). My impression is that it's going to get better. Couple that with a maturing X.org, and you have the makings of a beautiful desktop.
I should be graduating in 2012 with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering, so hopefully I'd be able to get a job working with Linux.
No it's not predictable. I am not (well at least not trying to be) flamebaiting and/or trolling but given this is Linux we are talking about FLOSS and innovation, so we can't possible know.
Innovation wouldn't be innovation if we allready knew what is going to happen in three years, now would it?
Here be signatures
Will it be capable of, correcting grammar?
Sony ha
I hope there is better driver suport. Getting *nix to work with graphics cards and NICs is too much of a pain for average users (and even skilled users).
~ Mooga
Seriously, whats with this?
Which might spur Microsoft to finally come out with a truly useful and revolutionary OS to replace it- but I wouldn't bet my salary on it.
Linux hasn't had any major changes in the past three years, why would you think it'll have any in the next three?
Wait ... are you saying that the Linux kernel will remain free in the future, but that people will pay for extras on top of that, including commercial software in some cases? That is just ... insane! What barking madman would even conceive of such a concept?
Incidentally, how do you go from what that article actually says:
Expect to see a three-way split among different versions of Linux. Not different distributions per se, but three basic usage models: ... For-pay ... Free to use ... Free/libre
...to "Linux forsaking its free usage model"? What are you, running for Congress?
Breakfast served all day!
Linux distros into one category.
In four years Distros made to be user-friendly like Ubuntu will probably be heavier on system requirements but nearing the ease of use of Windows (IE easier driver and plugin installs as some are still a bit touch-and-go)
Distros like Puppy will still be lightweight and have little change to fit on those old Pentium 2s you just can't bear to part with.
Distros like Gentoo will still be hardcore users only with every option available only after heavy config and compiles.
I think usability for the average user will improve on the "fluffy" side of linux, but a lot of the distros do exactly what they're made to.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
So THIS is what the Mayans have been predicting. Linux calls forth Armageddon in 2012. Wonderful.
Funny thing in three years in the future, according to TFA, Linux looks a lot like it does today.
Hold on, I have to get out my tarot cards...
Linux already has full support for the ntfs file system. All you need to do is install ntfs-3g, and specify that as the partition's file system.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Most Linux systems are already embedded systems (phones and the like). These far outstrip Linux usage in desktops and servers. The trend will only grow as more and more phones switch to Linux and desktop usage stays about the same.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Sounds like somebody needs an upgrade.
Three more claims of "This is, for certainest, posiluteley, once and for all, the year of desktop linux."
I hope it doesn't become a mess of binary drivers. Binary drivers are one of the worst things happening to Linux. They ruin the stability and the usefulness of hardware. As fas as I am concerned, they are not the pragmatic choice. I consider an idealist to be a pragmatist who thinks about the future. I have found that the "pragmatic' choice always comes back to bite me, at which time it stops being pragmatic.
Anyway, enough of that rant. On to CODECS. That depends on the patent systems in various countries. Currently FFMPEG has had a history of producing extremely find implementations of CODECS. They sometimes lag behind on the very newest ones, but their more mature ones suprass all others in terms of quality and speed. And they generally get better with time. Anyway, software patents don't exist everywhere and they are unlikely to do so within 3 years. So, it looks like codecs will remain free and FREE for a while yet.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
root@localhost:~#
It will have greater hardware support, incl. legacy support.
It will be THE OS FOR MOBILE PHONES & PDAs - PWNING MS MOBILE OS.
Linux OEMs will be common.
It will be Forked!
It will be used on a virtualised layer in the next MS OS.
It will still have Tux as logo.
Linux is here for a long time, and open source will blossom around it (vice-versa.)
Oh, and Linux will play a vital part as host to online services and hopefully, it will have its own Apache Terminal-like services.
...by the end of next year. Or the year after that, at the outmost.
Pretty much.
I think I've been waiting at least 3 already.
This time for sure, Rocky!
The Mothership, www.debian.com, will continue to pop off satellites like Ubuntu.
Yeah, as soon as they get it to just work(tm)! WaHAHAHAHAHA!
I can see linux being on a 2-4 GB flash card and the "computer" being the same size and the entire device running inside your tv, LCD picture frames, microwave oven, toaster, refrigator, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, or your air conditioner. The price for the computer and storage will be like $2-5 on the bulk side so that cost has to be able to be hidden in the products. Linux'll be running all sorts of things that you never really figured even needed a computer per se or even 2-4 GB of storage. What the heck does my dishwasher or toaster need 2 Gb of storage for? Well, we'd find out when it's "cheap enough" to through in everything. Licensing and cost is what'll get Linux in the door and keep MS out. MS just can't afford to give away MS embedded edition.
Of course Linux will run on things like cell phones and DVRs as well, but you'll shortly find it running things like McDonalds' toys as well. What could a McDonalds' Toy use Linux for? I haven't a clue, but, once the hardware is cheap enough, we'll find out.
All I'll need to do is modify my /etc/caller/bootcall.m file and add "mom" to the 'obpctfnum' section, then make sure the "mom" file exists in the /etc/caller/list directory and that I have the proper sytax for her number, then reboot the phone. Oh no, the file "mom" wasn't chmod'd to 666 so now my phone is won't work!
Of course, some linux guy will walk up behind and ask why I didn't just run "perl *4*6 (oo( !## -c -q/tvg bootcall ^_^ -@last _wonderbutt_" to make it magically work.
I find that Linux, and especially Ubuntu has much better support, and behaves better than Windows XP.
Mass Storage devices: just plug in, and they are ready to go very quickly. No need to install drivers if you plug it into a different port.
GPS: same, it emulates a serial device so that GPSBabel can handle it easily.
My odd mouse had drivers built into the kernel by Ubuntu, there was no "insert CD to use this mouse" stage.
And that is on an AMD64 Ubuntu computer. How is the driver support in Vista 64-bit?
Ubuntu on my HP/Intel laptop found everything just fine, and the Wifi even worked in the LiveCD installer.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Linux will be capable of removing superfluous commas from article titles in three years.
in 3 years, Linux will be capable of grabbing another .5% market share of desktop operating systems. Woo hoo!
KDE is a desktop environment. It's in the name, for crying out loud!
This probably won't be an issue by 2012, but it will be interesting to see how linux fares when Linux and/or people like Andrew Morton are eventually forced to remove themselves from the day-to-day maintenance of the kernel. We saw what happened to ReiserFS when it lost its namesake. In that situation, it was easy to chuck ReiserFS in the trash because there were several other mature alternatives. If/when Linus dies/retires, does Linux adoption falter?
We're going the wrong way.
If Tuomo Valkonen is accurate in his predictions, it will take less than three years for Linux to suck more than Microsoft Windows.
finally after 20 odd years of development in four years time it will definitively be the year of Linux on the desktop.
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
Another 1000 days, more or less.
Have gnu, will travel.
...I think there needs to be a *LOT* of education of the Windows & Apple crowd to make them understand that Linux refers just to the core kernel whilst all the other applications around it are Open Source.
So hopefully, by 2012, they will begin to understand that by viewing Linux purely as an attack on their own OSes of choice, they actually do themselves a great injustice by completely choosing to ignore the basic fact that, by design, just about any piece of Open Source software does run or can be made to run on their OSes of choice.
And rather than parting with any of their hard earned money to pay for what is frequently overpriced & buggy commercial software, by holding on to their money & just giving a small amount of their time to trying out some of these applications without having to worry about changing their OS, they can play a positive role in ensuring that everyone gets a choice of using commercial or free software, whatever fits their needs.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
If more hardware companies open their drivers(I want my usb broadcom wireless notebook working..), and perhaps *cough* Adobe ports some software to linux *cough* (wishfull thinking) things might look up, if not.. well I doubt it will have more than apple has right now.
And I didn't even got to Android and OpenMoko.. hell, you can't predict the future with so many constants..
Linux forsaking its free usage model to embrace more paid distros
The two are not mutually exclusive.
where you get free Linux along with (much-needed) licenses to use patent-restricted codecs
As if. Just because the US has a broken patent system. Or was that the whole world? Ih wait, the US is the whole world.
Also predicted is an advance for the desktop based on â" surprise â" good acceptance for KDE 4.
Whether you like it or not, GNOME will be the big one, because nobody controls it. With Nokia owning Trolltech, no other company (whose primary business is not Linux itself) will touch KDE. I know that's not justified, but don't expect large corporations to care.
Finally, Linux is seen as making its biggest imprint not on the PC, but on mobile devices, eventually powering 40 million smartphones and netbooks.
That's clearly the future. The question is - besides having Linux as the kernel, will the phone of the future be any different? Will free userspace triumph on phones, or are we going to see locked-down Linux? That's the interesting and harder question.
And what do you see for Linux in 4 years?
Let's see... a kernel that supports the latest hardware and runs the latest software?
The article is nonsense, but the discussion should be good.
It seems that if Linux were available as a free alternative in every PC shipped, it could provide a longer life to products that could be shared ( like hand me down clothes ) to younger siblings or new users to make the best use of the effort of creating machines and the least toxic landfill. I would think that it would be in everybody's interest to contribute to open source, like any system that exists to fill a need which is not commercial ( like Red Cross ) but serves a need of humanity.
Microsoft will be going out of the PC OS market and they will develop OSs for phones and other gimmicks other than PCs.
PCs will play an ever more important role in personal lives as well as business and Linux or perhaps some totally new and unexpected OS will emerge for PC operation.
Language Tool is an OpenOffice extension which is already able to do (on demand) grammar corrections.
Sadly, for now, it's only a Java module which only works for OpenOffice.
With luck, maybe it will evolve into something with a more standard interface like the various *-spell libraries used all-over Linux application.
Or maybe it'll end up in the core components of some of the environment (Kpart, Gnome plugins, etc.)
So that such service can easily be made available to any software which requires corrections, and can easily be implemented in "on the fly" mode too.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I think Linux has gotten to a level of equilibrium where it's probably not going to improve vastly in any ways that will be obvious to users. There are some things that are just design decisions, and aren't going to change. E.g., for audio applications, it can sometimes be a problem that linux doesn't have a lot of real-time support; there are real-time patches, but they don't look like they'll ever make it into the mainstream kernel, and in any case linux was never intended as a hard real-time system like qnx. There are some things that aren't going to change because of economics. Currently, we have decent hardware support for many devices, but it's still often a hassle, the quality is often lousy, and the drivers are often binary blobs; even if linux increases its share of the desktop significantly in the next four years, it will still be a tiny niche compared to Windows, so we'll still probably have a lot of the same hassles. Similar situation for availability of more preinstalled systems through more retail channels -- there just aren't enough people interested, for example, to allow linux boxes to be sold at places like Circuit City, and I don't think that will change in 4 years.
Ease of installation is already pretty good, and I think the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. The vast majority of users will never be able to handle installing an OS on their own, and that's not going to change. I'm still experiencing problems like x.org not being able to handle odd-sized flatscreen monitors, and I kind of doubt that's going to improve vastly, because it's like whack-a-mole with the low-end hardware manufacturers in Asia who basically want to sell as many widgets as possible to Windows users in its 1-year product lifetime.
As far as codecs ... well, you can already pay for codecs, so if you can pay for codecs in 2012, how does that qualify as a change? For mp3, decoding is already royalty-free, and as far as encoding it kind of depends on which patents you really think are valid and which are just trolls, but I've seen statements that encoding will be patent-free by 2010.
Apps? Firefox is already a browser, and in 2012 it will still be a browser. I think OOo has already long since reached a state of equilibrium in which the codebase is such a mess, and the developer community so closed, that there is basically no more improvement going on. E.g., users (myself included) have been begging for years now for better curve fitting, and better integration of curve fitting into the GUI; the result is that over all those years there has been marginal improvement in this area, but it's still way behind what my students are used to in Excel.
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Really, I suppose it will be the same as it is now, just slightly more mainstream.
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
Base window manager is irrelevant. Users don't care whether it's KDE or Gnome. Behold the Cube! Behold the wobbly windows. Behold the 3D tiling! Behold I say!
Show potential Linux users a demo of that floating cube, and you will ship millions of Linux boxes. I have observed this effect, first hand. If you've got a business selling Linux boxes and you don't have such a demo set up in shop, you are wasting your time. You think OSX got where it is because of its Kernel features?
May the Maths Be with you!
where you get free Linux along with (much-needed) licenses to use patent-restricted codecs
As software licenses are in most places (outside of the USofA) at best good for trolling I see a problem.
Maybe Linux distro's would in this scenario get a DVD-like Region Code.
Conclusion: unlikely.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I'm really starting to dislike the lumping of all software packages into these convenient things called "distros". Knowing how a distro will change doesn't tell us anything about the desktop or server software landscape.
We have many open source apps finally getting to the point where mass adoption isn't far away (like Scribus, big changes recently). We have KDE apps about to be usable in Windows. We have traditional Gecko browsers like Epiphany moving to Webkit/KHTML. Google Summer of Code projects also bring important new features to many applications. So I think many new workflows will open up for the Linux desktop and Linux server, regardless of how distros change or the kernel changes.
D-Trace.... or the Solaris-Debian distro most certainly will!
By 2012, Linux will pass the critical "100 different unpronounceable text editors" criterion, where adoption will begin to accelerate at a geometric pace as the common person forgets about all the useful Windows-based software and hardware at the store and entertains themselves solely by writing new window managers.
~
driver, and plug-in installation are already easier. You may be confusing driver availability in the kernel -- which is different. At the very least I know that installing drivers in various versions of Windows (I am not familiar with Vista) can be very frustrating.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Cleartype grade font rendering, better hardware driver support (it's close now), and colour space aware apps/gui's. Font rendering is the main barrier to making it my full-time OS now.
You mean when when kde 4.1.0.2 is out?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
You should be asking where do we see it in 2050. I see penguins. Lots of them. And they are hot. But not in a good way.
2012 will finally be the year of the Linux desktop.
Controlling my fembot, of course.
Linux in 2012 will look a lot like Linux in 2002.
I've been watching this over the past few years, as I act as tech support for friends and family-- as well as professionally at times-- and use OS X, Ubuntu, XP, and FreeBSD.
Linux on the desktop is a fantastic goal, but Windows is entrenched and that's not going to REALLY change in under a generation. People who learn to use computers running Windows-- especially older users and the less technical who might lean more towards memorization than understanding-- will stick with Windows because that's what they know, and there's very little Windows can do to fight that. People put up extraordinary resistance to change on their desktop "mouse, keyboard, monitor, chair" setups, and I haven't found a way around this.
Where I think Linux (and I say "Linux" meaning the kernel, not necessarily a distro) can really shine, and is shining, is embedded devices and new user interaction paradigms. Here's where people are really used to change. Look at your average American cell-phone owner. They upgrade faithfully every two years, and while Verizon has done some to standardize its phones' UIs, they still re-learn menus, key sequences, address book formats, EVERYTHING every time they get a new phone. The same with PDAs, smartphones, etc. When people aren't under the impression that they will stick with a UI for the rest of their life, when they KNOW they have to change and they're used to it, they can accept whatever that change is. Linux, being free, easily slimmed down, and extensible, can be that change. It already is. Look at the new generations of smartphones coming out-- more and more, phones are more computer than appliance. As these devices demand more and more power, the space will open up for Linux to move in.
Ubuntu? It's usable, it's great, but even after using it for a year-- even after customizing it much more than I could ever have customized my Mac-- I missed OS X. The same with my grandmother and XP, the same with my friends and pick-your-OS. But I transitioned from a Treo 650 to a 700wx to an iPhone in a month apiece, and didn't feel lost on any of them. My friends can do the same easily. That's where the weak point is in MS entrenchment, or any vendor's entrenchment, which means that Linux can really compete on level ground.
... still make Microsoftians foam at the mouth.
www.zombieapocalypse.tv
And that is on an AMD64 Ubuntu computer. How is the driver support in Vista 64-bit?
It's pretty good... now. A year ago, not so much.
Stability.
I'll still be running Ubuntu 8.04.x LTS in production, so the future is here now.
With slightly better virtualization support.
LTS - Long Term Support ... will still be free.
Ok so, right now its 2008. Since when does 8+3=12?
In the past, we used text shell to run stuff. then there was those fancy menus to launch stuff, because it was much simpler than remembering the commands. Then they invented launchers (launchy, quicksilver) because it's much more efficient to type the command.
Conclusion: in three years, linux will be like it was three years ago.
People who use "desktop" computing, your days are numbered... I just have no idea what that number may be. ;)
With this interest in cloud computing growing, I predict that specific-purpose devices will be used and linked in through various networking technologies (mobile phones, wi-fi, bluetooth, ethernet, something that hasn't been thought of yet, quantum link networking, whatever) to personal servers. These personal servers will be without a direct user interface although us hackers will still have terminals to connect to them to do our hacking and developing, but our personal devices will all link to our personal servers using whatever means is available to do so that is appropriate and capable for the application we're using. The fact that our personal servers will run Linux will be irrelevant to most people... it'll just work or not work.
All of our personal devices will be from various manufacturers using a similar pool of networking technologies that, hopefully Microsoft will not have patented or controlled in some way, and serve our purposes accordingly. For most people, they will simply have their TVs, phones, mobile phones and gaming consoles linked through our personal servers and the public network infrastructure. The rest of us will continue using laptops and desktops because we're busy developing, hacking, analyzing and all that sort of thing.
Business apps will continue to follow similar models of client/server because business cares where their data is stored and what network channels are allowed to access it. I don't care how "non-evil" Google is, they aren't going to store my company's data. They just AREN'T.
But it is because Linux works SO well in dedicated devices (especially hand-held) this is where Linux will grow the most. I find it difficult to predict whether or not it will be proprietary and/or restricted protocols that will interconnect our devices to our personal servers, but I can only hope the protocol will be open for all to use without being worried about getting sued and crap like that.
I predict an environment where it will be the device that is important to users, and not the OS that runs on them. This will make the OS a bit less relevant to all but the gadget-hackers. Microsoft will be a player in this scheme, and they will likely their their interoperability monkey-wrench into everything they can... business as usual for Microsoft... but as long as they don't buy laws that restrict people from making stuff compatible with Microsoft's crap, then, like Samba, we'll all be fine in the end. (But then again, there's the lords of copyright to interfere with this notion... technologies "forbidden" to work with like DVDCSS on our personal networks... who knows.)
Or is it already capable of that?
.
The OEM system install has been the gold standard in the home and SOHO market for close on to thirty years.
It has been demonstrated time and time again that the system that "just works" is what sells - and that there is no room at the bottom.
gOS at WalMart.com is being unloaded at fire sale prices - and the chain has effectively black-flagged the OEM Linux box as a do-little web appliance.
MS Vista at Walmart.com is priced from $350 to $1700.
The budget netbook to the 64 bit MS Vista Quad Core HP Elite with 4 GB RAM, NVIDIA DX10 graphics. Blu-Ray play, HDTV tuner and a tetrabyte of storage.
The very notion may throw the geek into cardiac arrest - but the "upgrade" to XP or Linux is utter fantasy when you look at systems with specs like these - and what is high-end for MS Vista today will be mid-line tomorrow.
Or maybe it will go the other way around :
- given the fact that Linux has already gained (and will probably keep gaining, as suggested in TFA) significant shares in the embed/portable/gizmo/appliance market, and given the fact that these same platforms where Linux excels are far from sharing the same specifications (probably RISC cpus like ARM, MIPS and SuperH will still be kings, no matter how hard Intel tries to push their own x86-ISA based shallow pipe simple scalar chips into the embed market) we can presume that the embed market won't reach anytime soon the situation where "one binary fits all".
It won't be like the current situation on desktops where a single x86 binary works for most and only pisses a couple of users who either use newer processor modes (x86-64 distros with pure 32bits plugins) or more exotic processors (Power PC, for example).
The I expect two tendency to appear :
- GPL version 2 (but not 3) projects which implement good opensource codecs, for which the Linux users will have to pay a separate license just to please the corresponding patent troll because their compression methods are used.
- Binary drivers written not using actually CPU assembly but targeting an open and set virtual instruction set and which will be execute sand boxed from within an interpreter. Think ATOM BIOS like on current ATI Radeon cards. Or the Fcode executed by OpenFirmware on Suns and PowerPC Macs. Hardware manufacturer could obfuscate all the secrets they want in their buggy drivers, the drivers themselves will by executed by a sand-boxing interpreter which limit them to their given scope of competence and thus reduces the impact of a buggy code.
Both situations will probably happen, and will help mitigate the problems due to BLOBs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
KDE 4 Is all eyecandy and no functionality...anyway, it's slow as hell. Have any of you tried Archlinux's KDEMod 3? It blows both KDE3 vanilla and KDE4 out of the water. Furthermore, it lives well with qt4 installed, so you can run the QT4 apps anyway... I highly doubt that we should be predicting what Linux will look like, and instead focus on what it will take to make it better, both functionally and asthetically.
And the US Supreme Court will rule that software is not patentable, software is copyrightable but EULA's are 100% unenforcable. And DRM will be outlawed.
And Microsoft, the RIAA, and most of the telecom industry will be broken up for various illegal activities, and forced to reform as smaller non-profit organizations with strict oversight.
Maybe I'll even have a date by then.
if you don't like learning stuff like compiling kernel, or dont have the time, using gentoo is a big mistake
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
What are you forgetting that you have to start over and ruin days of work? I ran Gentoo for several years and I'm honestly having trouble figuring out what it could be.
True, you can spend a lot of time in a loop trying to figure out what kernel modules you need and which, for some unfathomable reason, only work when they're either compiled in or as modules, but that's not exactly "starting over" -- kernel compiles are actually one of the more painless parts of dealing with Gentoo, at least comparatively speaking. Certainly one of the scarier ones though.
What Will Linux Be Capable Of, 3 Years Down the Road?
"In a prediction of the open-source future, InfoWeek speculates on What Linux Will Look Like In 2012."
Mathematics ?
I still remember back when the only way you could upgrade the kernel was by downloading the source, compiling it and installing it. Conventional wisdom back then was that if you weren't having trouble that an upgrade would fix and you didn't need some new feature, you might as well stick with the old one. Now, I use Fedora and when a new kernel comes out, I get it precompiled and ready to go, and I'd never consider custom compiling a kernel. BTDTGTTS and don't want to do it again, which is one of the reasons I'd never use Gentoo. YMMV and obviously does.
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I have no interest in that.
My software, codecs, etc. will be free or I will just not do whatever it is that requires that.
I'll buy a $300 throw-down windows box (easy at Fry's) before I'll do that. With multi-terabyte drives, I can wait 15 years to get a codec that makes the video 3% tighter.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If in three years it doesn't match and surpass the functionality Windows 98 had, it will fade into background without ever actually being in the spotlight. Of course, I'm talking about desktop experience, not the server side.
Yes, people tend to be happy with Linux on their EEE PC-s, but not without regarding it as a toy OS instead of the real deal.
-- Sig down
100,000 packages in Debian.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
the headline says 3 years. the summary and TFA both say 4 years. make up your mind!!! 2012 FTW!
How is the driver support in Vista 64-bit?
Not sure if this was rhetorical or not, so I'll answer.
I just bought a new HP desktop with Vista 64-bit (bought through work, so there was choice -- no flames, please!)
Everything so far has been plug and play, including
*my old keyboard and mouse (the new HP keyboards are terrible)
*ancient Dell CRT monitor
*2-year-old Samsung monitor
*brand new HP monitor
*all my various USB keys, zip drives, and external hard drives (7 in all, reaching back 6 years).
The only problem so far isn't Vista-specific -- this thing puts out so much heat that I can't keep it under my desk or it will shut down (and probably set me on fire).
Don't say doing your wife....Doing your....son?
Didn't Apple launch DRM in iTunes about 3 years ago and isn't Windows Vista embracing DRM at this very moment?
God I hope you're wrong - I want to *keep* my Linux music, not *borrow* it!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
What will be hot regarding linux by then?
- Usability: will be one of main objectives for developing things for it, including new widely available devices like multitouch screens.
- Mobility: cheap and powerful for today standards cellphones based on linux (Android, LiMo, whatever) probably will be the most used. Not sure if will be market for tablets/subnotebooks/etc or cellphones will take that role, in any case, probably linux will be the most used core OS for those devices.
- Embeddable: It happens now, it will happen far more then. Internet will be the main reason for this.
- Security, linux will be more attacked, specially in preinstalled computers, cellphones and devices.
i hope the linux community will continue to put out some great distros. i hope distros are almost like fashion or like tinkering w/ a car.
its a thing that constantly changes. i think people will begin to realize that paying the MS tax is dumb.
also, i think companies will look to linux distros for the OS and free versions of MS office.
also w/ the help of the likes of Android, mobile linux will be the standard.
I don't know who this Linux group is that you speak of, but we need to stop them! Who knows what they will be capable of in three years! I know this, that we really don't want to find out. Can we send the Israelis to bomb them for us before things get out of hand?
If they are not with us they must be against us.
it still won't be able to run Crysis
Linux will have 6% of the desktop market!
Whatever happens, there'll be more people using Linux-based OSes in 3/4 years. However, there's a long way to go before it can properly overtake Windows, IMO: there are several major problems that stop GNU/Linux becoming the ideal consumer desktop OS.
In short, devs need to really get their fingers out and concentrate on creating a truly kick-ass operating system that'll work out of the box on practically any machine you throw it at. This is what led Apple out of its slump in the mid-90s - if the FOSS community can do it now, when the popularity of FOSS is booming, it will truly be a force for Monkey Boy to reckon with.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
see all that fancy stuff vmware does with its VMs and hypervisors? I'm thinking much of that will be commodity in 3 years. linux will be the backbone a lot of IT companies due to it being the hypervisor to their windows installs.
Linux in 3 years will look much the same as Linux today, only we'll have longer mailing list archives to document the petty bickering and ego wars that have hobbled open-source projects since the dawn of computing.
Perhaps what irritates me as a long-time Linux user, is I keep seeing the same annoying quirks, the same old-world thought processes, the same lack of progress. It's still as big a pain to admin a Linux server today as it was five years ago, and the awkward bits have not been addressed. Any real progress comes from the individual distros, by adding their own flavor of heavy scripting on top of common apps. The distro maintainers have greatly improved over the years, but GNU/Linux is still the same stinker it's always been.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Agreed and agreed.
Linux driver installs have been getting much easier and Windows seems to slowly be getting harder. Although I do want to mention I don't consider Vista an operating system as much as a steaming pile.
We've gone from hardmac to softmac to ieee80211 to DeviceScape. The situation is still in too much flux for my liking. Progress is being made, no doubt, but who's to say the current approach will end up better than any of the other ones? The top-echelon of Linux wireless developers is like a revolving-door scenario. John Linville gets his cracks now, after Jouni and Jean had their turns. Dan Williams' NetworkManager has still not lived up to its hype.
I hope I don't see another wifi project leader in 4 years who moves the goalposts yet again.
Hardware vendors bear a large share of the blame for the slow pace of development. I'm looking at you, Broadcom. RaLink, Realtek and Intel have been much more friendly towards Linux, but every time a team needs to reverse-engineer another Broadcom chip it sucks valuable resources away from other efforts.
No, that question wasn't rhetorical, since I have never used Vista.
But, why do you think it is a big deal that your monitors are supported under Vista? I am not aware of any monitor specific drivers aside from resolution and refresh rate. Even more so if they are using an analog VGA connection. And then those old mice and keyboards are PS/2, right? Same thing there.
And then all of those USB drives should be using USB Mass Storage, so there aren't any device specific drivers there either, but if MS fixed the "you plugged a USB device into a different port, reinstalling driver" issue, that is a good thing.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Basically they will have these Live CDs as they have now, but the word "live" will be taken much more literally. You run it and boot, thinking, "oh, if I don't like it, I'll just reboot back into Vista SP5". Wrong! If you reach for the reboot key it will say, "I can't let you do that. Wouldn't you like to try my new interface?" and then it will go all Minority Report on you.
That's pretty much what Linux will be like 3 years from now.
...or is the author basically predicting that in 2012 we'll have the things we have now?
We currently have pay distros, free distros, and libre distros. KDE 4 already exists. There are already Linux netbooks, and major OEM preinstalls. In the future apparently we'll have Gmail and OpenOffice.
The author also MAGICALLY predicts storage costs will go down.
Linux will also be on servers, and support virtualization.
Will all this stuff happen before 2012?
I'd say so, considering it is all true today.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
predict that Apple macFanBoys will continue to predict the end of Linux.
/. will wind up a warehouse for old MS-DOS shareware games.
Microsoft flacks will continue to dine out on the gullibility of consumers.
I will still be living in this same stinky room.
4 years from now I foresee an article on slashdot saying 4 years from then linux will finally take over.
If you don't like doing "small yet vital steps" and compiling your own kernels, may I suggest using another distro?
Really dude, there are tens of distros with supereasy installation processes.
No sig for the moment.
Why does the title ask 3 years from now, while the article is written for 4 years? Is this in relation to seven minute abs?
I see the start now with the smaller ASUS machines. What would be grat is pre-installation on all machines. If possible dualboot or at least the ability to select from either Windows, GNOME or KDE. Yes, also the ability to choose Windows. Choice is good.
The downside might be that one distribution becomes very dominant. The upside will be that it will be out there in greater and greater numbers, which means some serious decision for Microsoft to take (They are not going away) on how to work together with Linux. Hardware developers will write drivers and people selling software will write (closed source) software for Linux, like games.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
2gb to 4gb is small only about 30-60 min of 640x480 video with sound.
How about cable and sat boxes with the os + guide data in flash. So you don't have the long guide data reload time after the power goes off for a short time.
Also a 10 - 30 min live buffer on non dvr boxes in flash will be nice and the drv boxes can have more tuners and a HD.
Given the state of Moore's law, and how powerful hardware should be around this time.
I'd say Wine should be Vista compatible around 2012, well okay maybe 2013
Didn't Apple launch DRM in iTunes about 3 years ago and isn't Windows Vista embracing DRM at this very moment?
iTunes has had DRM for five years and they started migrating away from it on songs Apple sells about a year and a half ago.
root@pentagon:~#
linux has pwnd my desktop since 1996 .. M$ crap aside ... im almost 100% besides a couple games .. its still just a matter of choice .. .. bont bash or be biased .. we can all get along (or hit a bong since most *n?X heads are considered hippies) .
choose what works for you if windows be your choice use it by all means
dont like my input just take a pill and deal
root@yourboxen:~#
Working, with sound and video, on a late-model iMac G5? That would be nice. Might save me a few grand.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'm not your buddy, pal.
That is exactly why Linux on the desktop still fails, the "All you need to do is install ntfs-3g, and specify that as the partition's file system." part. And each program has its own similar problems. Everything should just work.
Agreed and agreed. Linux driver installs have been getting much easier and Windows seems to slowly be getting harder.
How the fuck does "Download file X for Windows and double click on it" get harder?
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Well, let's face it - that "migration" is sure taking it's time then, isn't it?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Well, let's face it - that "migration" is sure taking it's time then, isn't it?
Not really. They started offering DRM-free songs from any label that wanted to offer them. The only trick is that not all of the labels are interested. Apple has done what they can, but the RIAA is pretty scared of Apple gaining too much power, so they're trying really hard to make deals with other music sellers, even to the point of offering DRM-free songs cheaper to try to reduce Apple's market share. They're a criminal cartel with a lot on influence, what do you expect?
and come with drivers to plug and play your fleshlight right into your USB 3.1 ports!!
3 years from now Linux will be brown-orange and called Quintessential Quetzalcoatl, of course!
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Linux is great at doing many many things but it hasn't really broken into the home desktop market. Yes you slashdotter's can say it is easy to setup but until more desktop manufacturers (yes dell has started but isn't marketing this) start offering it on all models it isn't going to catch on. Likely apple will keep growing at its current pace (if apple were smart they'd offer low end models between $500-$800 with a monitor which would greatly expand their userbase).
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
Why is that a troll - it is perfectly possible...!
Let me rephrase that, then: all you need to do is install ntfs-3g if it isn't already and specify it as the filesystem. Many, if not all Linux distros come with it pre-installed. That doesn't negate your basic premise, and I agree with it. However, more and more, Linux does just work, more than Windows does. When was the last time you had to install special Linux drivers for a thumb drive or a digital camera?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Oh, quit trolling. Not subtle, but apparently it escapes the others who replied to you.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
If you want my honest opinion, then I think that any form of downloads (illegal or paid for) will ultimately change the music industy for the worse and may even end up killing it completely.
DRM is evil - pure and simple. It's sold as a technology to inhibit illegal downloads where, in reality, honest music fans like I guess you and me just end up paying more through a rental model in order to subsidise the music industry's perceived losses through piracy.
Personally, I don't want "pick n mix" music. Anyone that tells me that a CD contains two good songs and the rest as filler tracks is not searching for music well enough as there are thousands of good albums out there that are worth every penny you pay for them on CD, especially if you spend some time researching & buying music as cheaply as possible. That's why I consider CDs to be the only way to buy music that gives me the freedoms to rip it how I want to whatever device I own.
Unfortunately, there's one simple fact that the proponents of the "new download revolution" fail to realise. Whilst I agree record companies are invariably evil themselves, they put a lot of money into promotion & advertising which ultimately leads a lot of people to find the music they like. But how will they do that when there are 10,000,000 groups & musicians all selling their music from their own web sites. How are you going to find the stuff you want to hear?
And in addition to that, what becomes of live music? If demand changes from albums to single tracks, how does a band get together enough material to not only justify playing live in the first place but also to keep having enough new material later on so that fans keep coming to live concerts over and over again? If bands don't tour, they don't make the majority of the money they do currently so why stay in the music business?
I really do honestly believe that the selfish "I want it now and I want it this way" attitude of many people claiming to be music fans is ultimately going to kill music.
Let's face it, the current system may be flawed but at least the "album every year" process has worked for nigh on 50 years & has meant a good selection of music artists are able to make money doing what they do.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It will *look* something like this:
demonx@neo:/boot$ ls -al vmlin*;date
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1710275 2006-09-07 22:20 vmlinuz-2.6.15.5
Thu Aug 14 18:05:46 MDT 2012
Oh? What? Not what you meant? Well I thought you said Linux, which is a kernel... I have no idea what all that other stuff like GNU, or X, or window managers and whatnot will look like. *shrug*
People keep saying ease of use of windows. I have been running ubuntu for years now, been running linux since redhat 7. Recently, since I came across a XP Pro CD for 20 bucks through my university I figured I'd dual boot again, just in case I needed it. I installed, nothing works by default. Even for my plain old generic network card I need a driver to even see it. It's not worth the trouble. Unless someone else does the hours of work to get windows to work on your hardware, Damn Small Linux is more user friendly. Ubuntu is way more user friendly. Most people I've talked to only complain when they realize XYZ website or AlphaBetaGamma proprietary file format "doesn't work with linux". That isn't a problem with the operating system. All we need is enough market share that hardware manufacturers ship usable drivers, just like nvidia does, and codecs are made available, if some of these are proprietary fine, but they can still be free as in beer.
that it'll be able to look for Sarah Connor?
Some on-line game my daughter is playing has the hero, a cute little girl's pet hamster or something, shooting love shots at penguins in one of the, what do they call those? game corners, maybe? and collecting the love-struck penguins in a line by the cute little girl.
I'd link to the game, but the wife is watching. (She hates computer games on principle.) And, if I remember right, you have to go through the candy jar (shades of Alice) and/or the album, so the link might not work anyway. Besides, my daughter would get mad at me if the site got slashdotted, and taken down or pwned.
The site has some other interesting alternative games -- cake baking class, ride the snowmobile to save the monkeys by finding them a new hotsprings, fly a broomstick through a snow storm and collect clouds like cotton candy, ... . I didn't like this one at first, because of the candy jar, but I must admit, it's better than the one my son found, where mounds of something that looks vaguely like poorly baked creampuffs engage in sumo wrestling matches in various villages. And that isn't as bad as the mario look-alike in javascript that lets you create and share your own games, and that is much better than the real mario, simply because you can create your own games, and, no, I'm not a fan of games either, just an addict to watching my kids play.
And in addition to that, what becomes of live music? If demand changes from albums to single tracks, how does a band get together enough material to not only justify playing live in the first place but also to keep having enough new material later on so that fans keep coming to live concerts over and over again? If bands don't tour, they don't make the majority of the money they do currently so why stay in the music business?
And how do you perform the intro to Pink Floyd's 'Time' live ? Go on stage with 50 clocks all wound up and ready to chime on cue ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyL2vAUVOM0
Squirrel!
Scribus is going to take an awful long time to gain any sort of traction if it continues to not work with formats that it doesn't like politically.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
For example?
What I've seen of KDE4 so far, anyone who doesn't know how to do all that on a Mac just hasn't been using the Mac.
I may change my mind, but, right now, I'm not really impressed with Fedora 9, either. Too much pseudo-innovation intended to make it easier for newbies, but missing the point. Maybe a little back-swig from sugar?
(Nothing against sugar. If they can get it to work, it's probably the best way to present Squeak as a platform for general users, although I wish they had gotten the Squeak licenses straightened out first so they could have been focusing on other things than re-inventing Squeak in Python.) But Sugar is not appropriate when super-imposed over Fedora.
More to the point, what will you (or I) be capable of?
Here's a conversation I found from a fedora discussion:
Non linear ogg editor/ screencast helper
Status: Proposed
Summary of idea: Still we are missing a good non linear editor for ogg videos. This can be a simple GUI based application to do non linear editing of ogg. Like cutting, mixing the videos. Adding still frames to the video etc. Though this is not a project to be finished within 2-3 months, but we should be able to have a basic application running to do simple edits. May be having feature of upload videos to fedoratv or integrate itself with recordmydesktop to get screencasts directly. I am looking for more ideas on this.
Contacts: KushalDas kushaldas AT fedoraproject {NOSPAM} DOT org
Notes: Recommended choice of language is Python or C
ValentTurkovic: I have 2 suggestions; First is to try and resurrect Diva Project who started as GSC project in 2006. Second is to work with Pitivi Project because it is on a good path and has ogg editing functionality and easy enough interface. To get an overview of this Diva Project rise and fall please read these two posts. UPDATE: There are two projects that look promissing: saya-videoeditor [2] and myvideoeditor [3]
So between these and Cinelerra's successor, Lumiera, I'm sure 4 years will be more than enough to have an actually usable professional Video Editor for Linux.
And I think that these 4 years will give Krita and GIMP the time they need to become full-featured and more user-friendly, respectively.
(And don't get me started on WINE, these guys are advancing fast!)
Seriously, windows 98 could copy and paste easily.. why can't linux?
Also, what is up with directories of thumbnailed images taking forerver to load? windows wins that one.
There is a difference between charging for a service and charging for the right to do anything close to what the service you are providing does.
The best way to kill the fud is to just simply get out there and start making money on a small scale selling pre-configured boxes the way the corner PC guy has been doing with MSWindows for years. When people see that we aren't waiting for the next big thing to make money, they'll be more likely to jump in the pool with us.
And if we are waiting for the next big thing, remember, it's likely to have the shadow of somebody's bad patent hanging over it.
Years down the road those with conceptual knowledge of how computers work will be using Linux as they are today ,while those who merely follow syntax with no concept of what their doing will be using windows as they have no other choice as they don't today.
When was the last time you had to install special Linux drivers for a thumb drive or a digital camera?
Never ... but then again, havent seen that in Windows since Windows 2000 either, so not sure why you would bring that up as a comparison.
I've _never_ seen that for windows xp or vista. Some older cameras dont present themselves as mass storage devices on their USB connections, but that was their developer choice, not a windows thing.
Other than that, dont confuse the camera manufacturer WANTING you to install their 200MB pile of crap software to actually needing to do anything other than plug in the USB connector (or pull the memory card out and plugging that into the memory stick drive).
Apparently I was talking out my ass. I remember being put off by lack of export or some such thing, but I can't find anything explaining what I remember.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
IBM To Linux Desktop Developers: 'Stop Copying Windows'.
Linux had it's window of free growth while being the only lean base OS to host virtualization solutions. From now on, Linux will have to earn every sale. Windows Server 2008 Core with Hyper-V may not be better than VMWare ESX on Linux, but it works. As of this year, a hypervisor is now an expected feature of a server operating system and is now a commodity. Look at the licensing for Windows 2008 and you'll see it is actually close enough to free on a big server. Some licensing models actually allow for the purchase of one OS license and the ability to run unlimited 2008 servers on guests with that one license.
Heck, I spec out servers regularly for projects at work and we actually budget more for the network drop than for Windows on a typical server. I still can't figure out how we justify a standard $900 price tag for a network drop in a data center, it's not like we need to hire a cable monkey to punch holes in the walls.
What I want to know is... why the hell does Windows have to identify and "install" a driver every damn time I plug a USB device into a different USB slot? What the hell is up with that. Whether it be my mouse or Logitech headset... if it hasn't been in that particular USB slot yet, it'll detect and install as opposed to my Mac or my Linux but where it "just works."
my elderly friend wanted a all around pda,organizer,music player, gps, web browser, and I came up with the nokia 810, that thing is simply great, i cant believe i dont have one (yet). Now she carries it everywhere and loves it, she never wanted a computer before (she has one but hardly uses it) now its like she cant be parted with it.
You know, I've seen someone else in this thread comment on that.
Are you sure that isnt something you saw waaaaay back in the windows 2000 days and just assumed it never changed?
I ask because thats something I never see either ... havent for years.
I've NEVER seen that happen with mice, keyboards, or mass storage on XP or Vista.
I have seen that happen with those craptastical fargo ID card printers on XP.
And come to think of it, I have seen that with some very low end printers on XP.
In fact, the only place I've ever seen it happen on XP or newer was with printers, and only very very crappy low end ones (or specialty ones with poorly designed drivers). The vast, vast majority of printers dont display that behavior, in my experience. Of course, the vast majority of printers I deal with, both in-house and with clients, are network printers, so my sample size of USB locally connected printers the past few years isnt very big.
My guess is that its something that most device manufacturers can choose to solve at the driver level, and some are just too lazy. ...
Just as a test, I just moved my wireless keyboard/mouse usb plug to a port I'm positive it never has been in before (on the other side of the laptop, in an inconvenient location) and within ~1 second it effortlessly just continued working.
Maybe its just something thats a polish level of feature on the drivers, and some manufacturers just dont bother.
In 3 years, Linux will have the following penetration.
Desktop 3%
Laptop 5%
Server 40%
Embeded 30%
At least that's how I would call it
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
I'm dead positive. XP service Pack 3 on my games machine and every time I moved the Logitech headset, boom. The mouse, a pretty generic Logitech, doesn't do EXACTLY the same thing, but it does take it time to recognize. For instance, if I put it in another slot while the machine is off--presuming it's a slot it's never been in before--then boot, no mouse at first. I was at a friend's place last night on his Vista machine, same deal with an external HD since I kept swapping between the front ports as we were doing stuff.
The headset and mouse, so far as I know, are using generic MS drivers, aren't they? Same with a USB mass storage device.
It's not really an "issue" per se, so much as an annoyance. I've just always wondered what was up with that.
Three years down the road, Linux will still be suffering from too many distributions and continuing to think that is an advantage.
don't you mean .4%?
MBA says that companies will open source their software when they want to slow innovation in a market.
Gotta say a good browser is essential, and KDE's konqueror browser is in a truly hopeless situation. The developers' attention is focused on KDE4, and they have no time to fix any of the literally 1000s of severe bugs in konqueror. They don't even have the time to confirm or reject the open bug reports from five years ago!! There are hundreds of really critical bugs like javascript crashes, remote code execution vulnerabilities, screwed up rendering, etc etc etc. It's a total mess. KDE has nowhere near enough developers to even make a start on konqueror's bugs. I'd say KDE's flagship browser is dead in the water.
Scroogle
What Will Linux Be Capable Of, 3 Years Down the Road?
Gee, I dunno, how about not ending a phrase with a preposition?
Personally, I don't want "pick n mix" music. Anyone that tells me that a CD contains two good songs and the rest as filler tracks is not searching for music well enough as there are thousands of good albums out there that are worth every penny you pay for them on CD, especially if you spend some time researching & buying music as cheaply as possible.
I'm not with you on this one. There are exactly two songs by Leonard Cohen that I like, but I like both of them a lot and want them in some of my playlists. So I bought them, from Apple in fact, and saved money.
That's why I consider CDs to be the only way to buy music that gives me the freedoms to rip it how I want to whatever device I own.
Generally I prefer to buy on CD as well, but I have unusual taste in music and, frankly, most of what I want is not in any of the local shops. Some of it can be had from the internet, but instant gratification, no shipping cost, and no worries about if the CD will be scratched are very attractive at times (provided there is no DRM or it is easily bypassed).
Whilst I agree record companies are invariably evil themselves, they put a lot of money into promotion & advertising which ultimately leads a lot of people to find the music they like. But how will they do that when there are 10,000,000 groups & musicians all selling their music from their own web sites. How are you going to find the stuff you want to hear?
Probably by harnessing the wisdom of the masses. There are a million blokes out there ready to review and rant about music. and a system ala Netflix that recommends music based upon other music you like would be quite handy. It's not like I really listen to anything currently promoted by the big RIAA companies anyway, so they're not exactly helping.
And in addition to that, what becomes of live music? If demand changes from albums to single tracks, how does a band get together enough material to not only justify playing live in the first place but also to keep having enough new material later on so that fans keep coming to live concerts over and over again?
I don't see that this changes at all. A band usually makes most of its cash touring and selling merchandise. People want to hear the old and new music, because listening to a song live, in concert, is a lot different than listening to a song at home. If bands need new songs to attract people to concerts it is just the same amount of new songs that they needed before.
I've actually seen an upsurge in smaller, indy bands. They play live several nights a week at several different, small venues within walking distance of me right now. The bands get by touring to these small venues and selling merchandise and CDs and getting cuts of the door take. I doubt they'll get rich, but a few eventually do get a large and lucrative fan base. The rest get by and have a good time doing it. Their expenses are low, they get lots of ladies, and fans are usually willing to put them up for the night after a concert.
Let's face it, the current system may be flawed but at least the "album every year" process has worked for nigh on 50 years & has meant a good selection of music artists are able to make money doing what they do.
Again, I'd disagree with the "good selection" part. We have tons of crappy, talentless bands that sound alike and are propped up by the system. Almost every band I've found in the last decade that is new and innovative and really makes me want to go see them has been an indy band the record companies would never have promoted because different is too big of a risk. Let the RIAA and those they promote sink and good riddance.
...along with (much-needed) licenses to use patent-restricted codecs.
The "much-needed" part is old FUD. With the possible exception of some pro applications, the free codecs punch their weight just fine nowadays.
If your device or software doesn't play them, install one of these and complain to $company_trying_to_lock_you_in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
Distros like Gentoo will still be hardcore users only with every option available only after heavy config and compiles.
Gentoo isn't hardcore. Its users just realize how awesome Portage is.
with a bunch of people insisting endlessly that essentially duplicating code (kde+gnome) is good for software and "freedom".
I'm getting sick of it, it happens all the time all over the internet:
1. Some business-type pundit asks around for something new to talk about. ... ].
2. He hears of this free [Linux | Firefox | Wikipedia | Django |
3. He shakes his head in disgust thinking nothing with the word 'free' on it can take off.
4. After actually using it, he gets surprised about how much it has done and how popular it has gotten.
5. Suddenly gets an extremely novel idea! "Let's "enhance" it; by tying it to some [ subscription service | closed source software | DRMd hardware | ]!!".
Argggg! Really bright idea there, if free got it where it is let's fix it by *destroying it's competitive advantage*!!
What really pisses me off is that none of this pundits suggest to go in the direction of free. e.g.
"In 3 years pressure from the EU and the rest of the world will make the US think again about software patents, codecs could be reimplemented free from royalties for open source projects".
Nay! They're always for less freedom.
But... the future refused to change.
The above poster may come across as a post-literate newbie - but look beyond the attitude and errors and you'll see frustration at the UI for different tasks.
We also need to cure such people from the idea of hunting about for drivers that they have learned from Microsoft - they should never have to do that. We need to make sure that as much as possible is included in the kernel instead of binary drivers of dubious quality scattered randomly around the net. The problem of keeping them away from the command line until they work out for themselves that it is useful is a bit more tricky, but should not be entirely discounted.
Just because the US has a broken patent system. Or was that the whole world? Ih wait, the US is the whole world.
Slashdot is in English. The United States has twice as many people as five other major developed countries with English as their primary language put together:
I didn't include India because even though English is the secondary "language of the Union" after Hindi, English is 40th place among Indian native speakers. I'm tempted to give half-credit to South Africa, where English is number six but dominates the media.
Libraries should live in /Library or something like that, users under /Home or /Users, and end-user applications (like OpenOffice.org) in /Applications or /Programs.
/Applications or /Programs? That's what I thought /opt was for: add-on application software packages. For instance, a tetromino game called Lockjaw could install into "/opt/Lockjaw/lj".
in the end, users don't give a damn whether or not they can 'modify' this new driver they're installing to get compiz to work.
Ubuntu's restricted driver installer explains one benefit of Free drivers other than that the end user can modify them: it's that the developers of Compiz have the ability to trace into the driver to discover, work around, and report defects that they find in drivers.
There are already Linux netbooks
But can I try a Linux netbook in person before I buy one? I haven't seem them at Best Buy or Circuit City stores in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA. I don't want to have to pay return shipping for a computer whose keyboard or hinge I find utterly unusable.
Linux already has full support for the ntfs file system. All you need to do is install ntfs-3g
Except 4D6963 claims ntfs-3g is a CPU hog. Who's right?
Oh come on, troll?! Made me chuckle... anyone with sense of humour got mod points to fix that one?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
who thinks Linux will be free/open source till then-the two key foundations on which it rests!!!!
There are several interesting new filesystems in development. HAMMER is really specific to DragonFlyBSD, but btrfs and Tux3 are both being developed for linux specifically, and all three are attempting to leapfrog zfs. All will make storage a simple question of capacity, and largely remove the concerns of configuration and data integrity. These will be strong advantages over any commercial OS.
There's some substantial activity on the biggest closed source black spots in the linux kernel, drivers for NVidia and ATI graphics cards. The open source versions lag quite a bit behind their propritary counterparts, but that gap will probably narrow.
I laughed.
I guess the major change is Gentoo users are considered as "hardcore users", like you said.
There was a time when every Linux user had to be pretty hardcore to get and keep their system running...
#1 Linspire/Xandros turns Linux into a Mac OSX type OS by making it easier to use with more eye candy and available with a commercial license for $60 under a new name like Lindros, LinDOS, XanOS, or just LinspireOS. It will have commercial codexes, flash player, PDF viewer/converters, and they will partner up with IBM to have a small business version bundled with commercial IBM software for Linux bundled with it called something like LinBusiness, LinOffice, or XanWorks, or just Busnix.
#2 Shades of the Indrema, someone creates a distro of Linux for game consoles, and develops a video game standard written in Java and Python that runs under the LinStation or whatever standard it will be called. The Linstation Distro gets ported to the XBox 360, Wii, Playstation 3, and other platforms and all can run the Java and Python based games most of which are free and open sourced and available over the Internet. It will greatly upset Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft as it will cut into their console game sales, plus LinStation would be ported to PCs and Macs so they can run it as well as the game consoles.
#3 Thanks to ReactOS contributing to WINE, in three years WINE should be able to run most software made for Windows XP and below as long as it doesn't use proprietary copy protection, but in three years WINE will find a way to make SecureROM and other popular copy protection libraries work in WINE without violating EULA. By that time Windows 7.0 will be out, but Vista broke too many popular software packages and they didn't get rewritten for Vista. Once ReactOS is able to use Windows WDM drivers, the code will be shared with Linux giving it the ability to use Windows drivers if WINE is loaded, thanks to a kernel mod written by the ReactOS team.
#4 Novell will have perfected the Moonlight and Mono projects that Windows software written in Visual Studio 2008 and under will be able to be recompiled under Mono to run in Linux or any other platform that can run Mono. After Windows 7.0 turns into another bomb with bloated features and legacy software issues some companies are looking for a Linux or Mac OSX solution using Mono and Moonlight to run the Visual Studio and Silverlight custom applications that they developed or paid to have developed for them. Microsoft will try to sue, but Novell will reference the Lotus 123 verses Twin, and the Crosstalk cases showing that as long as no original code is used in the product, it can be used to run files and/or programs written for the original product. Also since Microsoft made Dotnet languages like C# and Visual BASIC.Net part of the ECMA standards, they can't put the Genie back in the bottle and other projects use those standards like DotGNU, etc.
#5 New PLCS will be based on Linux and have USB and CAT5 Ethernet ports in them. The old PLCS still use serial ports and only work with Windows XP and below and not Linux. The new PLCs will have Linux clients as well as Windows clients. An open source version of PLC control software using RLL will be released and be available for any Linux distro and emulate PLC devices for better development.
#6 Angry Mac Developers and Mac Users will create a WINE type project to run Mac OSX applications on Linux systems. It will be a GNUStep fork, and first be based on OpenStep standards and then have the Mac OSX API calls added to it. They will make a plug-in for GCC to compile X-Code and Objective-C code under Linux and start porting Darwin libraries for Darwin support at first, and then when they can support Mach Kernel and Darwin programs, they will start adding in Mac OSX support. The end result will be a Linux system that runs Mac OSX applications faster than Mac OSX can run them.
#7 AmigaOS 5.0 will finally be released, but it will be based on Linux, using the Amiga Workbench GUI instead of X86.org, chances are they will use the Yellowdog distro as it is a favorite of Amiga One owners. It will exist in PowerPC and Intel versions, and drivers will be written for old PowerMac systems that couldn't run Mac OSX, they will
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I really love Linux and want to use it. Just last week I tried to convert my laptop to Linux for the n-th time - this time with OpenSuSE 11.0. All works nice until I want to make Netgear WLAN card to work - the OS just does not recognize it. I google for how to do it - get bombarded with strange messages that talk about NDIS wrapper, kernel modules, Atheros drivers and other stuff I just do not understand and certainly do not have the time to research. So its back to WinXP where even my kids can install almost every peripheral themselves. What I am saying: the Linux desktop will only take off once peripheral manufacturers include drivers and installation is as easy as under Windows. They key to mass market penetration of any product is ease of use. And people are willing to pay for ease of use. I gladly pay 100$ every few years to MS for a new OS and then can just work. no other software to purchase - I use OpenSource for all applications. So my prediction: Linux will dominate the server market in 4 years and will continue to be a niche product on the desktop.
I guess none of you have tried Mandriva 2008. I've recently installed it on several machines and for many different levels of users. They all find it functional and 10x cooler than vista (compiz enabled on all of them including the ati's) As far as wireless, Mandriva will handle installing the ndiswrapper or the open source driver, no muck! it's automatic everything is grouped together. It's so impressive that i'm writing an article now based on my case studies on using Mandriva 2008 (mind you i've been an SuSE fan for years!) When you need a codec the system comes up with a selection of codecs some pay some free. Any choice will work. I've been using Linux for a long time, and it's very ready for the desktop. Apple proved that.
some people are a "glass half empty" some are "glass half full" i'm a "there is something in the glass be happy" person
My porn collection will only become larger, but the quality will still remain at a very high level. And how much can a pussy evolve in shape in 4 years? That's a design that works damn well and has stood the test of time. Billions of men and quite a few hot lesbians agree.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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On the desktop, processors have not had the significant speed increases. Chip makers have moved toward multiprocessor in chip sets. Large increases in the storage capacity of USB keydrives is going to eventually send hard drives to the graveyard along with floppies and eventually CD's themselves. Unless Microsoft makes some changes in Vista and marketing, Linux and Mac will gain a stronger foothold of the market. It is unlikely that Mac will outsell or replace the existing PC hardware and their operating system will stay with the box it is shipped in. Linux, on the other hand, has been and will continue to be hampered by the same problems it always had (hardware and over diversity).
I predict that the expansion of broadband, WiFi, solid state storage, multiprocessors, and video hardware will have us hanging in limbo for the next few years. It will be like the transition that followed the end of console based interfaces to gui interfaces. Vista could be fixed or go out of existence like DOS 4.0-5.0, ME (other transitional operating systems), and be replaced with something new. Linux could get more standardized in the sense that hardware (drivers) and some software vendors could supply binaries that don't have to support a thousand different and incompatible Linux distros. Macs could get out the in-house thinking that has kept them from a broader influence in the personal computing market.
I think that the next 4 years will be a period of operating system flux until something rises to dominate. It could be something completely different, completely new, if then.
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Where linux will be in 2014, hell, actually, I'm pretty sure I know what Linux's future will be in 2020 for that matter.
In 2020:
1. Slashdot will announce that 2020 will be the year of the Linux desktop, and they will be wrong for the 24th year in a row.
2. X will still be broken, and the community will still be too disorganized to fix it.
3. Wine will still be broken, and in fact, may have actually gotten worse, if that's possible.
3. Linux applications written in 2008, or even in 2015 will no longer run, because no one writing open source even knows what the fuck ABI stands for.
4. For the same reason, very few commercial developers will write software for Linux.
5. People will still post tired arguments about why all of Linux's flaws are its strengths on slashdot's, but to an ever smaller crowd.
6. Some company that is actually organized and knows what it is doing will write a free operating system, and Linux's user base will dry up overnight. After all, it's not like you can have vendor lock in on a system where even the software written for the system doesn't work on the system.
Go Linux.
In 4 years' time, we may even be able to print from Linux!
Is that 3% marketshare just on the desktop would be larger than Linux's total installed base right now.
Try guessing again, but try shifting all of your numbers right a digit.
Linux didn't grow that much over the last 3 years, or very much at all for that matter, and there's no reason to think it's going to grow more in the next 3 years.
Seriously, reread that post. If you think he's serious about "4 years will be more than enough to have an actually usable professional Video Editor for Linux" is serious, then you must be new to software, and open source software especially.
>And I think that these 4 years will give Krita and GIMP the time they need to become full-featured and more user-friendly, respectively.
Yeah, GIMP, which was started in *1995*, just needs another 4 years to be not such a piece of shit.
Do you guys get it now? It's *funny*, *laugh*.
Maybe, eventually, it will look like all those systems they used on that futuristic film `Hackers'!
>If the majority of games can work on even one distro out of the box, the other distros will lose users.
It's called *WINDOWS*.
>It is the simple model of evolution at work
Indeed.
When the computer won't start without file X? Or have you never installed Windows XP?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The various flavors of Linux could be the new standard on desktop and laptop computers, but only if they are based on a common standard base and user interface. From my humble perspective, and as a Mac user primarily - and many of you might want to kill me for saying this - it seems Gnome is way ahead of KDE in most respects. KDE looks and feels like a very old version of Windows, though the underlying code may be better. Gnome seems to be much more modern and polished. You can tell someone actually put some thought into the user experience.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
>we are talking about FLOSS and innovation
In the same sentence?
Now there's a first.
>They are part of the kernel, not add-ons
No, driver's are not part of your kernel, because if they were, then you would have to swap out your whole fucking kernel every time someone comes up with a new piece of hardware.
Oh, *you do* have to do that? And you think it is a *feature*?
Thank you anonymous coward for you contribution to this discussion.
Linux will probably be capable of what Mac OS X is capable of now and in two more years Windows will be capable of it as well.
Aaaw, sorry - I love Linux too. So cute and huggable and, uh, powerful and all!
forgive me â" this may sound stupid question, but why is this function (ntfs-3g) not installed by default with distros?
not sure if anyone has mentioned it, but I personnally hope that Linux comunity will get together to create a Common Gamin Platform, so that game devs can start writing games without compatibility issues throughout different distros.
Seeing that there currently are projects trying to "port" directX to Linux, and that works on OGL v3 are on the way (or maybeit si finally complete?) maybe it would be a good marketing step for the comunity to get together and create a common API that would be adapted to respective distros.
Mr Shuttleworth would probably be for such initiative, seeing how he ahs pushed Ubuntu promo actions. Well done, BTW!
THere are many more brilliant dev communities, and nvidia and ati seem to be quite cooperative recently...
If this happens, and the Linux community in 4 year could say, united we stand, than this prolly would mean further spread of the platform.
the desktop
I've had a similar experience recently.
I had a RAID setup for a while, and the lack of hardware support meant that I was unable to dual-boot Linux and XP. Basically, none of the distros I found were capable of pulling back partition information from the discs. This was on NForce boards - mostly NForce 4.
Anyhoo, I recently swapped a couple of discs for a single large drive - replaced 2 x 200GB devices with a single 750GB drive (partially, as a power-saving thing as most of my documents have been moved onto a server). The last couple of weeks I've been trying to get a dual-boot install going.
First up was OpenSuse 11.0. This installed OK up to the point where the Suse installer required a reboot. "Grub error 18". Not helpful.
Anyway, I used fixboot / fixmbr to restor the boot record and at least get back into Windows and read up a bit on the web. Try as I might I couldn't get Suse to boot, no matter what I tried. In the end I decided to cut my losses and try Fedora 8.
Again this appeared to install OK, but on the final reboot left me with a GRUB> prompt. No diagnostic information at all. Great.
I've played with the Super Grub CD and been unable to boot to Fedora. The partitions are still there and I'm going to have another bash over the weekend, but I'm not optimistic.
Now I've dabbled with linux for some times - since the days of Red Hat 6. Never particularly deeply, but I'm comfortable with VI and the structure of the Unix filesystem. I've found that it's getting progressively less likely to work out of the box. That a boot loader can fail without providing any meaningful diagnostic information is a pretty poor showing.
Don't get me started on some of the other problems I've had. DVD playback under SuSe 9? Even after installing DeCSS and various codec packs, Kaffeine & MPlayer (I think - this was a while ago) refused to play ball. Sound but no video - for a bit, then something else borked and sound died. Some time later, Apache was convinced something else had started listening under port 80, although nbtstat insisted otherwise.
I want to give *nix a fair showing, but in my so humble opinion the glory days have been and gone - roll back to about 2000 - 2001, where you were far more likely to get a working system without having to screw about for hours on end.
Captcha - Extinct.
This article explains it.
I just bought a new HP desktop with Vista 64-bit
When bought preinstalled, any OS should bloody well have drivers for the hardware it's preinstalled on. Otherwise the hardware manufacturer chose the wrong hardware.
I've been a KDE3 user for quite awhile. My first impression of KDE4 was "WTF, are they trying to copy Vista?"
As a whole, I'm hoping it will turn out quite well, but the colour scheme and little boxes everywhere really do seem reminiscent of certain Redmond OS's. C'mon guys, I know you can be more creative than that!
Not meaning to be too blunt, but that is a really ignorant statement.
Just because it has a black taskbar by default and has some eye candy does not make it like Vista. Honestly, if you bothered to look a bit more closely you might actually notice this. They are NOTHING alike!! I'm willing to bet that you haven't used either of them properly, because if you did you would notice that they are worlds apart.
KDE4 is well on its way to becoming a much better and flexible desktop environment than anything Redmond has or will put out in the foreseeable future.
That's a misconception. Plasmoids can both be installed through your system's package manager (just like basic plasmoids that make up the desktop interface are), and starting with 4.2 also through webservices (Those of course only works for non-compiled language plasmoids such as Javascript, Python and Ruby). A security mechanism for installing them through webservices is in place. It'll probably also be possible to share plasmoids among users, to just drag+drop them from a webpage onto your desktop, panel or sidebars. The system is quite flexible.
I absolutely love Urban Terror, which has a Linux binary, and I also love all my old SNES, NES, and N64 games.
Also, the native Linux binary of Dolphin, which plays gamecube roms and ALMOST wii roms, works nearly identical to the windows version, depending on SVN.
That and Civ 2 in a VM, and I'm good to go!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
What you just said sucks. It's worse. It's awful. Unfortunately it's true.
It took me two days to get ntfs-3g to work because of some stupid missing library and I was using the latest official Kubuntu CD release. After those two days, when I finally had ntfs-3g working, I decided to switch back to Windows which just works and does the job I want (reading NTFS, playing DVDs, working with documents) without the need of recompiling the kernel or endless searching through forums. When Windows crashes, it goes down in flames but if you take care of it, it never crashes (I've installed XP SP1 in 2003, upgrated to SP2 and now to SP3 and it's working fine, I can't even complain about the speed, not even after installing/removing stuff like OpenVPN, VMware, etc)
"I'm really sorry you're so stupid you can't even compile a Linux kernel." Brilliant modding, *nix zealots.
At least for Ubuntu, it was starting with 8.04.
Or Heavy Gear 2.
you can pick some out that work. I can pick some out that don't.
Or it'll be as useless to me as it's been.
I've tried to move to Linux about 4-5 times over the years. And every time there is significant driver issues. Even for many products that were mainstream and not super cutting edge just released 2-days ago hardware.
People keep saying "you need to choose your hardware carefully". Well, several years ago I switched to notebooks only. Hard to select your hardware. Furthermore, I don't want to have to select hardware, companies, etc. Just to run the OS. I even tried with my wife's Acer notebook. Turns out the same model has different hardware. We got the network card that wasn't compatible with Linux.
*shrugs*
Drivers, drivers, drivers....right now I feel that Linux is essentially a decent car but missing a steering wheel.
I've spent the past 6 months battling my GFX/Monitor setup in ubuntu until I finally tracked down the issue last week: The "Intel i810" driver i selected for my "Intel i810" chipset was dodgy and I was supposed to be using the one named "intel", not only defying any kind of naming convention logic and also completeley negating the effort i had to go through to unscrew the case, take the side off and peer inside with a torch for clues half way through the original install.
Big score for intuitive user friendliness there, guys! /sarcasm
Please for god's sake sort out the GFX support, bulletproof x was a start, but it's not there yet.
*Author otherwise has no complaints and is 99% of the time a very happy linux bunny at home
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Because it happens to me too.
Oh, and I have a CF card and a USB HDD with ext2 disk partitions. Why doesn't Windows understand them?
And, while we're on the idea of stupid disk formats, why is it that I can format as FAT32 from the command line but the built in process will ONLY do NTFS?
to produce an OSS driver spec.
And you've said "call be back when real 3d drivers install" which indicates that you place this blame on Linux and have NO INTENTION of reporting a problem to Nvidia/ATI/whoever. Just screaming that Linux won't work and you'll ignore it until we change the installation.
Sounds a lot like making Linux the scapegoat.
I predict that there will be a blue leather coat. If it's raining and you put up the hood, music will play. If you press the cake button. hands and a round table will pop out with a napkin and some cake. Mmmmm...!
Linux will still look like a kernel in 3 years. If you'd like a look at it now, 'more /boot/vmlinuz'.
Are you saying that I should upgrade my entire kernel to gain support for new hardware?
The Linux kernel needs to get out of "we bad, we cowboys, we don't need to care about yo wimpy APIs" mode and make the ABI at the kernel and USER level stable. Linux seems to have pushed the ABI out to glibc, and expect the glibc maintainers to dance the macarena on an erupting volcano to keep a stable glibc API on an unstable kernel.
I'm running FreeBSD 4 userlands unmodified in a jail on a FreeBSD 6 kernel. There's hosting companies providing "virtual red hat hosts" using the FreeBSD linux emulation running a Red Hat distro inside a jail. The biggest API change I can recall in FreeBSD was when seek (I think it was) went to "long long" and that changed the system call number so old programs could keep on working. And that was in the mid-90s.
Upgrading the kernel should be no more exciting than installing a driver.
Isn't it the same (and the only?) reason for Vista crashes?
Since Linux is open source I can change to my operating system as well. I'm running debian etch and I love it =)
I don't know why I believe this. It is probably just wishful thinking.
I think that any talk of the 'The Year of Linux on the Desktop' is a cruel joke until average users can plug in the average flatbed scanner and have a good shot at it working without any fiddling.
I consider myself a pretty sophisticated user but can't believe how much time I have lost to making scanners work. And not 'Brand X' either but HP and Epsons that are listed as 'complete' in SANE listings.
OK, my main box is now x86_64 and that complicates things, but that isn't the only hangup.
Venting a bit. Done now. Time to go back and crawl under /etc/udev.
The Linux kerneluser ABI is stable, and has been since 2.0.0.
Thanks for the info, I'm glad they're making *some* progress on the "woohoo, we bad cowboys" front. Will glibc start pulling some of the crack-inspired code out now?
However, the article is totally wrong on this point:
It's only the odd person who wants to write a kernel driver that needs to worry about the in-kernel interfaces changing. For the majority of the world, they neither see this interface, nor do they care about it at all.
As the great grandparent* of this article, and many others, have pointed out, end users are impacted directly by changes in the kernel ABIs just as much as they've been impacted by the continual changes in other APIs... even if they don't write code for them. If this means that it's more work for Linux programmers then that's what it means, because there is a huge gain from stable interfaces. Stable interfaces are, at the bottom of it all, what open systems are about. That's what open systems are, one way or another... stable interfaces that don't depend on quirks of specific implementations. Anywhere more than one team is working at an interface, making that interface an open one is a huge win... and drivers *are* such an interface.
You forgot to mention that COMPUTERS will also evolve to the point they are the size of a headache capsule, ingestible with a glass of water, able to run for weeks on a single fuel-cell charge, and finally disposable at the other end in the ultimate data dump. Meanwhile they will be busy broadcasting wirelessly to your subcutaneous ear & mouthpiece transceivers, pick up "keystrokes" from transducers placed under your fingertips, and outputting to your visual and audio centers directly through tiny laser assemblies and implanted bone-conduction transducers. They will interact seamlessly with all the other ubiquitous computing devices in your home and office environments, and will upload and download data as needed to support your recreational, educational, scheduling and business needs. They'll be cheaper than jelly beans (here, help yourself to a handful) but you'll have to pay through the nose to the mega-amalgamated-consolidated-conglomerate cloud-computer-government-corporate entity made up by the former United States government and Microsoft, Cisco, HP, IBM, Sony, Toshiba, Con-Agra, Cargill and Haliburton corporations, who will of course be your friendly, benign, quasi-corporate-regulatory overlords.
Okay, now discuss amongst yourselves...
Suppose that Logitech, Asus, Trust, etc stopped producing out-of-the-box drivers for Windows. Where would Windows go in three years?
There Linux also will go, i.e. where it is now, and has been in the last several years.
"...distros where you get free Linux along with (much-needed) licenses to use patent-restricted codecs"
E.g. distros like Linspire and Freespire?
What if a future generation of Windows was simply an 'embraced and extended' MS distribution of linux? Frankly, if MSFT were to be so strategically brilliant to do such a thing they might regain my grudging respect.
Wish I could give you big props, but you're AC.
This was an excellent find, and good to know.
It also explains why it seems to happen more often with low end equipment, than higher end corporate class or name brand equipment.
For example, it explains why I never see it (havent for years, other than in low-end printers), as a function of the type and quality of hardware I buy.
Thanks again for the incredibly informative post. You deserve a +5 informative on that.
Make sure you check out the AC posting reply to yours with the Raymond Chen blog link.
Very very fascinating (new info to me) and explains why some people dont see it (myself) and some do (you). It's likely a function of the hardware you tend to buy.
Some manufacturers do a better job with things like the USB serial numbers than others. And in fact, I'm not surprised, as I tend to buy Microsoft keyboards & mice (which work flawlessly, regardless of usb port, and the natural line of keyboards are the kings), and only higher end, corporate-class stuff (ie, stuff that we know works well in a managed IT environment).
I pretty much never deal with anything but this kind of equipment, and never with white-box stuff.
So this resonates with what I've seen ... I figured it was quality vs. non-quality drivers, but it looks like its the serial numbers mostly on the device itself.
Anyway, good discussion and I'm glad the AC chimed in with that Raymond Chen link.
Which tells me two things: first, that you weren't doing it right and second, that you never bothered to ask about it because if you had you'd have been told the right way. To show just how much of a mucking foron you were, I'll tell you, and everybody else reading this the Right Way. Instead of downloading the .deb, trying to install it and running into Dependency Hell, you use apt-get to install it. Unlike what you did, apt-get resolves dependencies, downloads the appropriate .debs and installs them without your having to do anything. It Just Works. BTW, the equivalent for an .rpm based system such as RHEL or Fedora is yum.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Three years down the road i'll still have to manually install my notebooks wireless and graphics card drivers....
There is but one thing that I consider a potential contributer to Linux gaining mass again after stalling a while on the desktop:
Apple could become so powerfull that it no longer is the darling child of the *nix crowd.
I've basically moved from Linux to OS X allmost entirely in the last 4 years, but I swear as soon as Apple gets pissy with me Microsoft-style or Linux has gained a significant advantage for me, I'm moving back. Advantage also meaning zero-fuss Notebooks and mini-desktop computers a la Mac Mini with a Mint Ubuntu preinstalled and built to fit keyboard, mouse and all built-in HW extras.
It only takes some far east Laptop vendor with some balls to build an entire lineup of portable computers all around Ubuntu, a pimped out Gimp, Blender, Inkscape, etc. and a slowly but shurely growing amount of built-for-eternity open source online games and the market could turn. Right now it looks as if Asus could be the one. Look at their success - and they are only doing a half-assed job.
Any way you look at it, there is *nothing* OSS can lose, and that's been it's biggest advantage for the last 20 years. I consider it not unlikely at all, that I'm moving back to Linux as my main OS in the next few years.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Since you play games, you are going to insist that users that don't play games pay for an OS for playing games.
Isn't that a bit unfair? Considering that the option to play games is a fifty dollar premium. I assume that you do recommend OpenOffice.org to those who don't need MS Office?
"I think it's great, but would I be comfortable installing it on a friends' or a coworkers computer? heck no! I don't have the years of experience supporting it that I do with windows based systems, so when they ran into some strange driver error or something, I wouldn't really be able to help."
You recommend what you are familiar with... and you don't know what to expect with those "other" operating environments. Fair; but you do realize that then commenting in a discussion about Linux futures is, to put it mildly, obscene.
I wish to point out that I do not comment on Vista, rarely on XP. I would not presume to comment on Windows futures[*].
Your milage, may of course, vary.
----
[*] I may point out good or bad points on the design of the Windows system (In my opinion as a software designer -- Please note that I have award winning Windows products "under my belt", but I am not a day to day Windows user). I also comment on Microsoft business practices.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Interesting.
I just want to make clear that this wasn't some major gripe against Windows. And yeah, I'm glad the AC posted that article. It's one of those passing curiosities that never lasted long enough for me to even research.
I especially liked the part in the article about the hardware manufacturer who used the SAME serial numbers in all the devices. That was pretty sweet.
Linux in 4 years will be able to be hacked by a 2 year old because security vulnerabilities are a myth.
If Linux can work as well as a Mac or a Windows PC with hardware in three years it might be worth seriously considering for non-hobbyists.
sometimes ago, linux users on the desktop are 5%, today (2008) linux have 1% and 2010 it would be 0.125% and on 2012 Linux would be dead.
Extra points for trying to reinforce something that is completely incorrect with profanity, sarcasm and an attack on the person that actually had a clue.
Perhaps it's worth finding out a few basic points to save future embarrasment.
Duke Nukem Forever! Oh wait...
Hopefully the Linux ecosystem will get fixed and Linux users will actually have access to Linux software without the blessing of their distro. I want to easily install any Linux package on any Linux distro, and I want to be able to get automatic updates of that software directly from the maintainers of that software.
If that one major thing gets solved, which hopefully it will be soon, Linux users will actually be able to easily have access to ANY and ALL Linux software, distro maintainers can do something more useful and not redundant, like, say, helping to develop the software itself instead, and the whole Internet becomes Linux's repository. Linux should be about being open, and part of that openness means being able to install whatever software you want when you want how you want in whatever package format you want, easily. The day I can click on any RPM or DEB or eBuild or anything and install it will be a very good day.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.