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If Linux Fails, Blame Jim Zemlin
darthcamaro writes "Everyone asks who runs Linux — to which the normal answer is either Linus Torvalds or 'the community.' But (as Master Yoda once said) — There is another. His name is Jim Zemlin and he is the Executive Director of The Linux Foundation." From the interview linked above:
"'I want to be a thousand percent confident that this organization will be around for the next 30 to 50 years because Linux isn't going away,' Zemlin said. 'It's everywhere, and there is no doubt that Linux will be an important platform in the future and we're only at the beginning on the embedded and mobile side. It will be my screwup if we don't have an organization that can help coordinate and grow the development of the Linux platform.'"
You are forgetting that Linux is an open source project, which is actively developed. It only supported 386 processors at first, but now the list is too long to be posted here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_portability_and_supported_architectures#List_of_supported_architectures
Old versions of Linux won't be usable after 30 years, but recent versions will be.
Any OS which is coded in a forward looking fashion can keep up with changes over the years as long as changes and fixes are made when they become necessary. And there's somebody there to make the changes. Expecting to wait 10 years to fix architecture problems does not lead to good results.
But Linux wasn't coded in a forward looking fashion. It was coded for a specific machine that Linus had. UNIX was coded in a forward looking fashion, but now it is past the machines that it was trying to get in the future. What we need is an OS that improves on UNIX and Linux. For example, Plan 9 tried to do that (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/FAQ/index.html#INTRODUCTION) because some of the flaws of UNIX were too deep to fix with patches, etc.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So? Linux systems share a lot of design flaws (like X-Windows). But they are slowly being corrected.
IMHO, Linux adapts itself to new hardware reality fairly quickly. And there are not many revolutions in hardware, just gradual evolution.
What are we, developers who care about Linux on the desktop, to do?
If you want users to install software not shipped by their distribution then it's probably better they install it to their home directory.
Follow the Linux Standards Base and create your menu items in ~/.local/share/applications/ where they will be read by all LSB compliant desktops.
It might be wishful thinking, but I really couldn't agree more on this issue. Installing software on Linux when it does not exist in your distribution repository (or with an outdated version) is a royal PITA. Having to compile from the sources is out of the question (I don't want to waste time to find - an worse, having to compile too - the necessary libraries or why there are compilations errors even when the the configuration matches the requirements). If I am lucky I might find a precompiled tarball, which works, can be installed without su privileges (oh, and wtf why should I have to be root, even through sudoing, to install packages which are not part of the core system, like a desktop game or a word processor ?). Installers are the exception (not that it is my preferred way to install Software, I prefer Mac's way rather than Windows's way :) ).
Even if I'm not fond of packaging systems, I recognise that having a cross-distribution functional one which supports several versions of the same software would be a huge step forward. Hell, even a RPM which would work on all RPM-based distribution and a DEB which would work on all DEB-based distribution would be nice (I see neither Red Hat abandonning RPM for DEB easily, nor Debian/Ubuntu abandonning DEB for RPM ^^ ).
(Posting AC because I already moderated)
While the hierarchical filesystem has been great for programming, it doesn't work so well for end users. I've been coaching customers and my wife on organizing email for decades. Creating folders and filing messages in them is *not* what they want to do. Many are not even capable of it.
What an end users wants to do is not "file" anything any "where". Let the email pile up in the INBOX, and click on columns to sort, or use a query to find emails. Is the imap server not handling that practice efficiently? "Bad imap server", *not* "bad user". (We switched from uw-imap to dovecot since the latter is efficient for multi-gigabyte inboxes.)
In the same vein, users want their desktops to work like email. No folders. Just a desktop view with columns pulled from file content like in thunderbird, instant sorting and searching on any column, and a simple query screen to search by logical combinations of columns. The current filename, filetype, modified, size columns are insufficient. For open office documents, the document properties should be searchable.
So maybe there is not a single set of columns that is useful for all kinds of documents. Maybe the hierarchy should be a class hierarchy. The base class has bare unix file properties (name, modified, size, permissions, etc). Email extends that to add subject, sender, to, etc. Office software extends it to add author, title, subject, lastprinted, revision, template, etc.
Do you expect hardware that's made for a Mac to run in a PC?
Actually I expect hardware that's made for a Mac/PC to be clearly indicated as such somewhere. However the Linux Foundation doesn't promote identifying Linux compatibility on the hardware packaging the way MS and Apple do with their respective OSes.
You might say that is so because most of the work for drivers is undertaken by kernel hackers themselves. But said hackers only list the compatible CPUs for the kernel... they do not make any single compatibility reference (HCL) for other devices.
This makes me think that the kernel hackers are really only interested in catering to others like themselves, who don't mind keeping tabs on the kernel mailing list. Their expectations of end-users patience and abilities is entirely unrealistic.