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What Needs Fixing In Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Infoweek's Fixing Linux: What's Broken And What To Do About It argues that the 17-year-old open-source operating system still has problems. Leading the list is author Serdar Yegulap's complaint that the kernel application binary interfaces are a moving target. He writes: 'The sheer breadth of kernel interfaces means it's entirely possible for something to break in a way that might not even show up in a fairly rigorous code review.' Also on his list of needed fixes are: a consistent configuration system, to enable distribution; native file versioning; audio APIs; and the integration of X11 with apps. Finally, he argues that Linux needs a committee to insure that all GUIs work consistently and integrate better on the back-end with the kernel."
I'm tired of that penguin
I am sure that only sane, rational, and courteous debate will follow. Finally an argument-free thread!
-=Bang Bang=-
that Linux IS pretty much a mess, it's just that there enough hands around at all times to fix quickly enough whenever something breaks. That's pretty much how it works at the moment and this could be better indeed.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
the users
I am so happy that he has volunteered to do this. I was afraid that the article might be about wanting someone ELSE to do the work.
But how would you avoid that? Set up some sort of world regulation on distros? Tax it? :) It's just a natural thing.
o_O
Is more vendor support. Every supposed real problem with Linux is based on or related to a problem with a driver; nine times out of ten this problem is caused by the manufacturer being unwilling or unable to release specifications. The various vendors out there need to realize that Linux may not be the future, but it's a more likely future than Windows, and they need to put some effort into support. Of course, some of them have, and if you reward them by purchasing their hardware, they may do more of it. Regardless, having multiple GUIs isn't actually a real problem - it's an opportunity, not a setback, and meanwhile you can trivially use libqt to draw GTK+ apps or use GTK+ to draw widgets for libqt programs (Sorry I haven't updated in a while, my last build FAILED on the build servers but worked at home, and it was a compiler error, NOT a library I forgot to specify. Nice work, Ubuntu!)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That is not a bug. It's a feature.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
First person to make a fuss about this gets a prize!
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
the problem with linux, is that to many people want it to be to many things. there is no centralised effort to get it to do one thing.
there are several GUI solutions, rather than a centralised effort, there are several browsers gunning to be the main browser, there are several sound sub-systems/servers... why cant these people learn to play together, and come up with something that fits everybody.
i know i will get comments about "choice" its all about "choice", but its not, its not at all about choice to the common user... the common user want to switch the computer on, check their hotmail account, check facebook, and then talk to their friends on live messenger... THATS IT.... thats what the common computer user does now... they dont care how their computer does it, they dont care about the morality behind it, they dont care if the guy who made their file system killed his wife or not.. they dont even know what a file system is.
its only the very advanced users who care about these things, and im afraid to say, that these users dont even account for 1% of all computer users.
if linux based operating systems are to become as big as they want to be, they need to stop fighting among themselves and centralised their efforts. otherwise, we will be having this same story in another 17 years
portfolio
and the integration of X11 with apps. Finally, he argues that Linux needs a committee to insure that all GUIs work consistently and integrate better on the back-end with the kernel.
Call me old fashioned or whatever the cute term is now. But fuck that! If I ever see programs like cp become bloated with X library calls because some news reporter needs to see a GUI progress bar, I'm going to be very angry.
My biggest issue lately has been NetworkManager. It isn't absolutely necessary but wireless connections are quite annoying without it and more and more applications are becoming NetworkManager aware which means it is increasingly important to have it. It hasn't progressed that much since its inception and it's still not possible to configure most networking options to work with it. The NetworkManager homepage makes it clear that they are not interested in profiles, and their application makes it clear they are not interested in bridge interfaces or any other kind of advanced networking. So your options are to disable it and configure networking through your init scripts or deal with the extremely limited options of NetworkManager. My biggest complainst are that I cannot get a static IP on my home wireless while getting DHCP everywhere else and it's a real pain in the ass to set up bridged networking for use with a VM.
Time makes more converts than reason
Basically, what he seems to be complaining about is the lack of standards, and on this he has a point. But he clearly doesn't understand the difference between standard-as-implementation (the Microsoft way of doing things) and standard-as-protocol (the superior way).
You can see some examples of standard-as-protocol, for example, when he talks about kernel ABIs, audio APIs, and such. But most of what he speaks of is mere whining about how there isn't Just One Way to do something, calling for standard-as-implementation when that simply isn't necessary: for example, the single configuration format or the "tight integration" between X and the kernel.
1. Why is Linux blamed for configuration files that are written by application developers? Linux is a kernel and is not responsible for Sendmail. Further I fail to see how the point and click method of configuration is better than editing a text file than can be searched, backed up and version controlled.
2. Why is it the responsibility of Linux distribution maintainers to provide a means for commericial vendors to package their product? Vendors had to spend money to get certified for other operating systems. How about putting a little work into understanding and using a Linux distribution.
3. X freezing? Umm...
Perhaps I've just feed the troll but, I'm sure the pointy hairs will read the artical and think it's all true.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
How about the fact that there are way too many distrobutions, some of which are separated by nothing more than ideological lines?
I would agree with this. When talking to grandma about trying Linux since all she wants to do is check e-mail, look at pictures of the grand kids and keep her MySpace page updated, you get the question thrown back..."why so many different ones? Are they all different?"
Second item...pick one desktop. GNOME, KDE...whatever. Just pick one.
Third item...attitude of Linux supporters. Stop being so darn elitist! You want people to use it, then be friendly about it. The best way to turn someone off to Linux is to come off sounding like a zealot or an extremist.
It comes down to this summary: Windows users are not used to choice, thus, don't give them any. Market linux to them as more secure. Be honest about some devices not working, explaining that the Microsoft marketing machine is simply more powerful, but Linux will get there someday. We should be able to point the average Windows user to "Linux", a single cohesive product.
For the now, it is a religious battle by a bunch of zealous extremists. Get off your high horses and get to the business of taking over the world first...then argue about which distro was better.
Bearded Dragon
No, a committee should be responsible for setting standards, similar to how the W3C sets standards for the web. Standards are good. Besides, sometimes programmers need to have their ego reigned in and given some direction. ;)
It's a cultural thing. There's a difference between designing a distro for a need (I.E., embedded, desktop, server, special applications) and going gun-ho into creating a new distro organization for nearly every new feature.
That's the problem that I see with all of these niche distros. Many rarely see a user, simply because they're either indistinguishable from their dozen other competing niche variants or their features are already blanket covered by another distro.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
http://www.freedesktop.org/ is the link. Was that really so hard?
~ C.
We have the LSB, and distributions which make some effort to ship binary 'compat' packages, so that third parties can distribute their software in RPMv3 format (n.b. not the same format as currently used by RPM-based distros, which are on RPMv4) and it will just install and work on any i386 or x86_64 Linux system. But I wonder if that is slightly the wrong model. At the moment if you want some particular library you have the choice of statically linking it into your executable, or just relying on it being there in the target system; neither is very appealing.
For example, suppose you want GTK version 2.16 or later but LSB specifies an older GTK (actually, it specifies a set of interfaces, but that corresponds to a particular GTK version). You could statically link your app with gtk-2.16, or you could include your own private copy of the library to be stuck in /opt/myapp/libs, but then what about Fedora 10 which does include a new enough GTK?
Instead of providing a single RPM (or worse, lots of different binary RPMs for different distros), we should encourage vendors to set up a yum repository. Then to install their software you could add the third-party's repository to your software sources list and use the normal GUI tools to update and install packages. If they want to use some newer library which is not included in Ye Olde Enterprise Linux 1.1, then they can just add a package for that library to the repository, and it will be installed only on systems that need it. This also takes care of automatic updates, which are not provided if you just give people an RPM file to install manually.
Of course, we don't live in a world where you can just 'encourage' third-party software vendors to do things and they'll jump to it; otherwise Nvidia would long ago have released free drivers. So you need to make it as easy as possible to set up a repository for yum or apt-get or smart or whatever packaging tool distros are using. It needs to be trivially easy. So I would suggest enhancing yum and the other tools to work from a plain directory of rpm files served over http. Just dump the files on a webserver, let Apache serve the directory listing and let yum point to that and Just Work. Or, if that's too dirty for you, use a directory on an ftp site (which at least has a defined protocol for listing the files available).
I think a repository for package management programs like yum satisfies what the author is talking about when he asks for a 'meta-package'.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
No, a committee should be responsible for setting standards, similar to how the W3C sets standards for the web.
There is already Linux Standard Base. But what real influence does the LSB Workgroup have in the GNU/Linux ecosystem?
In the sense that there is little originality, and it seems anything added to linux has to have occurred in another operating system.
Linux/Unix has plenty shortcomings, but its evangelists believe it's so perfect it cannot be improved. Here is my short list of major peeves.
1. Filesystem metadata/permissions. Why do files still have to have rudimentary metadata? Drives are massive and a few bytes would not harm. MacOS has added metadata. An example would be that a file should be able to keep a list of all the dates it was accessed. Why can a file only have one owner/group?
2. Root is God. This must really be fixed. There should be a way for root to irrevocably divest its powers, and root does not need to access users file. A user should explicitly grant root permission to read his files. It will always be a major security issue because all one has to do is become root. Plan9 managed to do that.
3. They lie about everything is a file. Why not extend this to networking resources ('cd http://www.gnu.org/ would be cool ). Plan9 also succeeded there.
I am sure linux evangelists are going to propose (hack-filled) workarounds or reasons it can't work, but I don't buy it. That is why I left linux.
...and none of them are listed in this article. Most of these are lame rehashes of old stuff that just isn't important. How about stuff like flash not crashing on me every two minutes? A IM client that doesn't freeze on file transfers with native MSN clients (I've tried several and they just don't work), some real compatibility with MS Office (the locked excel sheet for travel expenses breaks every time and I have to unlock it to actually make it work), fix the dual screen setup so that it actually works, that the side buttons on my mouse would work without hacking xorg.conf, all the ways WINE fails me and so on. I don't care that there's plenty choices, I just want at least one choice that works...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The thing about Linux is no one can agree on one desktop, which is why there are more than one. Some people like the retardedly simple yet unconfigurable Gnome, some people like the super advanced yet buggy KDE, and some people don't care and use XFCE because it's fast. No matter which one you choose, a lot of people won't be happy, and the beauty of an open source operating system is you can't force them to use one they don't want. And if distributions being so different is a problem, don't tell your grandma to get Linux, tell her to get Fedora, or Ubuntu, or SUSE. Your argument is from the view of someone who doesn't understand the entire point of open source software. Linux users don't want our choices taken away. There are definitely issues they need to work with, like choosing one package format, but getting rid of all choices is not what's going to make Linux better.
USB barely works. It's OK for mass-storage devices, but sucks hugely for high-bandwidth devices, or anything that's removable - and gets removed.
Video: just as bad. Put these two together and you have a mess of non-functional webcams, video applications which sometimes hold together if you're prepared to spend hours and days hunting down just the rtight combination of codecs, libraries and applications.
However, the worst part of Linux is tha parlous state of the documentation. A morass of different styles: .man .info HOWTOs, html, text-files. Almost none is available in more than one language and hardly any is kept up to date. Even less is declared obsolete, to stop people trying techniques that haven't worked in years - but is still highly-linked to on the web.
Frequently, the best documentation for an application is the string command.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I use Linux and FOSS almost exclusively for my photography workflow.
Almost.
See, when I work in film, I need to have a Mac around to handle the flatbed scanner. Because, unfortunately, Linux support for flatbed scanners really sucks rocks.
gimp has some shortcomings as well but I understand they are being actively addressed so I won't bitch about that.
I guess these are the main things without wasting too much time on this topic.
... it depends heavily on what the goal is. If the goal is to overtake windows on the desktop, then largely, yes, I agree. However, linux is in good shape on the server, actually far better shape than Windows 2003 Server in reality. It's easier to manage, it's more reliable, it's cheaper, and harder to exploit. However, if linux is going to make a serious attempt at taking over desktop market share from Windows then there are two things that must be done-- simplistic flawless working audio. simplistic flawless working video. It takes many times more effort in linux to get audio and video working cleanly than it does in windows and until that changes there is no hope of linux gaining serious market share in the destop environment. (on the other side of that coin, once it's working in linux it never breaks unlike windows.. and you can simply copy your old configs over your new when you reinstall and everything works again.)
Pantek, Inc. - http://www.pantek.com/ - info@pantek.com
+1-877-LINUX-FIX - Expert Open Source Support
Documentation
Everything else is secondary. Well, most everything. But without usable documentation, all else is futile.
Oh, and would someone do some work on documentation?
Thanks!
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
He complains:
Who else should do it?
He complains the distribution differences make life hard for people selling software. Well, tough, if they want money maybe they should work for it?
I know! Let's recreate the windows registry, but this time better!. Yawn.
Just about the shittiest article I've read for a long time.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The idea that the purpose of Linux, and Open Source in general, is to beat Microsoft has done more damage to the movement than just about anything else. It forces people to think in terms of how to obtain market share rather than how to improve software and advance the cause of free software.
The biggest single advantage of the free software model is the ability to innovate quickly, because there are more people working on it, and those people have more freedom to tinker around without having to worry about being profitable this quarter. However, since the vast majority of people in the movement these days seem to be primarily concerned with copying Microsoft products in order to beat them at their own game, real innovation is being stifled.
The fact that most major Linux distributions come with a default desktop that mimics Windows in many ways is testament to this fact. It's time to face facts: For most people, it's never going to be the year of Linux on the desktop, and that shouldn't be regarded as a failure to anyone. The end goal of free software is not to defeat Microsoft. Free software is a goal in and of itself.
My biggest complainst are that I cannot get a static IP on my home wireless while getting DHCP everywhere else
Then tell your home wireless to reserve an IP address for your laptop's MAC address. It's an option in the Netgear router I use.
Yup. That's an idea, let's break out of the prison of choice into the bright new freedom of the one true windows dictatorship.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Maybe I am not looking hard enough but I feel there needs to be more lists of software solutions. Someone in my LUG group brought my attention to http://opensourcesmall.biz/ which is a great little site (no affiliation) that gives software solutions for small businesses. Some others I find googling are http://www.icewalkers.com/ and http://www.linuxsoft.cz/en/ (Czech site I just checked the google cache) For me that seems to be the most important part. If open source small business software names were as common to mom and pop places as vlc, firefox, and other free software are to us it drive linux adoption at crazy rates. This would force hardware manufactures to release their specs or get passed up on a purchase to a competitor. Other than that linux is great and I could never ask for more for free. Usually the big hurdle for people is software familiarity once you learn bash basics, if you never learn bash you usually struggle.
A few years ago you might have had a point, but now the standard "Granny" answer is quite clearly something like "Yes, there's all these different versions with various (effectively minor) technical differences but Ubuntu is just fine for what you want."
If Granny later needs a new PC she can even have a cheap Dell desktop/laptop/netbook with Ubuntu pre-installed. She doesn't have to think about Gnome vs. KDE - she'll get the default (Gnome) and not even know about it.
Ubuntu: The best choice for those who don't want to have to choose.
Oh, and re the "elitist attitude" you won't find that on the Ubuntu forums.
You have to install it yourself, from a script, but x.game works perfectly for playing full screen games and being able to get back to the desktop quickly. After you install the x.game script, you just add "x.game start" to the front of your launcher commands such as this:
x.game start wine "/media/DATA/programs/Warcraft III/War3.exe"
Then you use ctrl+alt+f7 and ctrl+alt+f12 to pop in and out. Very handy if you need to adjust the volume. Also handy as a boss key! You leave the game, it keeps running, and there is no trace of it visually.
I use it every day for over a year, and recommend it. I got it from an ubuntu forum thread. Here is the link: http://sudan.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php?t=699332 Just take it from the first post, he edits it and it is up-to-date.
What I find in *most* of these sorts of pieces is that they are either cynically or subconsciously pushing for the winozification of Linux. He makes some good points along with the bad.
(1) Package Management
This is a good point if the debian people and redhat people could work toward a solution, it could be fixed as both systems have a great deal in common.
(2) Configuration Files /etc are, IHO, better and can be backed up and diff-ed.
Bzzzt. Wrong. The foolish part of this subject is that while the Windows registry provides a standardized access to the data store, it only defines types and not what they are supposed to be. Lunux configuration files under
(3) Kernel Application Binary Interfaces
I would like to see a stabilized and standardized device interface API for standard devices, something exposing a limited subset of the kernel that would simplify simple devices like block, serial, and network types of devices.
(4)Native File Versioning
Bzzt. Its called automatic backup people. This is a relatively new feature in Macs and barely working in Windows. Would be nice, but can't characterize it as something that's broken.
(5)Audio Application Programming Interfaces
This I 100% agree with. Choice is nice, but the geometric product of "choice" in system services means that rich multimedia applications are much harder to develop.
(6)Graphical User Interface
He sort of has a point about this and it has often been a problem.
(7)Integration Of X11 With Apps
Bzzt Wrong. X11 is a HUGELY powerful system and if you encounter a bug that crashes your session, that's a bug. Fortunately I haven't seen one of these in about 6 years.
(8)Commercially Hosted Backup And Restore
Bzzt Wrong. This is not "Linux" being broken, it is 3rd party vendors being stupid.
I agree. Clearly there are only two diametrically opposed options here. Either we immediately cease all development and enhancement of Linux and agree that the current kernel version is the absolute perfection of open source, or everyone formats their hard drives and installs Vista.
There couldn't possibly be a middle ground anywhere in there.
Video drivers. Video drivers. Video drivers. Or possibly X11. Or possibly the whole multi-layered graphics approach.
I'm not sure whether it's the fault of the Linux kernel or the graphics card companies that won't release their hardware specs / open-source drivers. To the "newbie" Linux user, that's more-or-less irrelevant. I just know that I installed Linux for the first time two months ago on a brand new computer (AMD Athlon X2 6400+, Asus M3N78-VM with onboard GeForce 8200 graphics, 2 x 2 GB DDR2-800 [PC2-6400] memory) and gave up last week and installed Windows XP after spending eight weeks dicking around with video drivers / KDE vs. GNOME / xorg.conf / etc. trying to get the desktop performance up to the level where it doesn't take a good half-second for a bloody Firefox window to stutter its way up to full-screen from the minimized state.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
It's as likely to be fixed as the problem of stupid comments on Slashdot.
I wish there was a windows remote desktop equivalent. Yeah! I can forward X11 apps over SSH! Network transparency! Cool! But over the internet - usually painful...high latency? oops. Connection dropped? App exits. Hope it autosaves.
Ok, so let's use VNC. A lot better to be sure. Or NX, with its shockingly awesome speed and responsiveness.
But how do I get at the apps I already have running? Nifty, I can ssh in to my desktop machine at home. I know I'm logged in to a gnome/kde/whatever session. Screen locked. What if I have Eclipse open and want to pick up where I left off? :0, and setting environment variables appropriately)? Oh, look at that! Screen's locked. I'll just type in my password and get going. Works fine, except for the fact that my _monitor woke up_ and _everyone can see what I'm doing or hijack my session_ (keyboard and mouse working). Maybe I'll just quickly logout so I can start something in VNC...
-Start a vncserver? That's fantastic. I just bypassed the display manager, so no warning about concurrent sessions. Let's hope that _all_ of my apps are careful about this weird case and don't barf all over my data.
-Forward just eclipse? Maybe if I kill it first from my shell it won't complain.
-Use x11vnc (hoping my session is on display
It's ugly, all of it.
On the windows side, as most everyone here has seen, a) a session started locally can be connected remotely b) a session started remotely can be connected to remotely c) in either case, a "locked" screen is displayed as appropriate and nobody gets to see a haunted cursor and d) none of this breaks 3D acceleration or video overlays when switching back to local display. It's _incredibly_ useful. This is something you'd expect Linux to be _better_ at, a big selling point of desktop Linux...afraid not.
I tried to pick some brains once about even the simplest hacks - like being able to poll X for display updates when it doesn't have a VT. And from that, I don't get the impression Linux will catch up in this department anytime soon.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
the "just works"-factor, the factor that made me say "oh fine whatever" and switch to a Macbook Pro as a work-laptop. After an upgrade botched my carefully handcrafted xorg.conf and left me with a semi-working dual screen setup, mac was the way to go. Plug the external screen in, everything dims and comes back two seconds later, running in glorious extended desktop/xinerama mode with full 3D acceleration everywhere. That's a "just works"-thing. Program installation? I use the packages available, which has the lovely "little thing" of actually integrating with things like Spotlight, so once I've installed something it's available right away by an apple+space keypress, as opposed to say Launchy on windows or any of the multitude of programs on *nix, which require me to wait until the next time it scans everything to show up. Another "just works"-thing. Headsets, more specifically USB ones, get plugged in, and then get selected when i do something like run Skype. Last time I ventured in to getting-logitech-usb-headset-to-play-with-skype-land in linux, it eventually ended up working - KINDA (but that kinda might have been related to the relative immaturity of skype on linux at the time), whereas - again - on the Mac it's no problem whatsoever. "Just works". And so on, and so on. I don't mind at all to tinker with configs and clis, and have done so extensively over the past many years, but when I sit down to do my job - I want stuff to "just work". It's a big waste of time having to craft configs for simple things like dual monitors and headsets, and it's honestly something I don't want to spend time with when I'm on a deadline. So until things start "just working", linux is confined to my servers and my private "workstation" (which is kinda set up like the servers), but for anyone getting a new machine to actually USE, I would point them towards a Mac with the whole of my body. It. Just. Works.
It's a feature in Windows as well, they make a complete solution, call it Ultimate. Then step by step strip it down until it becomes almost static. And when you need that one simple function, they go "Well you can always upgrade to Ultimate".
So to the parent of this thread, don't give me that bullshit.
I am the lawn!
I would agree with this. When talking to grandma about trying Linux since all she wants to do is check e-mail, look at pictures of the grand kids and keep her MySpace page updated(...)
Your grandma uses myspace? Oh my god... http://www.flickr.com/photos/driveafastercar/2110340303/sizes/o/
Christ, is there some kind of hidden /. rule that says we're not allowed to have any story about "fixing" Linux without people bringing up that same retarded false dichotomy?
Rule 34 - I get off on retarded false dichotomies, you insensitive clod !
Squirrel!
One of the axioms of free software is that users are free to fix whatever they want, when they want. So after 17 years of Linux evolution, why are these "problems" not fixed yet?
In most cases, it's because the cure would be worse than the disease.
So obviously what we need is yet another package management system that's different from all the ones that exist now. Developed from scratch, of course.
Obviously the solution is to rewrite every program in the OS to use a standard configuration file format. Instead of, you know, writing a man page that explains how the configuration file works.
So we should freeze all kernel development until proposed changes go through a 2-year approval process by a configuration control board. We all know that keeps the Debian distro moving along smoothly.
And so on.
Bottom line: the author doesn't like Linux, doesn't bother to understand it, and wishes it were more like a proprietary OS controlled by a single vendor.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
consistent configuration system
What a dope; because we know this has worked so well for windows. The registry is a nightmare on Windows. Linux/Unix does have a consistent model and it is known as text configuration files. It's powerful and can be leveraged on even the slowest of links. One size does not fit all - although I've seen far too many applications use XML for this where it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
native file versioning
Seems Linux is now held to a higher standard. Again, what a dope. Outside of the VMS crowd, I've not seen a huge outpouring of demand for this feature. Having said that, I do believe a versioning FS is in the works and for all I know, some may already be available. Realistically, few people want this and most have no clue what it even means. For the general use case, RC-software already exists to fill this niche. His complaint is empty.
audio APIs
As far as I'm concerned, it's done. Pulseaudio and ALSA are all that you need. If you have more specialized needs, then JACK Audio takes care of you. For the majority of people, Pulseaudio has what you need and is also portable to Windows. Many (most?) distros are already moving or have completed their move to Pulseaudio. As far as I'm concerned, this issue is addressed, save only for migration time for slow adopters.
integration of X11 with apps
This means nothing. What a dope. All GUI applications which communicate with X are integrated.
and integrate better on the back-end with the kernel
Again, what a dope. This means nothing.
In a nutshell, his complaints are silly, meaningless, or have been addressed. As far as I can tell, his only complaint which has any merit is audio API standardization and that has been achieved.
How can you blame anyone for coming to this conclusion? When you "face the facts" and clearly come to the conclusion that the pros do infact weigh heavier than the cons you have to ask yourself, "And why aren't we all using OSS yet?". Thus beating Microsoft is not relevant, but beating proprietary code is, and thus indirectly also Microsoft, Apple etc.
I am the lawn!
Until "Linux people" start recognizing that to the average user, these distinctions are totally irrelevant, it's not going to be a success on the desktop. Maybe you don't care, but if you want users to embrace the OS, the whole system has to work well, not just the kernel.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
I'm with you. If my laptop Broadcom wireless worked out of the box on Ubuntu, I'd be using that instead of Windows.
It's not out of the box, but it's simple enough, and it worked for me twice already on 2 different laptops. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff
How can Linux win me back? Whatever machine I bring home from Best Buy has to "just work" at the end of the install/config program. Is that too much to ask for?
Just buy a machine with linux preinstalled if you want no hassles, especially for laptops. And for desktop pcs in my experience everything does just work out of the box nowadays.
There is also the notion that "copying" someone else's work as a target is a good thing to do.
Innovation rarely gets it right first time round. There are few examples of big innovations working well first time out.
The huge number of hands to code Open Source projects does enable fast innovation, but copying should not be seen as an evil thing. I don't think there are too many projects where copying the exact functionallity of Microsoft or Apple products is the aim. I would humbly suggest that copying the good parts and improving the poor parts is what drives innovation in many areas - and that this isn't a bad thing.
Cheers
Duncan
Car anologies are of course famous on slashdot, but I won't do that. I will do instead something radically new. A MOTORcycle anology. Yes, you saw it here first!
What is wrong with motor-cycles.
The list goes on. Any of them can be fixed BUT the moment you do that, you no longer have a motorcycle. You got something else.
Back to linux. The NATURE of linux is that it is free. Not just free as in beer or whatever but free as to what anyone does to it. Anyone can create a distro or a new UI or whatever because that is what it is all about.
Change that and you change the nature of linux and you get... well depending on who does it. A Red Hat or a Windows or an OSX. It might be BASED on linux, but it ain't Linux. Same as OSX ain't BSD. It uses it at its core but it ain't BSD. Similar to how Mandriva ain't Suse.
The suggestions made CAN apply to a distro, even perhaps a collection of distro's but NEVER to Linux.
It ain't just about the name, the author talks about kernel interfaces and X11 as if they are the same thing or indeed got anything to do with each other. They don't.
There are already efforts to standarize Linux distro's making them use the same directory layout.
But to make any such effort to official, that is the way into development hell that Windows and for that matter all gigantic software has become.
Notice that Linux constantly improves, constantly changes. Well those two things go together. Either you get Linux that is a constant moving target or you get MS Windows that doesn't change in years and then breaks everything at once. Oh yeah, remember how Vista was such a dud because all its interfaces changed and none of the drivers work? Well guess what, to fix that, the next windows won't change... so you get a NEW OS in the a couple of years that hasn't improved at all, just a few bug fixes, if you are lucky.
Apple knows this and just threw everything overboard two times already, last time with OSX because sometimes if you want to move on, you just got to break things.
GNU/Linux is what it is because of what it is. Change that and you get something different and that might be to big a price to pay to end up with yet another commitee developed OS. We had those. You can get PLENTY of unixes developed by a single entity. Not a single one of them is a popular as linux. (Oh alright OSX might be more popular but that ruins my argument so I am ignoring it)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"When talking to grandma about trying Linux since all she wants to do is check e-mail, look at pictures of the grand kids and keep her MySpace page updated, you get the question thrown back..."why so many different ones? Are they all different?"
Why the hell is your grandma worried about which Linux is she going to use? Does she knows about the differences between distros? Just grab her a Fedora or an Ubuntu and get over it.
"Stop being so darn elitist! You want people to use it, then be friendly about it.". No. They will come when they are willing to learn. GNU/Linux is not a shrink-wrapped product - it's a very versatile and configurable tool. And no. I don't want them just to use it. I want them realizing it is a better choice and, if for them it's not, I want them to use whatever makes sense for them. There is Windows and there is OSX. There is a lot of choice around.
"We should be able to point the average Windows user to "Linux", a single cohesive product."
No. Because GNU/Linux is not a single product. It's not even a product. It's, like I said before, an immensely versatile tool backed by a community of fairly bright people. It's made by them and for themselves. If you want to try it, fine. But don't start making suggestions or bossing them around. Did you pay for it? No? Then don't be surprised if they don't feel like they are your employees.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
The core of the problem is that this entire argument hasn't changed (much less resolved) in oh, about 14 years. Linux at some point looked like it could succeed Windows 98 to become the OS of choice, and then Win2k (and then XP) killed it. That was what, 1998? Just for reference, there was barely a google.stanford.edu then, AltaVista was still the king of the hill, Novel ruled the small server market, and NeXTStep did pretty much everything OS X does today.
The Linux companies (never mind the 'community'; hackers will do what hackers want to, by definition) need to wake up and band together to fix some underlying core issues with the platform: file structure layout, configuration and preferences storage, device support, user management, etc, etc. They are invested way too much in making their *versions* of the platform work as opposed to making the entire platform work, and their versions excel.
...it seems like someone with very little experience wouldn't know exactly what package would best suit them....
Isn't that going to be true with any operating system? If you don't understand it, you ask, or buy it premade for you.
If someone isn't willing to investigate, then the only way they will start using linux is if someone installs it for them. Whether that person be a friend, or a store-bought eeePC with a debian etch variant.
the kernel application binary interfaces are a moving target.
That's why we have glibc, which abstracts that ABI from applications.
Kernel driver interface - the horse was already beaten to death many times ( see here ).
a consistent configuration system, to enable distribution;
Windows tried that with Registry - and it didn't worked. And it will never work since "one size never fits all" requirements of all applications.
native file versioning;
Was tried many times before and failed miserably. As long as majority of files are blobs, versioning on level of file system makes no sense. Versioning on level of applications is implemented already more or less everywhere it was needed and SVN/git is there for the rest of applications.
audio APIs;
See ALSA and its user-space libraries.
See SDL.
and the integration of X11 with apps.
As was shown by FreeDesktop initiative not really needed nor X folks want to be bothered by all the end user bells and whistles.
Finally, he argues that Linux needs a committee to insure that all GUIs work consistently and integrate better on the back-end with the kernel.
Committee?? Buahahhahahaha!!!1!!cos(0)!!!!!!!
All what he says was tried before (see (11)) and generally can be described as "failed".
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Windows users are not used to choice, thus, don't give them any.
WTF? So now I have to give up choice and competition in the OSS field because you want to cater to the lowest common denominator windows user?
If you don't want choice just take Ubuntu. Don't think about it, just take it. It's the most popular distro and it just works, and to make it even better they don't ask you to choose between Gnome and KDE.
But don't take my choices away from me just because you want to have all of yours made for you.
Yes, because granma is not adopting Linux because she feels the LSB file structre layout is too rigid...
If Linux beat Microsoft, it would probably mean Adobe programs and most or all commercial games would be released for Linux, which would mean I could stop dual-booting.
Consequently, the single greatest "feature" that Linux could work toward in terms of improving my experience as a user would be to "beat" Microsoft. Really, everything else works fine for me; I can't think of anything else I want. It's better for me than Microsoft products in every other way except those. Oh, wireless drivers I guess. More and better wireless drivers. And you know what? That's another problem that would solve itself if Linux took over as the market leader.
Games. Adobe programs. Working 100% at release. That's what I want, and it likely means beating Microsoft. Or, beating Adobe to become the industry standard in its arena(s), then still beating Microsoft to bring in gaming. Either way.
(I understand and respect your sentiment, just giving one perspective on why it can be reasonable to want Linux to "win" for reasons other than "M$ is teh suxor!")
Yup. That's an idea, let's break out of the prison of choice into the bright new freedom of the one true windows dictatorship.
Well, ignoring the false dichotomy and overall tone of this, the prison of choice is, in fact, a prison nonetheless even if the walls are painted the colors I like most. So many here want to see real commercial software delivered to the linux platform, yet are not willing to agree on much of anything. How can we expect commercial software developers to want to target a moving object? How is that realistic or financially solvent?
Free software is nice and fits the needs of some, but a lot of the good software out there that people need is just not available for it.
When the popular distributions can not even agree on a single package manager, this is not something that will change. The LSB is selectively followed at best. Until the community comes together and makes some basic decisions like .tar.gz, .rpm, .deb, .pkg, etc. then how can we possibly expect development houses to even give serious consideration?
I just spent the last week with my father-in-law who is a sole proprietor of an engineering company out of New Jersey. We talked about computers a lot, since it is a common interest. One of his very first laments was being strapped to Windows on all of his computers because it is a requirement for Solidworks. This is a man who would love to change his OS because he started with and loves *nix, but cannot because of his software requirements. I asked him about using Pro-E, since I know it supports a few different *nixes, and he said that it never worked right on them, and that graphically it was inferior to Windows.
His software needs?
Solidworks
Pro-E
Lightwave
This is true for everyone that works for him as well. A whole office of people that are strapped to Windows because of the software.
We can lament that it is the software makers fault for only producing for one or two OSs, but the reality is a chunk of graphics and engineering software supports OS X just fine. It's not a question whether they would produce it for *nix then, but a question of how we can make linux attractive as a platform.
One way to absolutely make sure that does NOT happen is to keep moving the targets and to keep living in our prison of choice.
1) Some distributions have lousy package management tools (RHEL) and proprietary vendors insist on releasing software only for RHEL, taking advantage of every stupid little thing it does differently so the software does not work anywhere else.
2) I want to use complicated programs that no end user needs to touch (i.e. sendmail) but I do not know what I am doing and I screwed up the configuration.
3) Some hardware vendors refuse to give specifications so other people will writer drivers for free, but cannot be bothered to maintain drivers themselves.
4) I want to use a filesystem that has a specific feature, and they exist. I am grumpy that one of them is not the default for my distribution.
5) There are several audio APIs, each with advantages and disadvantages. I apparently do not know what I want to do, so I want one that has all of the advantages and none of the disadvantages so I do not have to plan ahead.
6) I do not understand how graphical environments work on UNIX and think that Linux should be responsible for most of what X11 and graphical toolkits do.
7) I want 'screen' for X11, but do not know about 'xmove'. But what I really want is for my damn proprietary video driver to stop crashing.
8) There is no company that provides a backup solution because there is not enough market share because most Linux users learned how to use rsync and a handful of other tools.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Why the hell should we have to? I prefer having a choice. Windows users have plenty of choices when it comes to desktops -- Litestep, emerge, talisman, Aston and many more -- so why shouldn't Linux users? Simple answer: NO.
Clearly what you want is Mac OS X, not Linux. So use it instead of bitching that Linux isn't what you want.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Depends on how you define "different". Different in default installed software? Certainly.
Different in how the developers want their distro (and in turn, their community) to evolve? Perhaps.
Different in how the system behaves and looks? Maybe so.
The question has IMO always been: Are the high-profile distro's (Ubuntu, SuSE and Fedora, for instance) enough for people to get the job done? If so, then why look further.
If the "big ones" don't give you what you need (be it software choice, level of difficulty or something else), _that's_ when you look further to the less obvious candidates.
I partially agree here: it would be easier if both DE's would quit quibbling and simply merge, taking the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither. The problem with this is however, who defines what is a strength or a weakness? KDE users for instance like the high customizability of their DE of choice, while some GNOME users see that as overcomplication and bloat and refuse to use it.
If all users were in agreement of what the best course of action was, we wouldn't have these two DE's fighting over the market share now.
Fanboyism is a bad thing, and I have to confess that I myself have at times succumbed to it, but the point here kinda hinges on "You want people to use it". I don't.
I do not want nor need every Fred the Baker (Joe Plumber is out on his ear, sorry;))and his mother use Linux. Quite frankly there is no reason for them to switch from the OS of their choice. If they prefer Windows of any flavour, let them use that. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. (And yes I know about the botnets).
People should stick with what they know and prefer.
I like Linux, I've used Gentoo exclusively for 5 years now and will never switch to Windows myself, but my GF is free to change to and from any OS she so chooses to run.
Zealots exist in any discussion, it's nearly impossible to eliminate them. The best we can do is let them be and ignore them, they'll eventually have to come around when no-one listens to them anymore. And if they don't... Well, no-one's listening anyway. ;)
Posting obviously for anonymous reasons.
Free software is not monolithic entity with a single purpose in mind, and never will be. That is why there are so many licenses. Who are you to decide what free software's goal is? Seriously, what makes you think you can tell other people what their motivation for developing software is? If people want to write software to compete with Microsoft, that is their right. Every person involved has a different motivation from the next.
Laying this kind of idealistic thought process on people stresses them out.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
could you elaborate on this? Which GUI specifically? By windows do you mean Windows Vista with Aero or XP? How do you define "sluggish"?
Do nothing at all! This isn't a problem, it's a symptom of a healthy open source movement. If anything, be happy that there's so much interest in Linux and open source.
The kernel and tools that constitute a Linux distribution are open and free, and there is nothing you can do, legally or otherwise, to prevent someone from creating another distribution. This is the very essence of open source and the GPL, the thing that gives it (and you) so much power.
And it's not like a lot of these smaller distributions are expecting a huge following. Often they fill needs or particular niches and are usually happy remaining small and focused upon a certain thing. This isn't a competition by any means. You don't win any prize for having the most users of any distribution (RedHat notwithstanding). To think this way is treating Linux as a vehicle to stroke your own ego and is an incorrect attitude.
checking for libvirus... no
ERROR, libvirus.so not found, terminating
After 10+ years, it's still the same stuff that needs fixing:
1. Better documentation, including better man pages with examples.
2. Apps that are multi-screen-aware and, most importantly, network-aware. Some apps send way too much traffic over the local network when run remotely.
3. Awareness of existing design standards and guidelines and compliance with them.
4. Desktop- and distro- agnostic applications.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
You must not have looked into NX very thoroughly... Particularly, these options:
EnableSessionShadowing: Each user can require to attach to an already running session.
EnableDesktopSharing: User can require to attach to the native display of the nodes.
I use NX to share my desktop session over my VPN, so that I can login with my laptop while I'm away from home.
Not only is NX very fast, but it also does not require a running program in the background (like x11vnc), since the SSH server doubles as an NX server if you login with user 'nx'.
My only complaint is that I can't then use public key auth to login to my own user from the 'nx' user (a limitation of the NX setup -- though frankly I don't see any reason why this shouldn't work... its probably just disabled for "security reasons")
So the common user can install Ubuntu, and someone else can use Gentoo. What's the problem again?
That is nonsense.
Windows also is a moving target every few years (figures can vary) a new version is out and many applications have to be rebuild at high costs too.
On the other hand you can find dozens of applications that run on every Linux distributions : Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Blender for the free-ones I use, Adobe reader as a non-free one (can't think of another one I'm using currently but I'm certain there are others) and all those applications also run on Windows.
My point is Linux is not more a moving target than Windows, many Windows applications could be developed and work on any platform Windows/Linux and any distrib/packaging system. It's just about money or will to get there, not about a "there are so many packaging system out there, I'm afraid Dave"
If there is only a few potential customers for a product, they won't make any step in that direction. That's all.
And no, "a whole office trapped in windows" is not enough customer. "a whole bunch of big offices trapped in Windows and asking for Linux versions", that would be enough customers
BTW, as a new Linux-user, I do agree that I found the whole various-packaging-systems quite strange, some standardization could help. But I cannot objectively say it has something to do with SolidWorks not being ported to Linux.
You have a decent point, but I don't fully agree. If "beating Microsoft" involved making a viable alternative to Windows/Office that I can actually use instead of Windows/Office for my real-life job, than I'd say the goal of "beating Microsoft" has done a lot of promote Linux and other open source products.
Being able to stick Windows users (which have been the majority of computer users) in front of a computer running Linux and expect them to be productive without a steep learning curve has helped win converts. A bigger user base and greater business viability means more funding. More funding means more developers.
Now I wouldn't claim that user base is everything, nor would I want Linux developers to aim for a Windows clone. Still, making a system that people want to use isn't a waste of time, and having money and developers hasn't hampered the progress of Linux.
Exactly.
This is "The Free Market" in action. People see a need not already covered by existing Distros (or covered, but with a pile of other crap they don't need) and they go ahead and roll their own distro, and then throw it out there in case anyone else has a similar need.
What this guy is suggesting: Central Planning for Linux, is essentially Communism. Nobody gets to make changes without going through the central planning group. In theory, it can sound alluring. In practice, it would mean the death of Linux. Does this guy work for Microsoft? What horrible ideas!
I particularly get a kick out of one of his major ideas: A COMMITTEE! Yeah. that's JUST what Linux needs, a "Designed by Committee" label on it! /sarc
Leave Linux alone. It doesn't need central planning, it works just fine as it is.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Windows target may change, but most well written programs written to API's and system variables instead of hard coded paths will work with all versions of Windows from 98/NT on. And as far as msi, exe and cab files go, the msi format has been used since Windows 2000, and cab files are just another compression format.
A well written program from 1998 will still work and install today.
OK, so over the years I have always heard this gripe about Linux not being consistent in this area or that area. X11 doesn't have standard GUI? Well, if I recall correctly and I'm not an X11 hacker, but it is open source and Window Maker has always ran well on all of them well.
So, maybe everyone is talking about perhaps the NeXT Step-ish style of Window Maker as opposed to GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment, xfce4? Well, while it might be true, going from Blackbox to Afterstep is a bit of a culture shock, it's hardly a bane to the Linux community.
Non consistent configuration means.... Non consistent UI and non-consistent interfaces through out.
All of this makes PERFECT sense... IF DEALING WITH PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE. But since it's open source, my argument is that all the interfaces are easily accessible via source if nothing else.
There is a operating system which has much of these things... consistent interfaces, UI and configuration. It's called Windows. Oh, and might I add, that even Apple had the good mind to realize that a centralized-consistent-unified configuration utility is often enough a bane where they have a clear and obvious ability to turn it off in MacOS X! Windows, you can't so easily turn off the registry... if you do... good luck.
Linux has a clear and consistent informal trend in regards to configuration utilities. It's so simple it's ridiculous. It also contributes to 98% of the "power" of Linux and other unices. Flat file, plain text key-value pair configuration files. Someone in the Unix history, can't remember who, said plaintext is the universal API. Flat file, configuration is an application of a plaintext API. There are opensource applications that make configuration into binary files and such, and they are a pain to deal with.
So Linux does have a consistent, generally accepted means for a configuration architecture, Plain Text Files!
It really bothers me, these yahoo's, who have the power of the pen and thus perception, these so-called journalists, columnists, lingual devils and verbal vampires who spew their assertions onto the web in hopes of change; who write in total disregard to the essence of Linux's existence. These people, obviously do not realize, that what they are complaining about is what makes Linux so blatantly powerful. They view the surface, but ignore the mechanics. They see that sendmail configuration is different than apaches, but fail to see that both are plaintext and editable from program, script or human just the same.
And some of use actually listens to them!
They are lazy. They don't like to think. They want to be told, once and for all what to press, how and when. To launch an app, you may only use a recognizable cursor, across the same blue background, over an identical 32x32 icon which has been blessed as the only icon for that application regardless if you are on FreeBSD and KDE, or Gentoo Linux with enlightenment. They want a unified means of configuration, even if it means everything must be binary, and uneditable and totally obfuscated to the human.
To hell with these reports of Linux should actually be Windows. That is essentially what they are.
Unfortunately, the effort to lure MS Windows users to GNU/Linux results in copying bad features as well. For example, one of the great things about Unix in general is the hierarchical file system. When I want to work on a certain project, I cd into the appropriate directory and fire up a program such as emacs, which then defaults to looking for files in that directory. However, programs that aim at compatibility with MS Windows don't do this. If I start up OpenOffice.org in my project directory and ask it to open a file, it displays the last directory in which it looked, which may be far off in a different corner of the file system. I then have to navigate into my current project's directory one click at a time, without the speed and ease of the command-line.
Making this kind of behavior available as an option for people new to GNU/Linux is fine, but software running on GNU/Linux ought to take advantage of the core features of GNU/Linux. As a long-time (26 year) Unix person, I resent having inferior features of MS Windows imposed on me so as to attract MS Windows users.
Until the community comes together and makes some basic decisions like .tar.gz, .rpm, .deb, .pkg, etc. then how can we possibly expect development houses to even give serious consideration?
The package format is totally unimportant. Making Redhat use .deb or Ubuntu use .rpm would fix absolutely nothing, since the distributions would still be as incompatible to each other as ever. The problem is the underlying dependency tree not the way in which you package the software, said dependency tree is what makes it impossible to install software outside of that tree (i.e. installing Ubuntu7 deb on Ubuntu8 doesn't work, since the dependency tree is a different one).
To fix this issue you would first need to get rid of the dependencies, but to do that you would need a large enough and stable enough core system on which applications could depend instead, but given how Linux development works its not clear if that is ever going to happen or even desirable.
There are however two things I really miss:
* a standard way to ship or even just build third party software that will work across distributions
* a way to install two different versions of the same piece of software
The first problem is somewhat tackled by things like autopackage and LSB, but it still feels more like multiple layers of ducttape instead of a robust solution. The second problem is a direct consequence of stuffing everything into /usr/bin/, which makes it impossible to have two different versions of the same package, a workaround is of course two just build the software yourself to a different --prefix, but it would be nice if distributions had such a feature build in instead of forcing the user to completly bypass anything the distribution provides.
But don't take my choices away from me just because you want to have all of yours made for you.
Amusingly a lot of fun was had at Microsoft's expense for having multiple versions of Vista.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I was citing one office as an example, not as the definitive sole issue holding back linux. Be realistic. No one piece of software will make or break an OS, but my use of Solidworks, Pro-E, and Lightwave are, in this case, definite examples that keep this particular office from looking at linux. Denying the existence of the elephant in the room does not make its actual presence a fact.
You can extrapolate from that to include Photoshop (no, GIMP is not good enough for serious work), accounting software, 3DS max, and much more.
The point was that by presenting a real moving target, that the lack of software is rather self-inflicted.
Windows presents much less of a moving target that linux ever has. Games that ran on my 2000 desktop over 8 years ago work just fine on my Vista desktop. Old Photoshop works fine too.
I'd love to see real graphics packages ported to linux. Having Photoshop and a real 3D package (3DS or Lightwave) available would go a LONG way to making it my primary desktop and not just my development box.
Maya runs on Linux...
"lack of quality control is one of the pillars of slashdot"
sorry to burst your bubble, but open source development is essentially communism. there's no free market at work here. it's the collective efforts of the open source community that drives development. it's not the invisible hand of the free market that's writing code and submitting patches. most open source developers are not motivated by profit, but instead donate their time to open source projects either out of altruism, a sense of community, or simply the love of writing code.
the free market has more relevance to closed/proprietary software, which users actually have to pay money for, and is supported entirely by commercial profits. how does Linux fit a free market model when Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman both intended Linux and GNU, respectively, as collaborative development efforts that anyone could freely use, modify, and distribute?
Be careful here. Windows is less of a moving target for binaries, not for software. I'm running software written in the 1970s and 80s all the time under Linux and Darwin without any real problems.
Users.
We've had windows looking desktops for 13 years. For example
http://www.xmission.com/~sa/fvwm-themes/redxp2.png
Its amazing how easy it is to sound right but be wrong
As has been pointed out before - ad nauseum - there are many many different distros out there. Some of them attempt to cover the same user demographic, but in reality, it is an overlap rather than a competition. It would be foolish to say Ubuntu is seriously competing for Red Hat's userbase. There is an overlap and in some cases it might be a large overlap, but it isn't really direct competition.
That said though, open source development is as far from communism as it is possible to get. If you write something, feel free to put it into the wild. If people like it, it will take off. If they don't, it becomes one of the projects festering away in the search results at sourceforge. You know the ones I mean, they are the ones which appear to have a massive relevancy for your search term, but haven't been worked on since 2002.
You don't get a more classic example of the free market than open source development. It is totally darwinian, if its fit for purpose and accessible, people find it and it lives. If not, it dies and becomes extinct - except for the sourceforge search results.
A.I. Research. The peculiar science in which we know the question and we know the answer, but can't show the working
GNU/Linux is absolutely the Free Market. Not a free market of MONEY, but a free market of IDEAS. The very same principles that make Capitalism work are the ones that make GNU/Linux work. Only here people are doing it for Merit or personal satisfaction/need rather than money (Although there are plenty of people that make good money off of Open Source work as well.)
The key difference is the mechanic. In Communism, everything is directed by the Central Planning group. Whether that group be a committee, or a single "strong man" everything runs through that central group, and there can be NO WORK DONE without prior central approval. This means that communistic or centralized economies (and organizations) are slow to react to change, prone to error, and monolithic in approach to any issue. It's a poor way of getting things done.
In Free Market Capitalism, people make their own decisions on where to work, what work to do, and whom (if anyone) to work for. They work to fulfill their OWN NEEDS FIRST. Whether that need be for money, or merit. By each individual fulfilling their own needs, the "invisible hand" of the Market brings together all those disparate desires into a cogent whole. This is the very definition of Open Source. GNU/Linux falls quite neatly into this arena.
In other words: Proprietary Software is Communism, Open Source is the Free Market.
The sooner we all understand this, the better off GNU/OSS will be.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
MS Windows and the Mac also have hierarchical file systems, but they don't use the notion of current working directory the way Unix does. My reference to the "file system" was sloppy, but what I said should have made it clear that this was what I was referring to.
No, these are not diametrically opposed views. You have to step outside the box to understand its dimensions, or lack thereof.
We've seen a Window-izing of Linux for a long time that amount to parallel development efforts undertaken under the aegis of different values and development animals, but they both still walk like a duck.
Fortunately, the need for ducks is high. But we have to see beyond what's currently here. The basic principals go back to Unix and PARC SmallTalk and iPCs/RPCs, and variations on that theme. Hardware gets cheaper, and coders get sloppier. This cycle's been going on for four decades now. I yearn for something that breaks the model, gives state machine computing a run for its money, and really challenges how we think.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
true communism has nothing to do with a stalinist dictatorship. marxist philosophy proposes an egalitarian society without socioeconomic inequality. that clearly did not exist in stalinist Russia, as party members still had much more wealth and power than the average worker. and contrary to what many Americans believe, a communist economy does not preclude a democratic government. if you only have a single "strongman" or a non-democratically-elected "committee" making political decisions, then that's a dictatorship or oligarchy. a communist society by definition needs to be democratically run by the working class.
true communism has only really be achieved on a small scale in experimental communes. the basic idea of communism is of putting social cooperation ahead of competitive self-interests. this ideal is illustrated in the creation of local farming co-ops, in which everyone in the community works together to achieve a shared interest--providing food for the community. everyone contributes what they can to the farming efforts, and in this way everyone gets to eat for free, and no one starves. likewise, an open source project enlists the help of the community to develop the software. everyone contributes what they can, and their collective efforts result in free software than everyone can use/modify/distribute.
the difference between a free market economy and communist economy isn't freedom to do what you want. the difference is competition vs. cooperation. a socialist society doesn't have to be a dictatorship. just because health care and education are socialized doesn't mean people have any less freedom. arguably you have more freedom in a communist/socialist society because what you're free to do isn't limited by what you can "afford." that means that if i'm interested in computer science, and my grades are good enough, then i'm free to study CS. this stands in contrast with a purely free market education system, where if i'm not born into a privileged background, i can't afford to go college and pursue the career i want, just because i can't afford it.
Actually open source is very much a free market. There's no barrier to entry, it's open to anyone to get into. It's entirely competition based.
When the X11 project became mis-managed people forked it off and created Xorg instead, which is now the standard X desktop.
That's a free market. A market where supply and demand are unregulated.
I would have to disagree, it is a free market, because even though there is not a currency involved, these distros are competing for users. The more users, the more people there are to contribute, the better the system gets, the more people use it, and the snowball keeps rolling.
Not to get ideological here, but I see communism more as something you would be forced into "for your own good", like Windows.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
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Is why everyone sees the plethora of distributions as a minus? This is not Windows, where you have multiple versions by practicing feature stripping (Ok Gnome feature strips but thats only so that they can get it to work :O) each distro adds something based on the creators vision. Best of all, you don't have to use it, and not using it won't hurt you or anyone else.
Out of the cloud has appeared such stars as the current glory hog Ubuntu. In the past dozens of others have had their moment in the sun. Most have actually contributed to the good of the whole. Heck if someone hadn't thought Slack was doing it wrong we never would have gotten RH or Debian, then were would we be.
If you want plodding stability. Go with RHEL or Debian Stable. You are guaranteed to be so far back from the edge it isn't even in sight. At the same time you are guarenteed that your code is sufficiently vetted as to have limited problems. Additionally it's advisable to stay away from laptops, wireless, and cloud computing as these are still areas of heavy change.
Seriously I'm tired of people(sheeple) who stand on the periphery, of Linux, capable only of pointing to every imagined flaw, while they type out their punditry in M$Word on Vista.
Oh and a note, my last Winbox was a Windows 95OSR2 system. Don't need M$, I tolerate my wifes MAC, and miss my Amiga.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
All of the main distros have the same set of major third party software. With some variances between them on the more obscure packages. Packing up software is not some major undertaking, which is shown by how quickly new distros can pop up. Figuring out what versions to ship with and what patches to apply can take a fair amount of work, but if you were on any mailing lists you would have realized that a lot of this information and these patches are shared between different distro groups and applied to their own release schedule.
The real reason we have so many different distros is that we have 50,000 Linux users that want to work on packaging, but it only takes 5-500 to package a complete Linux install.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Actually, it's past that stage of communism. It's more like the communist ideal: all forms of control abolished, people contribute out of good will and the sense of reward they get.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Let's use apache as an example, threading MPM vs. forking MPM. Note that forking is the original heavyweight threading model.
Apache gets a request on port 80, forks a copy of itself, and starts processing the incoming request. Now if that forked copy throws an exception, it won't kill the master port 80, or the other 10's or 1000's of child processes that are still processing requests. Access to shared memory has the same problems as threads - it must be synchronized, and access must be explicity granted.
With threading, all this is cheaper and faster, but it's also far less robust. One thread deferencing NULL improperly and they all die.
To fix this issue you would first need to get rid of the dependencies, but to do that you would need a large enough and stable enough core system on which applications could depend instead, but given how Linux development works its not clear if that is ever going to happen or even desirable.
No, you don't. All you need is a stable libc. For everything else, if you *really* want to support a wide range of distributions and versions, you bundle all the dependencies into your package, which is either just a simple .tar.gz that the user can unpack whereever they please (with a launcher script that sets up the lib path, etc.), or a self-bootstrapping GUI installer that can install the app wherever the user wants, plus can take care of the other background install tasks like setting up mime-type associations, etc. (The mime-type stuff can use the freedesktop.org standards, and that will work fine for the vast majority of end-users who use GNOME, KDE, or Xfce.)
Is this ugly and a redundant waste of space? Sure it is. But that's the de facto recommended practice on Windows, and it gets the job done. How many installers on Windows either expect you to have dependencies installed, or have some sort of dependency resolver built-in? Very few, possibly NONE. The only things that come close are gtk apps like Pidgin which offer to install a common copy of gtk for you, and apps like wireshark/ethereal that come bundled with a copy of libpcap that will get installed automatically if you need it.
None of this is rocket science, but the Linux crowd (myself included) is so hung up on code reuse, modularity, and shared libraries, that no one can target Linux because there's no such thing as "Linux the OS" from an ISV standpoint.
Apps targeting Linux should assume that libc is present, and bundle everything else.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Only if you tell her that there are so many different ones. Why are you so determined to confuse her by overcomplicating things?
When you moved her off Windows 98, did you start by telling her that she had to choose between XP and and MCE and Vista Home Premium and Ultimate, and did you describe that as a choice between all the different distributions of the NT kernel? No -- you probably said something like "Here's your new computer. It's pretty similar to the old one, only it won't crash so much and you'll be safer on the internet. Some things look a bit different, so just give me a ring if you have any trouble."
And she probably got a bit frustrated for the first week, then got used to it, and still doesn't know which Windows she's using, which suits her fine because quite frankly she couldn't give a damn as long as she can read her emails and view her photos.
Why? Linux is a kernel, not a product.
If you want a single cohesive product to point Windows users to, then you have that today. It's called Ubuntu. Just Ubuntu. Not "the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux". Not "Ubuntu, or you might prefer Kubuntu, or maybe something else like Fedora or Gentoo, no, wait, actually SuSE has this great thing called YaST... or are you more a BSD sort of person, Grandma? There's FreeBSD, and OpenBSD... here, read the GPL and all the BSD manuals and see what you think."
No, you can forget all that. Only nerds care. For everyone else, just stick with Ubuntu. There you have it: a single cohesive product, aimed at being usable, with one packaging system, one standard desktop environment, a marketing machine, plenty of mindshare, and plenty of support. You don't even have to mention the L-word or the D-word.
Really, what was so difficult about that? All you need to do is stop worrying about how complicated it all is. Screen out all the irrelevant bits, and suddenly it's not so complicated any more.
It would be foolish to say Ubuntu is seriously competing for Red Hat's userbase.
It would be foolish to say they aren't in competition. They are in competition for users, for developers, and for overall mindshare.
A distro without developers dies. A distro without users loses developers. A distro without mindshare loses both users and developers.
You don't get a more classic example of the free market than open source development. It is totally darwinian, if its fit for purpose and accessible, people find it and it lives. If not, it dies and becomes extinct - except for the sourceforge search results.
In other words, all distros compete for resources, and if they fail, they die?
The problem with this whole argument is that there's no such thing as a free market, and there's no such thing as a completely communist system, nor no such thing as a system with no communism whatsoever, so every side has something they can latch onto to make their case.
Linux is communism in that it's a community effort. Linux is centrally planned in that Linus is the master of all things kernel, and distros all have a central planning body of some sort. Linux is 'free market' in that there are various distros all competing with one another. Linux is capitalism in that anyone is free to enter the marketplace and try to make money off of Linux. Linux is socialism in that everyone involved 'owns' Linux.
Just about the only things Linux isn't (at least, not very much), are things that are dictatorial. Linux isn't terribly feudal, or monarchial, or despotic. This is because there's no real way to 'force' any of those systems, and all of those systems depend on force to get to full steam.
Same old, same old crap complaint.
It is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT how many distros there are. Ninety five percent of the people use the top five or six - and anybody who isn't a Linux geek hasn't even heard of the others.
This is a bullshit complaint that crops up every time somebody talks about what's wrong with Linux, and it's absolutely irrelevant.
Linux distros need the following:
1) Better QA - stop releasing software that's not ready to be used. "Release early and often" does NOT mean "release CRAP"! Canonical a few versions ago released an installer that wouldn't allow you to leave the mount point management screen! WTF? That means the installer WAS NOT TESTED AT ALL! That sort of thing should be embarrassing for any software outfit.
2) Get better driver support from peripheral manufacturers. And that includes 64-bit support. In reality, this won't be solved until corporations start demanding better driver support from their main hardware distributors like Dell and HP, and then the hardware companies start demanding it from the peripheral manufacturers.
3) Straighten out the package mess. By that I mean all the main distros need to start tuning their package management systems for reliability (no more downed servers every time the repository needs to refresh), better dependency management, and speed (openSUSE has massively sped up its repository refreshes from 10.3 to 11.0 and even includes a "skip refresh" button, thank GOD!) Some consolidation of repositories between distros might be necessary, too, to allow more packages to run on more systems and reduce the need to compile from source, which, although easy, means the system is outside package management.
4) Fix ALL existing bugs BEFORE releasing new features that compound the bugs. This should be obvious but the entire IT industry continues to ignore this basic principle. You CANNOT fix bugs while introducing NEW ones - and if you haven't fixed the old bugs, you WILL introduce new ones. Duh!
5) Stop writing software "BY geeks FOR geeks" - i.e., stop issuing incomprehensible error messages, crashing with no clue why, with user interfaces even Steven Hawking couldn't figure out. In other words, learn to program CORRECTLY before "learning to program" in some language. Learn user interface guidelines. Stop trying to re-invent the wheel. You are NOT better than everybody at Apple at this.
6) In other words, most of the above boil down to: check your ego at the keyboard. Stop assuming you're the world's greatest software designer, GUI designer, programmer, debugger, and system analyst. You're not. There are RULES for doing this stuff developed over the last forty years! Know them and don't break them unless you absolutely have to.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Most of TFA's criticisms of Linux assume that the lack of standardization is a problem. I say that this is the level of customization Linux users have come to expect.
One of the key features in Windows is that the graphical shell is basically hard-wired into the operating system. While this allows for the GUI consistency that the author seems to value most of all, the GNU/Linux architecture was never meant to do so. The result is great flexibility in how the machine's state is presented to the operator. The price, of course, is that any number of graphical libraries end up being used to write programs.
I like the idea that a distribution encompasses a large amount of software that can be installed from a single vendor. While this requires that software may need to be installed from many repositories, in practice it is not difficult to find a repository with the software that is needed. Package management is handled differently, because it achieves greater flexibility and security. It's the very idea that you must go to a vendor and download an executable that installs the package that Linux intends to avoid. Instead, the vendor provides a crypto signature that identifies their packages, and a repository to download them from. This way, the vendor's signature can be verified before installation, and no arbitrary privileged code is executed, as the package manager is invoked for installation. The package manager program can be monitored for changes to ensure that the installation procedure is always the same. This is not the case for most Windows installers (though MSI files are better than an EXE). Any software obtained through a repository will be automatically updated as the vendor provides new releases. While core Windows functionality may be checked regularly, each installed program must provide its own automatic update process rather than using the system updater. Having a single system updater is superior architecture since it minimizes the amount of privileged code that much execute.
The graphical/multimedia desktop is undoubtedly more complicated as there are competing design philosophies. While the general concept of one-click execution is present in even the most basic window managers (TWM, WindowMaker, BlackBox, etc.), other window managers attempt to provide a more unified interface to the system. On the other extreme, there is KDE, which provides many integrated services (such as audio extraction from CD) directly into the windowing system. Middle-of-the road desktop philosophies such as GNOME provide graphical and VFS consistency, but the same audio extraction task requires the installation of a separate program. In the end, however, every one of these environments can be quickly customized to provide efficient graphical shortcuts to any software that is installed. In most cases, the vendor's package will provide these shortcuts, and they can be placed in the "Start" menu, on the desktop, or in a quick-launch style configuration on the taskbar. There's really no difference in the end result, nor is there any appreciable difference in effort involved.
While there's some truth to TFA's criticism of the competing audio subsystems, in practice there's not really any issue. PulseAudio, included in Ubuntu 8, provides a unified interface to both ALSA and the legacy OSS driver, allowing for simultaneous use of the audio driver by both ALSA and OSS apps. Again, a simple one-time configuration, and the application is still launched with a single click.
TFA complains about the need to kill the X server should it crash. In practice, it's only buggy video drivers that will cause that to happen. Fair enough, I've seen Windows Vista successfully reload a crashed video driver. Still, anything prior to that version of Windows would require an entire system restart in this situation. Simply restarting X is preferable to the entire system restart.
Finally, there's some discussion about things that make binary-only development for GNU/Linux annoying. Of course, you could look at it the oth
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
is to decide whether it really wants a year of the linux desktop.
If it does, it needs to wake up, smell the coffee, and work on some serious standards.
If it doesn't, it can keep doing all the stuff it does now.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the way linux works, there's nothing wrong with only working with other free software, changing every interface whenever it's convenient to do so and forking every five minutes. Absolutely nothing, it's part of what makes Linux great.
However, it's also the reason there will never be a year of the linux desktop.
There is a major problem in Ubuntu which the Ubuntu community seem unable to comprehend. n the Screen Resolution dialog in Ubuntu 7.10 it was possible to change what type of monitor you are using if X.org was unable to properly detect you're hardware. This functionality was removed from Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10 and Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE4. The Ubuntu community seem completely unable to comprehend why this is a problem, however users who try Ubuntu and install the drivers for their video cards find themselves locked in at a resolution of 640x480 with no clear way of fixing the problem. In 7.10 it was as simple as opening the Screen Resolution dialog and changing what monitor you have, but now that functionality is gone. This is a big problem that can put off new users from ever giving Ubuntu or Linux in general any serious consideration and that is unacceptable.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
I, personally, hope that GNU/Linux systems are never that standardized. It may be a setback for the community as a whole. I really do not care. Choice is why I moved to Linux. If that choice disappears... I may have to use BSD, Solaris, or something else. The more standardized and popular an OS becomes, so the attacks on its security. The more standardized, the less customizable. The more standardized the more prone to failure when trying to use older legacy software... I hate it. If GNU/Linux becomes more standardized across the board, I will have to make my own distro and add to the plethora already there, just to be a rebel. Then again, there is always GoboLinux.
Yes, and packages and repositories are a horrible kludge to fix the basic problem: a lack of binary compatibility between version or even distros.
I think you're backwards. "By-hand" binary distribution (by which I mean "you have to find and install and update it yourself separately from the rest of your system") is a not-nearly-as-functional workaround for systems that are are unable or unwilling to modernize. Seriously, tell me with a straight face it's easier to install and maintain software on Windows than Debian.
So you end up with a situation where a third-party developer either has to do the almost impossible task of compiling and packaging for all popular distros, or else depend on the goodwill and whims of a large number of people that they do the work him.
Yeah, because we're just desperately short of people that are willing to package software. Obviously.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!