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2009, Year of the Linux Delusion
gadgetopia writes "An article has come out claiming (yet again) that 2009 will be the year of Linux, and bases this prediction on the fact that low-power ARM processors will be in netbooks which won't have enough power to run Windows, but then says these new netbooks will be geared to 'web only' applications which suits Linux perfectly. And, oh yeah, Palm might save Linux, too." The article goes on to skewer the year of Linux thing that seems to show up on pretty much every tech news site throughout December and January as lazy editors round out their year with softball trolling stories and "Year End Lists." We should compile a year-end list about this :)
ARM-based netbooks won't be powerful enough, therefore Linux will shine on them? That doesn't sound very convincing. First of all, with Moore's law this means that a few months later, netbooks *will* be powerful enough. Will that then be the end of Linux? Nonsense.
I'm a Linux fan. The main reason why "the year of Linux" never happens is that the press (and analysts) keep comparing Linux to what they know: a Windows desktop.
If we keep copying whatever Microsoft implemented 3 years ago, we'll never pass them. What we need are real killer applications in completely new spaces. For instance, look at web applications: that's hurting Microsoft 10 times more than any 3D effect in KDE ever will. The Web made a lot of Microsoft software irrelevant. Linux needs to do the same, by doing something *different*.
--
Application iPhone Les Meilleurs Jeux et Utilitaires pour iPhone et iPod Touch
it's their operating system and they can do what they like.
Are they going to start listing the reasons why I no longer use Windows? :)
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
"Year of delusion" sounds about right. Don't get me wrong I love linux to death, but this year just won't be different from the other years. If people really want linux to become mainstream then it needs to be more user friendly, and the elitiest attitude will need to be droped...just my two cents.
2003 was the year of "Linux on the desktop".
In my house, anyway.
Free Martian Whores!
And in no particular order, my 2008 top 10 top 10 list of 2008. 1) top ten celebrity linux slip-ups 2) top 10 open source explosions 3) 2008's top 10 celebrity windows pet peeves. 4) top 10 obama-zune rumors. ...... etc.
This is one of those dumb statistics battles that simply ignores all of the low-power devices out there that are already running Linux. Compare that with WinCE devices and prepare to be dumbfounded by the success of Linux.
The longer I use Linux as my primary desktop, the more I'm convinced that getting into a speeds-and-feeds battle with Apple and Microsoft is a horrible idea. A financially successful desktop distro would destroy the variety of distros out there.
Fortunately, big-box retail is such a losers game that only the inexperienced would attempt to keep a Linux distro on the shelf. How's that Ubuntu distro doing at Worst Buy??
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
What are the criterions for it to be the year of Linux? Frankly, every year has been good to Linux lately. I'm glad to be sporting a Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu on it. Buying a laptop with Linux on it wouldn't have been possible a year or two ago from a large vendor. Now every big vendor has a Linux laptop for sale. So, what needs to be accomplished for it to be the year of Linux on the desktop?
And, oh yeah, Palm might save Linux, too
I didn't realize that Linux was in need of being saved.
Its future might have been a bit less clear five years ago, but now it's pretty obvious that Linux is here to stay.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Not as in "it replaces Windows and Mac OS X" but as in "more and more people are buying Linux computers", which are those small netbooks.
The general public started buying Linux machines without really being aware of it. They don't need to know about Linux, all they need is a web browser, email, IM, etc.
I think the year of the Linux Desktop has passed already.
Everybody thinks that the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will be some huge event where Microsoft goes bankrupt, MacOS is hit by a MalWare storm and Linux desktops are sold more commonly than Windows Desktops.
A single event like this is a pipe-dream. The year of the Linux desktop was the start of the revolution. There was no huge event to mark it, but we have now what "Year of the Linux Desktop" pundits predicted years ago.
Linux desktop machines sold alongside Windows Machines, Linux Laptops sold by at least one top 3 Online vendor, an area where Linux competes on an equal footing with Windows products (netbooks) and common adoption of Linux desktops by large corporations and government agencies.
In fact, we have more - MANDATED adoption of Linux or other OSS desktops.
The thing is, now the real work starts. We are out of the shadows, having stepped from relative obscurity into the public eye - and now we are being watched closely. The OSS community needs to provide more than a killer desktop OS, we have several to choose from. We now need to provide the finer things that our competition has a leg up on:
1. Good Marketing. Say what you will, the Microsoft Marketing machine is one of the best there is, OSS needs to match that somehow.
2. Good service. Things will go wrong with any Operating System, who is there to assist our clients? Do we have a "0860 CA LL MS" number that the user of his chosen environment can contact in time of need?
There are obviously more, but that is all I want to do as far as ranting goes...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
The article is deceiving on many fronts. The author states that it is "inconceivable" that the Windows 7 release date will slip past mid 2009. Why is it inconceivable when Microsoft regulary misses its release dates? In addition to that no one is really going to know how well Windows 7 actually performs on netbooks until it is released. XP is getting old and developers are slowly moving away from it while Linux will always have the latest and greatest whether it is on a netbook or a supercomputer. I think netbooks and Android phones will improve the visibility of Linux to consumers in 2009 but it will still be a long way to garner a significant desktop share from an entrenched Microsoft.
Time makes more converts than reason
I'll probably get modded down for this, but I'll say it anyway... Linux on the desktop as it stands today will most likely never have its year.
The general population wants what they know and until a Linux distribution is pulled together in a nice, neat, familiar (to mainstream users, meaning Windows) package, they will not buy it. It will also need to be packaged with their shiny new HP/Dell/Gateway/whatever. The only way I see it happening at this stage is if Microsoft continues to stumble with Windows. One potential back door I see for Linux is through business. If businesses adopt Linux, people will have that familiarity and won't be afraid of it anymore. For that to happen, of course, there needs to be much improved support for those systems, which is not happening yet.
Unfortunately, I think Microsoft is doing okay for the moment. They stumbled a bit with Vista, but the incompatibilities of Vista were a necessary step for them to improve the security and stability of Windows. If they can improve the performance of Windows 7, mainstream users will have little reason to switch.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
Ah, yes... The 100$ netbooks OLPC and EeePC running Linux that now cost 400$ and run Windows.
Seriously, when it's declared that next year will be the "Year of the XXXXXXX", it's more likely than not that it will never happen.
Alchemist: Be Thou For the People
The reason linux keeps finding niche applications and not being a major player hasn't changed in 8 years: Applications. Users don't care about the operating system. Linux can be hacked fairly easily to emulate or include the UI features of any other major operating systems currently in use. It comes down to application support. When Microsoft Office comes to linux, when games are routinely released with linux binaries, and when software like Adobe Illustrator and internet plugins "just work" under linux, then you'll have a linux desktop.
Linux could have all the functionality and intuitiveness of Windows 3.1 and people would still use it if it had the application support. And please don't tell me that The GIMP = Photoshop, or that many of the free software replacements are "just as good". It doesn't matter! All that matters is the users' comfort level. And they stick with what they're used to, even if it costs a lot more and isn't as good.
But people keep pinning their hopes on the hardware, or the security robustness, or the feature set, or whatever else they have control over. Face it-- If you want Linux on the desktop the community needs to make a concession that it ideologically cannot afford to make -- which is to start marching to the tune of the large businesses that design these killer apps. When you convince Adobe to release all their products on Linux, and Blizzard to release their games on Linux, etc., then we'll be getting somewhere. But the community won't, because those companies have already made it clear what their terms and conditions are and we won't compromise.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
From TFA:
An article has come out claiming (yet again) that 2009 will be the year of Linux, and bases this prediction on the fact that low power ARM processors will be in netbooks which won't have enough power to run Windows, but then says these new netbooks will be geared to "web only" applications which suits Linux perfectly. And, oh yeah, Palm might save Linux, too.
In a year that saw Linux netbooks appear, and fail to excite consumers, thus handing Microsoft victory in the netbook operating system space, yet another pundit has come out claiming 2009 will be a revolutionary year for Linux.
The "year of Linux"?
Palm "might save Linux"?
A "revolutionary year for Linux"?
Does this asshat even know what Linux is? Does he even know what what he's trying to talk about is Linux on the desktop? He goes on talking as if he thinks that if Linux doesn't succeed on the desktop, that it is a failure and that something will need to come along to "save it".
People need to get it through their thick skulls that Linux is a kernel for a unix-like operating system. The primary purpose of Linux is not to become a replacement for the Windows desktop, or to become the latest gadget PDA system. It's purpose is not to be a fancy, shiny, eyecandy competitor for OSX. Its purpose is to be an extremely versatile, scalable, and portable kernel for a unix-like operating system - and when coupled with GNU it becomes a very powerful unix-like operating system capable of pretty much anything.
Linux has succeeded as the number 1 OS of choice for HPC and supercomputing applications.
Linux has succeeded as being a very popular OS for Internet-connected servers.
Linux has succeeded as being the OS of choice for many embedded systems, home entertainment applications and DVR systems.
Linux has succeeded as a powerful development environment.
Linux has succeeded in so many areas that it would be tedious to list them. Primarily, though - Linux has succeeded far beyond anyone's wildest dreams in its original goal: to be a viable monolithic kernel for x86 systems, so that x86 users can enjoy unix.
Linux is not going away, it hasn't "failed", and it certainly doesn't need to be "saved". In fact, since the day GNU/Linux has been available, it has done nothing but grow and increase in usage. And not only has it grown, it's grown wildly... from hacker OS, to mainstream OS, to a laughable nuisance to Microsoft, to a downright huge challenge to Microsoft's vitality in the server market. From where I stand, I've never even seen a dip in its growth. It's only growing more, and it will continue to grow. Linux has succeeded, and will continue to succeed. Just watch.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
People don't realize that you don't need to *replace* yesterday's technology to succeed. There's still tons of COBOL running out there. Java, Python, Ruby do not act as *replacements*. They are layers of something new and different. If you replace something obsolete, you're just slotting yourself into a role that makes you obsolete!
The article is deceiving on many fronts. The author states that it is "inconceivable" that the Windows 7 release date will slip past mid 2009. Why is it inconceivable when Microsoft regulary misses its release dates?
They keep using that word.
I don't think they know what it means.
I almost forgot. The author says that Linux doesn't have all the available plugins to enjoy the web. What plugins is he talking about? The most commonly used plugin is Flash and it has been available for a while. Java is available too and Silverlight support is close to done the last time I looked. Which magical plugins am I missing on my Linux laptop? Whatever they may be they haven't seemed to hinder me yet.
Time makes more converts than reason
People kept predicting the year of the network. It never came or it came and we didn't know it.
Networks went from being very rare to being pretty common in companies then they started selling the stuff in Walmart.
It is the ever growing creep. Linux will just keep creeping into our life.
Of course I have my list of things that are slowing it down and most of them are religious issues.
Lack of a stable binary driver interface and the difficulty in selling software are two big ones.
But full support from Adobe for for Linux for Flash, Air, and PDF Reader are a big sign that the slow march of Desktop Linux is on track.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This would be great - better battery life, I can't wait.
The next step is to start using ARM processors in the big data centers - that will save huge $$ on electricity and cooling. Is this the start of the end of Intel's reign ?
There will never be a Year of the Linux Desktop until there is a Year of the Mac Desktop.
I like Linux, and that's what I preferably run on my boxes, definitely the server ones. I use it even on my main desktop box, but I recognize Linux failed miserably in there.
If we really need to mention the year of someone, this is Apple. They have a package that is very attractive. Finely built hardware (more expensive then the $400 chinese clones, but well worth the added value), and a very nice desktop OS software.
I started having Macs together with Linux boxes, since they switched to OSX, and I've to recognize that I really like them.
I can run all the GNU software I run on Linux, plus I've the added value of a nice and coherent desktop.
I wouldn't run OSX on a server, but for a desktop is pretty nice. It's a BSD after all, and that puts all Unix guys like me at comfort.
So yeah, I predict the next year will be the year of Apple, like the couple before that.
Let's just face it, free software is great but unless the really basic stuff gets ironed out, Linux will not satisfy the needs of basic people. I used to suggest installing Ubuntu to people, but after running into some trouble with how it handles USB sticks, I won't. Somehow, someone thought it'd be a great idea to not actually delete anything from a USB stick, but to rather move it into a invisible folder in said stick and forget it there. Now that was easy to clear up in the phone.
I think 2009 more than any year before will be the year that people make more predictions about what 2009 will be "the year of"
[signature]
The reason that ARM based notebooks can't run Windows has nothing to do with the "power" of the chip.
There isn't an ARM version of WindowsXP or Vista! And even if their was there is no software that would run on it!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Of course, Windows XP has shown that it handles netbooks with aplomb, and works with the web best of all, thanks to having all the browsers, plug-ins, downloads and more you could ever want, something you just can't claim with good old Linux."
Really??? You have to laugh really.
"As for Windows 7, Microsoft is specifically ensuring it will work on netbooks, and if it needs to sell the software at cheaper rates to compete with free Linux, it will do so - just as it has done with Windows XP today."
If XP works "with aplomb" why would there be any specific need to tweak Windows 7 for the purpose? Surely it's a case of "just keep swimming", since the path they'd be on would be the correct one.
I remember endless predictions that the upcoming year would be the year of the office network. Originally networks were supposed to share then-expensive resources like printers and large disks. Then networks to the outside world (wide-area) came into play in the later part of this period. The commercialization of the InterNet and web software finally got networks off the groudn in the 1990s.
So I've seen a few projects lately that really hit home for this, as well as a couple of generalizations. General stuff first.
The really basic, broad one is "audio editing in linux." I don't know if other people follow it like me, but the number of tools, good, quality tools, available these days are staggering, and it seems like this year was the year that all of them came into their own, maturity wise. Ardour, the Calf plugins, etc.
Another generic space that is seeing huge strides is graphics. GIMP going GEGL is a huge milestone, and will make making high quality graphics apps in linux far easier in general, as we're moving a big chunk of that work to a generic lib. nice.
But the real killers for me, that are hugely differentiated, are neither of those things. One is Beremiz, which is an open source automation framework that just pulls together existing open source software to create something new and amazing.
The other is Fritzing, which makes it easy to take an arduino project from prototype to production.
These are world-changers, and I don't even think many people are aware of them yet.
-Josh
-knewter
There will be no year of Linux where Linux goes from 0.9% to 100%, that's a myth but 1/3 of the netbook are sold with Linux.
Which is way higher that the percentage of Linux in the general population.
Then again, Microsoft was surprised by the NetBook success and they're restrained by the anti-trust lawsuit but I expect them to find a way to reduce Linux marketshare on the netbooks.
However, those days have been over for a while. Linux with Gnome or KDE with Compiz is just as bloated, processor intensive and memory hogging as Windows. I have used Linux as my only Desktop OS for 6 Years and have noticed the hardware requirements go through the roof.
Sure you can configure a system with no window manager, or use TWM, or XFCE and get better performance, but if I remember correctly, you can configure windows to run without a lot of fancy bling too.
I agree that Linux is a better option that Windows. But using the speed argument doesn't carry the weight it used to.
The "it's free" and "no viruses" argument is still valid!
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Yeah, so almost everyone I know runs linux on the desktop. Our entire business runs on ubuntu machines (software dev). My good friend JD runs his business (apartment mgmt.) entirely on ubuntu. Both of our houses are all ubuntu. When I have to use a windows machine, all I can do is cuss. This is true of JD's wife as well. And my friend Brandon. All of these people ran Windows until a couple of years ago, when I showed them Ubuntu for the first time. Without fail, they have all gone and installed linux on their desktop within days, and never turned back.
Windows is awful, but you can play games on it well. Anyone who disagrees with me (about anything, really) is mentally handicapped. TYVM.
-knewter
(Or is that 21, not quite sure).
The point that is missed by this guy is that Linux doesn't need a year of the Desktop.
Linux market share is about 1%-1.5%, something small - but growing at a substantial rate. Now, a lot of small is still small, so by the end of next year it will only be a little bit bigger and Microsoft's market share will only be a little bit smaller. But if you compound that year on year, then all Linux needs is time. And unlike Microsoft, that's something it has plenty of - a commercial reality that, you can be sure, the boys in Redmond are all too aware of.
Humble Pie like Christmas Pudding is at its best when it is left to season and mature, and I'm pretty sure our friend here is going to be able to eat his fill.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Linux might save Palm.
I used to be a big fan of Palm. For the life of me I have NO IDEA WHAT THEY HAVE BEEN DOING.
None of their PDA hardware is competitive with say the iPod Touch and only their Centro while cheap really is very flawed. No GPS, no voice dialing with a blue tooth headset and you have to buy a program to get stereo support for bluetooth.
Palm's browser just doesn't cut it any more.
The only thing Palm has going for it is their huge library of 3rd party apps but even that is aging.
Linux is Palms last real hope.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It seems like everywhere, people are praising the spread of Linux, or arguing against it, or blah blah. My question is, why do Linux geeks care if Linux gains market share? There's no profits to be made or anything like that. If average Joe User used Linux, then I wouldn't have the excuse of, "no I can't fix your computer, because I don't use Windows." Why do we want to spread Linux?
Seriously, who cares about the "Year of the Linux Desktop" and all that? Those of us who use Linux and think it's awesome can continue to do so while everyone else wastes their money and shakes their fists. It doesn't make any difference.
Shockwave is missing but I don't see as many sites that use it as I used to.
The Linux desktop arrived in 1998 with RedHat 6.0. (Yes, this was before all that RHEL stuff...) With that release, the GUI looked better than Windows and the system was usable by the general public. Installing it still required a fair bit of expertise, but even the Windows 95/98 setup program couldn't/wouldn't repartition or reformat your drive for you. A newbie end user with a blank, non-formatted HD couldn't install either Windows or Linux.
Some years later, Mandrake came out. It was so easy to install that my non-technical brother managed to install it on his machine by himself. I didn't like the lack of build tools, but hey, it was Linux and very user friendly.
And then Ubuntu took its place. It may sound odd, but Windows is now more difficult to install than Linux. I've never had a Linux user ask me "how do I get the activation number"...
Let's face facts: journalists have been hyping, "This is the year of Linux on the ${DEVICE}" for the past decade.
What has really changed? Nothing. Journalists are just as clueless today as they've always been.
I've been using Linux for the past decade, and I've seen the distros go from "Here's some hints on configuring X, good luck!" to "Do you want fancy GUI effects or not?". It has been a mature, solid platform for about ten years now. It has been adopted primarily by people who make informed decisions about their choice of operating system.
The reason why this will never be "The year of Linux on ${DEVICE}" is simply because Linux is already widely used where appropriate. Sure, the desktop might be a lost cause, but this demographic almost never makes a decision about their operating system. The overwhelming majority of desktop users want something which is:
To make Linux popular with the Joe-sixpack crowd, you'd have to turn it into something as brain-dead as Windows. You would have to sacrifice the security of the operating system for the sake of providing a familiar idiom - "I want to execute this code automatically when the page loads..." And you'd have to adopt some brain-dead, fischer-price lookalike interface. Is that really what people want Linux to be?
I don't think so. I don't want Linux to sacrifice its good qualities for the sake of being popular. Right now, I have an OS which is secure, stable, easy to use, free, and I'd like to keep it that way.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Well clearly what we need the vendors to do is put Linux on an actual desktop. This garbage about "Linux on a laptop" is just no substitute :D.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
When I can go to Best Buy and purchase a boxed copy of the latest/greatest games and install it from the DVD onto my Linux machine.
Linux might have made inroads during a recession, especially on the cheaper netbooks, except that Microsoft recognized this took the drastic step of unretiring Windows XP, making it available on the eeePC. They actually arranged pricing so the Windows version is cheaper than the linux version.
The value of Windows is not any intrinsic quality (not its performance, reliability, usability etc), but the software that runs on it.
Therefore, wine is the greatest threat to windows.
http://www.ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54&swfSize=1 This is what converted me.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Didn't you mean the year of Tourettes?
you know, i've messed with this Linux stuff off and on, was a totally avid user for years.. but if you ever want to get something accomplished, that doesn't involve web browsing, email, or running servers, you're probably going to want to run some other (commercial) operating system.
This post is called "patching kernels" because the first time I ever booted Linux, well over a decade ago, I had to write kernel patches just to get the thing fully running. The sad, sad fact, is that if I wanted to boot Linux today, I would need to do the same thing.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
1999-2002 was when Linux accelerated. Why? recession and 9/11. Now that Linux is more mature and bigger, we are in another recession(depression?) and Linux is again gain traction. They slowly grow, while MS is slowly losing ground. Right now, the majority of the gains are Apples, but there is only so far that they will grow. My guess is within 5 years, Apple will own about 15-20% of the market and Linux will be 5-10%. At that time, MS will start a rapid fall (think early 90's when IBM crashed hard).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think the most important point is that Microsoft is losing market share. Not much, and probably more to Apple than to Linux, but it does something for the bean counters when they make predictions. Questions like "What features will our core products need in the next 2-5 years?" and sends "Cross-platform compatibility" higher up on that list. Even if it's not more than last year (2.6%) then over the next five years that means nearly a quarter won't run Windows. Of course that's only a stupid prediction, Windows 7 might be brilliant and bring Microsoft back in the high 90s, but both are certainly on the table.
I can really only speak for myself as a Linux user and say that it has become easier and easier to use Linux over the time I've used it fulltime as my primary desktop. I've never seen any serious reverts in price, functionality and usability as I've seen on Windows when good products run out of natural improvements and desperately try to bloat into doing other things. And if there was, support on the old version usually was good enough anyway. I predict nothing but a slow trend upwards in the future. For example, one thing I could only dream about a year ago was a Linux media center but now nVidia was a working video acceleration and HDMI audio. Wireless drivers and webcams are two other examples that have made great strides in 2008. At least from the hardware side Linux is becoming a supported platform all around, and that is nothing short of huge. It's not exactly a "killer feature", but at least it's not a "feature" killing Linux anymore.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Adobe Shockwave.
Every year we here this same prediction. I expect Linux to the same place one year from now where it is now.
The simple fact is that Windows is simply eisier for users to use. Not because it has a dumbed down user interface, but because things just work on it. Installing, loading and unloading device drivers isnt a huge hassle. Installing third party software is not a huge hassle. You are able to run down to the store and buy a software and not worry about if it will work, you just install it and it works. Hardware devices work out of box. Everything is supported.
The attitude of Linux people i not helpful. We have kernel developers who refused to add a stable device driver ABI, despite the fact to get increased adoption of Linux binary drivers is an evil we will have to live with, but will actually have long term benefits since Linux will expand its user base, and we could eventually write open source versions of those drivers. Being able to have binary device drivers and making it easy for users to load them and companies to provide them, actually would give programmers an opportunity to be able to document the hardware protocols used by these drivers and make an open source driver from that.
Another thing is the assumption that a user can live with installing all programs entirely from the distros package manager. The reality is companies will want to use their own installers and these will have to run on different distros. Binary compatability is very important and a Stable binary program API.
I think WINE is very important and that when that becomes to a point where it can run 100% of Windows software, and that if even some way was found to allow Windows drivers to run on Linux, then maybe Linux might gain more market share.
Otherwise, given the fact that there is so much hardware, software lockin on Windows, and that everything Gnome does tends to make the GUI on Linux even worse and mroe unuseable and its developers seem at a loss how to make a flexible and useable GUI, i think linux will remain mainly a botique operating system with some penetration into the server market.
Ive watched people use Ubuntu and the are absolutely baffled. Its not because its a new system, its because the development philosophy (of dumbed down, rigid, inflexible GUIs rather than high levels of flexibility and good layout) is all wrong and the system is simply junk. The more user friendly they try to make it the worse it gets. Somehow Ubuntu has LESS configurability and flexibility, and options than Windows, at the same time it manages to be MORE user unfriendly than windows. This is because the dumbed down GUIs of Ubuntu does NOT make software easy to use. Its layout that does. Software needs to have lots of customizability and allow users to grow into it, as they become experts they can customize more of it. With the default GUI of Ubuntu there is little to grow into.
Many of my users were even scared by the default desktop background that looks like a coffee stain or a dangerous animal. Its the ugliest thing ive seen. What the hell are these people thinking?
Despite the CD being 600 MB it seems there are only a dozen programs avialable on the menu and half of them didnt load properly.
Its good to have a user friendly GUI, but this does not mean dumbed down. This is the mistake that Gnome has made to equate the two. Everything Gnome has done has made the system simply worse, more inflexible, unuseable, and so on. Its layout that matters in a GUI, not scarcity of features. A GUI can have the most features, customizabiliy and tons and tons of extra options for experts, and still be user friendly, if it is well laid out and advanced options are placed in advanced screens. Gnome developers try to push their own tastes on everyone and preferences, instead of letting users decide how to use their computer, and that will not work. The idea should be to make it easy for the user control everything on the computer, not hard. And make it so users can configure as little or as muc
The author says that Linux doesn't have all the available plugins to enjoy the web. What plugins is he talking about? The most commonly used plugin is Flash and it has been available for a while.
Not only that, but Adobe has released a Flash 64-bit plugin for Linux (alpha), and not for Windows. I'm using it right now.
... on the desktop.
There was a time when Windows had USB support, and Linux panicked within 5 minutes of inserting one of those fancy new 512k USB keys. That was a whiiiile ago.
There was a time when Windows had antialiased fonts but not Linux.
When Windows had Media Player and I struggled to play a DVD or the odd .avi in mplayer without it crashing.
When the only decent graphical browser that didn't crash was konqueror, and then it crashed quite a bit.
That was the time when IE was the best browser, although not by much. And that was a long fucking time ago.
Not so long ago, there was a time when you seriously use Linux on a laptop. Couldn't suspend, hibernate, or what have you. Wireless drivers? There was that ONE orinoco thingie or something, and if you could get lucky enough to find one ...
So that was at least 5 years ago.
Today Linux's USB support is vastly superior to any Windows, performance was and so on. Linux doesn't require dodgy third-party drivers. Suspend/hibernate/energy saving features work on 99% of laptops. Wifi works out of the box on most distribs, or at worst requires the DLL compatibility thingie because some vendors still suck (proprietary) cock. We have the best built-in full disk encryption, built-in virtualization, and there's SELinux, which is much better than what Windows has to offer.
Soo, hm yeah, there is this applications thing, or the lack thereof. Really? Most apps now run in a browser window. And what is the situation today, in the browser war? Internet Explorer 8 BETA sucks as much, compared to modern browsers, as early, crashy Mozilla sucked compared to IE 5. And here at the office today, someone had to watch a video sent by the communications dept. Windows couldn't play it. They ended up downloading VLC with Firefox, and it worked great.
So in the end, what's left is games. I'll give you that.
"Yeah, Windows; gotta admit it's better for videogames."
I'm pretty much a full time Linux user, save for times when I want to do music production. I've spent a ton of money of Windows music software, and feel like I shouldn't abandon it. So last month I happened upon JAD and Ubuntu Studio (two music-oriented distros). Let me tell you, they work. And they were set up by the community, not big corporations. More importantly, they allow me to use all my expensive VSTs/VSTis quite easily. The last time I had tried to manually set up a real-time kernel environment that could actually use ASIO, I gave up in frustration. I just could not get all the pieces working. Now because of these two communities, the install took about an hour, plus the install of all my VSTs.
And I get better latency on this machine than I ever did using WinXP.
Granted, this is pretty niche, but apparently big enough for two different non-commercial developer communities to create specialized distros. And you see it with commercial companies as well - Cedega for gaming, Crossover for business apps.
So yeah, corps are important for mass adoption, but don't discount the communities.
For the past 10 years, Linux has done something significant... or sometimes many somethings significant. Each step is incremental and forward and rarely, if ever, a step backward. This cannot be said of Apple or Microsoft.
While I am sure a lot of Linux users would love to see the lights come on and suddenly the entire world say "hey! this linux thing is really cool!" we all know this isn't going to happen... not EVER. What will happen and has been happening is a gradual and cautious encroachment of Linux into territories historically and traditionally occupied by others. Linux is on the edge of the "joe sixpack" user's desktop, but it just hasn't gotten there yet and it isn't for lack of trying. And a variety of things have been tried and are still being tried... mostly, the sale of low-cost computers with Linux pre-installed have been the means. That doesn't seem to be the way just yet.
I am wondering, though, if some sort of IBM.Google.Whatever "Safe Browsing Disc" might be the way. If some Linux supporting company gave these CDs away that will boot on every machine and give users access to their data and to the internet they could claim a "safe internet browsing" system that could be used for a wide variety of purposes. The idea needs a LOT of refinement, but I think the general idea is a good one. But if it was given away as a means of safe browsing, I think it would turn a bunch of people onto Linux who are just looking for ways to use the internet without trashing their Windows installations... and be able to use their comptuers after they have been trashed. If all they have to do is pop in a CD, whoever gave it to them would be a hero... (or a villain depending on the actual results.) THAT would put Linux on the desktop QUICKLY. THAT would allow people to diagnose or even clean/disinfect their machines when their Windows installation was so corrupted that it cannot be fixed any other way. THAT would enable people to see the power of Linux contrasted against their Windows that used to run pretty nice.
There are many pragmatic reasons for a non-geek to switch to linux.
1. Package managers and the ease of installing free software e.g. easy to search for without entering commercial sites laden with ads and sometimes trojans, no EULA type nag screens.
2. Better jukebox software. Amarok can easily rip music off of ipods, which is widely appreciated by non-geeks (some people have their entire music collection trapped on a single ipod, and when linux can make that ipod send its songs to the outside world they become believers).
3. Better video playback software. Even though mplayer and vlc are ported to Mac OS and MS Windows, they work best on linux e.g. smoother playback and response to controls, better OS integration, current feature set closer to developer feature set, etc.
4. Best videogame console emulators. Since many emulators are open source (with notable exceptions) they are primarily developed as linux apps with windows ports that lag behind in features. Also, WINE really does run many recently popular games.
5. Superior performance in all things hard drive related, linux is better at reading, writing, and not going into retarded fits of swapping data to the drive like MS Windows is so fond of doing.
6. Better network security, and better multi-user PC security.
7. More aesthetically and functionally customizable.
What are the current aspects which prevent linux from achieving its critical_point of adoption on the desktop this year?
a. Lack of familiarity with the OS and applications.
b. (really a corollary of 1) Some favorite applications are not availible.
The solution to both (a) and (b) is marketing, which linux does not get very much of and hence the perpetual delay of its year.
What plugins is he talking about?
Quicktime. I have never been able to get all those "buffer overflows" I keep hearing about.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
With all of the infighting doing on between the various factions of Linux, those of Microsoft, and those of Apple, it's clear that 2009 will be the breakthrough year for Ninnle Linux. With Linus Torvalds himself endorsing it and using it on his own desktop, nothing else will even come close. Rumours have been floating around for some time now, that even Gates and Jobs have adopted Ninnle Linux for their own systems. The Ninnle movement has begun in earnest. Bring on 2009, the Year of Ninnle Linux!
That's the only thing that really could push Linux. Have a new platform with convincing power advantages which is binary incompatible with Intel. Not a large problem for Linux since both the OS and almost all of the apps are Open Source and rather easily recompiled for a new platform. Windows on the other hand would have large problems because even if MS would come up with a compatible version of Windows you'd have to wait for a long time until all (or just most) of the millions of commercial apps for Windows would be available for that OS.
Of course it would be hard to get a large enough market for any platform not able to run Windows in the first place...
Can I subscribe to your newsletter?
Seriously, all kidding aside, could you provide a link (or a few) to a simple tutorial for someone new to Video/Audio editing/recording who is interested in doing some simple recording (Guitar) for fun? Using Ubuntu 8.10 (64-Bit)?
I'm somewhate overwhelmed by all the options and would just like something simple to get me started.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Linux killed commercial Unix. Apple killed the Linux Desktop. Honestly, I was one of the people who switch back in 2001/2002 from a dual boot Windows/Linux desktop to an Apple laptop and never looked back. I have my Unix Development stack AND handy commercial applications such as MS Office, Adobe et. al., and Quickbooks. Doesn't sound like much, but having spent the last 5 years in small business, quickbooks pays for itself given the discount my CPA gives me for using it.
The company that I am help found is looking at a very specific market and one of our main selling points is that we're platform agnostic thanks to the use of JAVA. (Say what you will about liking or hating Java, for this arena it works and that is all that counts). If clients have existing Windows installs or likes windows, then we deploy on Windows. But if we get our choice, we develop an installation DVD with OpenSuSE or SLED and our POS system.
Server side we either set them up with an ERP platform hosted on Windows Server, if they already have one, managed FreeBSD (if they are small and don't need or require an in house IT shop), or have them buy servers with SLES.
Why SuSE? It was dumb luck that openSuSE happen to be the first linux Distro that installed out of the box and everything on the development box worked. (Fedora kernel panicked on boot, never got past the Ubuntu set up screen, and PCBSD didn't have the needed print drivers pre-loaded) Later on we found out our Enterprise class database vender deploys on SuSE Enterprise Server as their defacto operating platform. So at that point it just made sense to stick with SuSE until something better comes along.
Also, it gives both us and our customers piece of mind knowing that they can seek support elsewhere if something should happen to us. (Say we get bought out, sold, or we do a bad job: they are free to hire another company to come in and extend or service the set up since everything is OSS). They can also buy the 1-800-Help-With-Linux from Novell if they want too. And most people have at least heard of Novell. So there is a big name company there to provide additional support if needed.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Seriously, real developers can package for multiple distributions in their sleep. This is non-issue.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Here is what MS seems to be doing. Reworking and cutting the price of XP so, combined with existing relationships, the MS based netbook is cheaper than the *nix netbook. Such a product may be more expensive than the base product, but the base product will often be pushed as underpowered.
Then, to emphasise that the user will continue to have the full power of MS behind them, something MS will claim to a loss if the user goes with *nix, MS will point to the growing online offerings. Of course many of these work in any OS, and Google Docs already does what most people want, so it will be another bit of FUD.
MS Windows 7, or whatever it will be, will likely have a variant the runs on Netbooks, as well as a variant that runs on existing PCs. If MS does not recreate the Vista zoo, and only has three or four versions that are targeted toward specific hardware varients, instead of trying to artificially inflate the price of the box products so as to drive hardware sales, they may have a good chance of winning th netbook space.
The netbook space really should belong to *nix. It is a good fit, and the randomness that exists in the PC space has not yet emerged. Unlike the last time we tried the net appliances, the world is actually pretty networked, and the online tools are of a quality to actually compete with the offline equivalents. More importantly, the damage that MS caused to the online space has been repaired.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I've been using Linux since 1995. I remember when people said Linux would never be more than a toy. Then they said it was capable of some neat things, but would never be used in a business. Then they said it could be used for small things in a business, but it'd never scale to the high end. Now, it's fine in a server role, but will never be any good as a desktop...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The reality is any planned rollouts of a Win7 system where the OS costs twice what WinVista (the dog) did, are mostly dead.
Widescale worldwide adoption of Linux is anticipated in most of the business magazines, you IT guys are just buying the MSFT spin and haven't been told by your CEO and CFO to cut costs yet.
But you will.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This may be a bit off-topic but I just came across with this idea when reading your post.
As said in a few posts here, the future of Linux on netbooks and desktops may lie in its good support for non-x86 architectures e.g. ARM. However none of the binary blob plugins seem to be working on that direction. I'm all against the plague of non-standard Web plugins, but if the FOSS implementations of Flash etc. finally turn up with workable products, that would be a greater win than it seems to be: good portability and hardware-independence because the source is there.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
This is the media doing what it does best. One guy publishes a bullshit article claiming Linux will be the second coming, and another attacks it. Both of them generalize everything so that it sounds like it is the end of the world for Windows zealots or the greatest thing ever for Linux zealots, and the flames roll on, driving views and hits (and thus REVENUE).
Starve them out: IGNORE THESE STUPID ARTICLES!
The big problem with all of these predictions, is that it's not clear what "Year of Linux" means. If it means double- or triple-digit growth in installed base, then every year for the last decade has been the "Year of Linux". If it means a majority market share, well, first you have to pick a market segment, because they're very different. Depending on how narrowly you segment the markets, you can find areas where the year of Linux came and went years ago.
So what happens is that each of these pundits looks at the issue from their narrow perspective, and with their definition of what it means to achieve the "Year of Linux", and they make some reasonable projections, which may even be borne out -- but don't match anyone else's perspective or definition.
From my personal perspective and by my definitions of success, Linux is there. It may not be a dominant player in many segments, but it's a viable player in all of them, including on the desktop. Regardless of what Microsoft and Apple do, Linux is not going away, most hardware vendors are paying attention to it, and market share and mind share will continue increasing.
Linux may well never be the dominant player on, for example, the desktop. If it ever achieves that status, it won't do so for years, because even massive year-on-year percentage growth takes a long time when you're starting from a tiny market share. But, regardless of that, I think Linux has arrived as a serious player, and every year will be the "Year of Linux" in some useful sense, for many years to come.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
What do you see Beremiz being used for?
Coming from an industrial automation background, it isn't even close.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
ActiveX to download your updates, duh.
If we keep copying whatever Microsoft implemented 3 years ago, we'll never pass them... What we need are real killer applications in completely new spaces.
Yeah, yeah, people keep saying that. In every thread that in any message board where anyone had declared "the year of Linux on the deskop", someone has tried to argue that "the problem with Linux" is that Linux developers are just trying to copy Windows. And the people making that argument always fail to include the same thing: a single idea on what different/new thing Linux developers are supposed to include.
But the fact is, it's never that easy to come up with a revolutionary idea, and it's often not necessary. What most people use their computers for is still web surfing, email, the word processor, and maybe storing music and pictures. If Linux is enabling people to do those things easily, reliably, and without frustration, then it has already "passed" Windows.
I'd like to add to this my perspective:
First off, if every Linux application developer sets themselves to the task of making their program innovative in some way, you'll wind up with a bunch of different innovative designs - and they may not all fit in with each other. Useful innovation requires clear leadership on the form that innovation will take - and for that clear leadership, striking out in an exciting new direction, to actually yield a good result across a wide range of software, that requires a lot of good thought about the problem, combined with experimentation to see how the design plays out.
Now, combine that with a second factor: when something new and different comes along that's better than what came before, people aren't necessarily going to flock to it right away. To some extent people enjoy staying with what's familiar to them. This is where really good PR and advertising comes in handy. It's not enough to create an exciting new product, you have to get people to use it.
The latter is a problem I've thought a lot about: I want to create a new Unix shell, quite different from the typical ones. I believe it will be a big improvement - but I also recognize that, once it's written, it's going to be an uphill battle to get people to use it.
Basically, when you're talking about "innovation" there is a big advantage to being the company who controls the de-facto standard OS in the computing world - able to make almost any change to the OS without significant fear of losing business, with the resources to make these changes carefully and to get people to embrace them as well. Now, that doesn't mean it always works out right or that Microsoft's designs are always the best for everyone - just that Microsoft has a kind of power to make and promote change that is difficult for Free Software to match.
One final point - I am a big advocate of the idea that, despite common ideas about UI design, a UI isn't (and perhaps can't be) "one size fits all". Most commonly applications are targeted at "normal" users - people who are normally expected to be content within a somewhat limited range of functionality, so long as it's easy and it works right. I think there is room in the world for applications targeted at users like myself - people who are happy to see things like scripting interfaces to an application not only present, but reflected within the UI itself (as in Emacs, for instance). There is not always a huge overlap between these groups and one does not need to "take over" the other. In that sense, the innovative side of Linux is as a proving ground of experimental code for this kind of user. If I can have that, plus be able to watch my video files without issues, then I'm a happy Linux user.
(And speaking of playing video without issues - trying to innovate before getting basic functionality like that working is, in my opinion, the wrong way to go about it... Functionality first - then get fancy...)
Bow-ties are cool.
...but not because of the reasons you think.
It will be because "the desktop" all the prognosticators refer to will go extinct before MSFT will even come close to losing its market dominance in that area. Like the typewriter, it will never go away totally, but it will be a niche. More and more, I notice people doing computing tasks on non-traditional hardware. I know facebook junkies who continually keep their status up-to-date and people who reply to emails in seconds, yet don't turn on their home PC for days (and are blocked on their work PCs). I know people with NAS devices in their basements that play music on various receivers in the house...and they aren't even nerds...and not one of the gadgets runs Windows (nor do they care). People visit internet services on their game consoles..most of which don't run Windows. My television has a network port and can connect to the 'net all on its own...and it doesn't run Windows.
Who needs a "year of the desktop" when the desktop has peaked and is facing eventual decline?
The general population wants what they know and until a Linux distribution is pulled together in a nice, neat, familiar (to mainstream users, meaning Windows) package, they will not buy it.
How come personal computing seems to be the only place where people make this argument? It's not like there is one company that makes 90 percent of all vehicles and it is justified because peole want a "familiar driving experience". Sure, cars all have 4 wheels, a steering wheel and some other basic common elements but every different model puts the wiper controls in a different place, have completely different climate control layouts, some put the shifter on the floor and others on the steering column, they all have different wheel sizes and so on.
Same goes for restaurants. McDonalds is big and successful, and their dining experience is certainly familiar, but it is FAR from being dominant in its industry like MSFT is. In fact, in much of the world McDo is not even the leader in the market (for example, in Canada Tim Horton's is more than double the size of McDonalds). Nobody argues that no other company will succeed anywhere in the world against McDo because people want a "familiar dining experience" and it needs to be the closest restaurant to any given residence.
People are fundamentally the same regarding behaviour and tastes across industries. Familiarity is indeed a competitive advantage, but there are other concerns consumers have. In fact, the argument that Windows is familiar is not even really valid anymore. Vista and Office 2007 are different enough that people have to adjust to them just as much as if they did in switching to a Mac or to Linux. It's like buying a new car--they all have mice, icons, windows, menus and such, and people can adjust. In fact, that unfamiliarity was probably a GOOD thing, because people sometimes DO want a change, if it s a good change.
Notably, performance and reliability are proving to be the challenge to MSFT. Vista was a step backwards on both fronts. XP was honed and tuned for years, and Vista comes out and for all its flashy features, you need twice the computer to do the same basic tasks, and some very fundamental operations were next to useless until SP1 was released. Linux and MacOS offer a modernized experience and in the case of Linux it can be had on inexpensive hardware, as I can attest to in running some pretty Compiz effects on a Sempron PC with 512M of system RAM (a configuration that is just barely practical with Vista Basic and no aero glass interface). Hey...Jaguar autos have always been very pretty but were extremely poor sellers in N America as they were unreliable and didn't preform any better than some less costly alternatives.
It will also need to be packaged with their shiny new HP/Dell/Gateway/whatever.
Well, HP and Dell and Lenovo have made factory installed Linux relatively easy to get. MSFT seems to have lost its tight gr
developers are slowly being dragged away from it
Fixed that for ya.
Everyone knows that the year of Linux is always next year.
As with any device, I only care about what I can do with it.
If a computer (regardless of the OS installed) allows me to plug in my camera, edit my pictures, email my pictures and then print them on a common printer then (subsitute Windows with Linux) you have won me over...
Ease of use and peripherals are needed for Linux to gain a better following.
Remember - Amiga 2000's were used for Video Toasters back in the 1990's and no one cared about which OS was what as long as it worked, and it did until Lightwave 3D was ported to Windows and Commodore went bankrupt... FYI
I used to be a big fan of Palm. For the life of me I have NO IDEA WHAT THEY HAVE BEEN DOING.
I don't think they do, either - not for the last five or six years at least. I'm sure selling off their OS seemed like a good idea at the time (the time when other companies besides Palm made PalmOS devices)
It's kind of sad - they were in decline ever since their peak in 2000 or so, and they had one damn good shot at a comeback, which was their success with the Treo 600 and 650... For a while it really was the best smartphone out there - good browser, good form factor, good display... But it only took, what, a couple years for the competitors to catch up?
Six years of PACE (and more recently, NVFS) was enough to kill my interest in Palm development, and with it any interest in getting another Palm device. It's too late for them - competitors have been providing better products for too long, their momentum as the former kings of handheld computing is long gone... Time for something else.
Bow-ties are cool.
Year of the Linux desktop? Why do we hear this every year. I personally had my "Year of the desktop" two years ago. I had a surgery and was off work for 6 weeks and wanted to give Linux a real try as my desktop. I had been using RH or Mandrake in a dual boot setup for years but always went back to Windows when I didn't want to be bothered trying to figure something out in Linux. Since I had so much time on my hands, I wiped clean my desktop and tried Kubuntu. It took 2 weeks of everyday use until I realized I found myself missing my own PC when I had to use a Windows based PC.
After four weeks, I figured I had a pretty good grasp and decided to switch out my in-laws Vista basic for Ubuntu. I made it look like Vista Aero and I have not had any more evening tech support trips to thier house. I showed them how to install things via Synaptic and it was the best move I have ever made as far as an admin. I got tired of "fixing" everyone's computer on a weekly basis, now I tell them if I come over they are getting Ubuntu. 5 PC's later and I find I rarely have to go to their houses for tech support. I actually got a call from my mother-in-law asking if I would come over for coffee since she never sees me anymore!
Anyways, what I am getting at is this: Linux is already a viable solution for the masses. It has passed the grandma test, it has passed the wife (mine) test, and it has passed the child (my 6 year old) test. Once people realize they don't need (or really even want) their software in a retail box, they can move to Linux.
Now if people are wanting to classify the year of Linux as a Best Buy flyer advertisement boasting Linux, I don't think I ever want that day to come. Think about it: a bunch of crapware slowing down the PC, trailware galore, services that no one needs... it would only be to our detriment. OEM's would only supply drivers in these instances and not make them available in a repository. It would worse thing that could happen to my beloved "hobbyist" OS.
I run Linux on the desktop and it works wonderfully for me. I edit my photos, create hdr images, watch DVDs, run Maple on occasion, test perl and java code for my job. I use Windows to do some video editing.
Every so often someone comes up to me and complains that they can't get some random Linux distro to work on their brand spanking new laptop. I help them out. But then they complain when they they can't understand Gimp or tell me that their Windows machine plays quicktime fine.
I really don't give a rat's ass if it doesn't work for them. It works like a charm for me. If Linux one day rules the computing world I won't stand in its way, but I can't stand these pundits and other idiots who think that the Linux community owes them a mass appeal desktop.
Go straight for consumer devices running Linux.
davecb5620@gmail.com
1. Because Windows has become the baseline 2. Because Macs are expensive 3. Because Windows desktop program presentation "seems" more coherent, smooth, tight (fonts, etc) even after much customization, which most people will never do. 4. Because Windows comes loaded on most Desktops 5. Because most people don't care about design origins, security advantages, etc. When was the last time Grandma's machine was hacked? 6. Because most people have been socialized to the ways of windows, and culture doesn't change overnight. shall I go on?
1. Article funded by Microsoft claims it won't be.
2. UN announces worldwide laptop program will run on Linux not Windows 7.1.2
3. IE drops below 90 percent market share.
4. CIOs announce no plans to roll out Windows 7 due to budget cutbacks.
5. China, having held Olympics already, moves to more secure Linux.
6. Penguins, dislocated due to global warming, take up residence in people's homes in Florida.
7. Large spheres land worldwide, and disgorge robots which say "Exterminate Windows! Exterminate!" - Windows programmers die worldwide in fits of laughter, and must be removed as biological hazards.
8. Major magazine columnists write columns explaining why we all need to pay $500 for an OS for a $500 PC and nobody reads their columns.
9. President Obama's plans for Rebuilding America don't have a line item for Windows 7 rollouts anywhere, no matter how hard you look.
and ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Linux usability is moving forward at a prodigious rate. Windows is not developing at the same speed because of its flawed design legacy. When ANY Linux system sells to a consumer, that implies that the MARKET, not a geek, is deciding - and the market is doing so without the power of expensive MS or Apple advertising programs. The gist that the article misses is this fact: it's now a matter of when it happens, not whether it happens.
*** Don't be dull.***
... improve sound and video configuration in linux...
/dev/dsp or /dev/sound should not be allowed to be locked by regular applications.
Presence of usable/working elementary things like the above would make a novice user use linux, not excessive "slow" eye candy of KDE4...
1) Configuring a multi-monitor setup should be EASY for a novice user, and they should be able to use a system GUI for that purpose, not an ATI or NVIDIA third party GUI, after a long mess with xorg.conf.
2) Sound setup should be as simple as in Windows. If there is a valid sound driver present, the sound should just work for any application. No configuration of complicated sound daemons should be necessary.
Maybe we don't need a killer app to make Linux used everywhere. If someone invented a processor architecture that would be a lot faster than x86, and if linux was already ported to that platform then Linux would be the only OS that could run on that platform. The problem is that all software is x86, but that problem would be solved if this new platform is so fast that it can emulate x86 faster than x86 processors can run... ARM is designed for low power usage, and thus is not what we need. We need a processor that can deliver the most MIPS and FLOPS with less power, with a lower price. Most x86 processors does after all use a RISC core emulating a CISC. Maybe the new CELL architecture is the answer... Then all we need is someone to produce consumer PCs with it, that outperforms all our current x86 PCs.
This leads me to the conclusion that linux is basically a mature product, which has reached the top of it's development cycle and is, for all intents and purposes, in its maintenance mode and therefore in decline.
However, it's not alone: Windows peaked with XP and it too, is suffering from bloat, lack of innovation and decline, also.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
As another replier posted to your comment, Flash is one of the plugins that does not work. Flash works fine on your desktop, as long as its running an X86 (or increasingly, an X64 processor) but not if your running an ARM, RISC, or any other low power architecture processors that are starting to gain in popularity. They are binary, and are not necessarily compiled for other architectures as easily as linux can be. (Ubuntu now supports ARM processors, btw)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I'm a midline user of Windows, and I'm interested in Linux. However, it really feels like a foreign language with the culture shock that implies.
It feels like I'm in a weird class of exceptions "who don't count". I have a typical install of uBuntu Dapper Drake.
I want to upgrade Firefox, and it simply JustDoesn'tWork.
I get cascading layers of other dependencies to upgrade. Sorry, but for nervous newcomers, that's hard. For what is arguably a flagship transition-to-Linux app (Firefox), I find that really frustrating.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
My dad runs a robotics engineering company that he started in my home, and I've been involved in quite a bit of work on projects for Honda, Hyundai, Daimler-Chrysler, etc., PLC programming generally, although I've done tons of build and wiring jobs for him as well. Medical devices as well. Pretty much done the industrial automation thing from a hobbyist perspective my whole life.
A few things: I think this provides the average guy, immediately, with an intuitive (and scalably awesome) way to build his HID, as well as run it. The "any computer is a PLC, or two or three" concept is very nice, as virtualizing PLCs and just using ladder logic on 'interconnected' bits in software is just obvious as hell. I'm not suggesting a robot at a Hyundai plant will run on this software tomorrow, but telling a guy "here's a kit, you can make some awesomeness with it. And it's free, just put it on that spare PC you have." is powerful, extremely. It's like Arduino gone a bit more hardcore.
Anyway, I'm a huge believer in empowering individuals for big results though.
-knewter
How's this for 2008 as the year of the linux desktop: Here's Adobe's page for a 64-bit flash player. Basically, it says, you must run a 32 bit browser, no 64 bits for you! Now, here's the announcement from adobe labs for the release of the alpha of the native 64 bit LINUX flash 10 player. Yes, that's right...linux actually got some badly needed mainstream software BEFORE windows and os x. I think that's just awesome! I have no idea if it was incidental or intentional or what, but thank you Adobe.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
The article goes on to skewer the year of Linux thing that seems to show up on pretty much every tech news site throughout December and January as lazy editors round out their year with softball trolling stories and "Year End Lists." We should compile a year-end list about this :)
Taco whinging about lazy editors... there's a hypocrite for you. Is the difference between Slashdot and all those "other" tech news sites the fact that Slasdot editors are lazy year-round? How about getting your own house in order pal!
Palm will save Linux? Wow, is that twisted. First of all, Linux doesn't need saving. Secondly, Palm couldn't save their own butt with help from a thousand amorous spider-monkeys.
I have no idea where that came from. I may have accidentally doubled-up on my allergy medication...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Seeing Asus EEE's and Acer Aspire One's on the shelf at Best Buy & Target, seeing billboards on the way to work from Amazon for the OLPC Give-One-Get-One deal, all the hype around the T-Mobile "GPhone", on top of all the existing embedded usage in SOHO routers, etc., and I'd say we're already here.
That MS hasn't imploded from it all isn't an issue, however desirable it may be. They appear to have shot themselves in the corporate foot quite thoroughly with Vista, there appears to be no salvation in sight from their next version, so one could expect a slow but steady increase, especially given the economic situation, of individuals and businesses looking at Linux as an alternative. We're visible and becoming more so.
What plugins is he talking about?
ActiveX FTW!
There were a few more independent Linux porting groups; Loki Entertainment comes to mind (defunct, but website LOKI.COM still there from ICCULUS.ORG share). Now, there are OEM's and developers including documentation with their hardware suggesting their support of Linux if not including a 3rd-party driver or their own closed-source support. Linux is making great strides in that regard of application support; most independent porting groups like Loki have disappeared because developers of the original titles are considering a code tree with their intent, even if there is only a subdirectory called "linux" that has a README file saying "no linux support. evar." In that regard, Linux could be looked upon as a giant Rick Roll when developers go out of their way to answer all the forum requests that they will not support linux. The ones that do provide a compile-base, look where it has got them: what is Linux? Exactly, if they support Linux then supporting BeOS, any of the *BSD's, Solaris, Tru64, a *VMS, *cough* UnixWare *cough*, and especially OSX is just a byte-order preparation and mis-compile away for that flavor. That's a much wider market share right there, and the debugging abilities of shared libraries and well-written code means that you could just close all your code to a dynamic link of your open-source libraries and let the bug-fixing come down to what the user-base is willing to manipulate. Sound code, extensible, is kind of like how ID Software's Doom and Quake2 engines have been re-used by other development groups, yet that is a bad example because as we can see re-usable code is more like how open-source C or perhaps Basic and Perl or Python have become in terms of maintenance. All they have to do is drop a few seeds and they'll germinate by the effort someone else makes in spilling a little water of effort. In terms of supporting crippled software, that's how Microsoft has continued the illusion of security and stability by compelling its user-base and external hardware market to center on its platform by legal switchcraft and bribery to continue a dilapidated frankenware of 4th-party international-government intervention called RIAA, MPAA, NSA, DARPA, and oh yes that Abraham Lincoln incorporation in district of Columbia called "United States" according to Title 28 US Code 3002 15b.
There has been RealPlayer support for Buffering... some time now.
QamuIs Heg qaq law' lorvIs yInqaq puS
If Linux wants to get big like Windows, then Linux needs to create a development environment that encourages closed-source, intellectual property loving, for profit software developers.
If this is anathema to the true GNU believers, then they are merely being shortsighted. Linux is already better than Windows. Any idiot can see that. Developers use Windows because they think that they can make money in Windows. When developers don't use Linux, the reason must be that the developers don't think that they can make money using Linux.
The Linux community should stop focusing on making cool Linux programs (for now). The community should devote most of its new effort to creating a development environment that makes it trivially easy to port a Windows or Mac program to Linux.
Windows was successful because it cultivated closed-source developers. Linux will only become that successful if it also cultivates closed source developers. This is screamingly obvious.
Once the closed source developers migrate to Linux, then Linux gets really interesting and political. It may not remain the same techno-elite benevolent dictatorship that it is now, but it will be interesting! The techno-elite can then reap the benefits of the GPL by harvesting improvements of GPL'd Linux code that are made at the behest of the for-profit closed source people.
In other words, EMBRACE for-profit-closed-source developers. EXTEND them a generous and profitable helping hand that allows them to port their products to Linux. EXTINGUISH Windows, when they--and their users--figure out how much better the Linux world is.
...but not because of the reasons you think.
It will be because "the desktop" all the prognosticators refer to will go extinct before MSFT will even come close to losing its market dominance in that area. [SNIP] How come personal computing seems to be the only place where people make this argument?[SNIP]
Linux is making some good strides into other devices and will likely gain a nice market share there. It's true that a lot of people are switching to alternative devices for email and basic internet browsing, but PCs are hardly going away. Regardless, my post wasn't about Linux, the savior of the computing/tech world. It was about Linux on the desktop, in response to the story, only.
It's not like there is one company that makes 90 percent of all vehicles and it is justified because peole want a "familiar driving experience".[SNIP]Same goes for restaurants.
I know car analogies are standard here, but cars (and restaurants) and operating systems are hardly the same thing. Average people have a basic understanding of what a car does (even if they don't know anything about the engineering and science involved) and they certainly understand food. Computing in general and software especially are like black magic to a lot of folks. They barely know how to make Windows work, so they stick with what they know. They obviously know how to eat food and cars basically all drive the same. Linux is kind of like buying a car with no oil in it and with no tires. People COULD make it work, but normal people wouldn't buy a car like that.
[SNIP]In fact, the argument that Windows is familiar is not even really valid anymore. Vista and Office 2007 are different enough that people have to adjust to them just as much as if they did in switching to a Mac or to Linux.
Yes and no... They're different, but they're made by the same company, which scares them less. They may get frustrated with it, but they know it's 'safe.' It goes back to what I said about viruses and boxed software. It's been drilled into their heads that it's not okay to download things.
It's like buying a new car--they all have mice, icons, windows, menus and such, and people can adjust.
But we're talking about software functionality, not just the input devices. Like you said, cars all have steering wheels, etc. That's great. What? They work differently under the hood? Your average driver will barely know the difference beyond having more or less power in one car versus another. It's different under the hood, but the differences are transparent to the user.
Notably, performance and reliability are proving to be the challenge to MSFT. Vista was a step backwards on both fronts. XP was honed and tuned for years, and Vista comes out and for all its flashy features, you need twice the computer to do the same basic tasks, and some very fundamental operations were next to useless until SP1 was released. Linux and MacOS offer a modernized experience and in the case of Linux it can be had on inexpensive hardware, as I can attest to in running some pretty Compiz effects on a Sempron PC with 512M of system RAM (a configuration that is just barely practical with Vista Basic and no aero glass interface). Hey...Jaguar autos have always been very pretty but were extremely poor sellers in N America as they were unreliable and didn't preform any better than some less costly alternatives.
True, and that helps Linux. Somewhat like what I was getting at when I said "Microsoft stumbled."
Well, HP and Dell and Lenovo have made factory installed Linux relatively easy to get.[SNIP]
Yes, they do, but can you honestly tell me that most average people know about that? More often than not, Linux models are buried far enough into the site that you don't see them unless you're looking for them. Even if an average user saw them, he wouldn't
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
Its going to take the removal of any command line usage for mass adoption to do things like install software and setup drivers. I still have no idea what the commands mean or do, when i need to get something done, i search and find it on a forum somewhere some random letters and slashes and magically things work. As much as die hard linux users love the command line. Average people want a gui to set up things that does nothing but works. Once linux gets there, it'll stomp MS. Till then, it'll be only for hard core linux heads and those that have a hard core linux head on constant stand by to fix things.
Most of the tags I see are correct - other than the last one "story".
IMHO, that should read "same *old* propaganda".
But I use linux all the time and I'm avoiding the flame wars thanks.
Byeee.
Does it matter if there ever is a "year of the Linux desktop"? ....Not to me.
We have several flavors of Linux to choose from, from the my-mom-can't-use-it Slackware, to my-mom-uses-it Ubuntu, SuSe, Fedora, and plenty more.
Who cares if I can't buy a Linux-loaded PC at Best Buy or other chain stores? I don't buy my PC's or parts from big box stores anyway, wtf does it matter if they carry preloaded Linux systems.
These "year of the Linux des...blahblahblah" stories are getting old. I don't want more masses of idiots using the same OS I do, or they are going to ask me for help the way they used to with Windows. It's still an incredibly useful OS, regardless of whether anyone else thinks so, or it gains "widespread adoption"[which it has].
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
1. Pick a distro unlike your favorite. For example, if you use Ubuntu, choose Mandriva.
2. Install the new-to-you distro in VirtualBox.
3. Now, using the command line, try to change the new-to-you distro's configuration, or set up a server or something like that.
4. Experience the frustration of missing familiar commands, bizarre distro-specific ways of doing things, weird file locations, funky startup scripts.
5. Rinse and repeat.
6. Now imagine the experience if you were not a Slashdot uber-geek.
It's not that any distro's way of doing things is wrong, it's just that it is sometimes so different it's confusing and discouraging. And it's mostly different for 'religious' reasons rather than practical ones.
See? No wonder we have an annual "Year of Linux".
with existing Linux distributions doing their best to look like Windows, and do everything that Windows can do.
This annoys me more than anything about some distro's. The iPhone didn't try to look and feel like Windows and look at its success. If Window Manager designers would get this through their heads IMHO Linux as a desktop would finally excel. Make Linux have a unique look and feel that attracts people to it.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
He obviously has not used any Linux distro within the past 2-3 years. A plain vanilla install of Ubuntu, Fedora or even OpenSolaris can do all of that and then some. For free (as in beer).
The old-time reporter kept stories in his head for the days when he was too sloshed to do any real work.
The only hardware barrier to MS Office and Windows on the XO-1 was 1 or 2 GB of flash.
The 1.6 GHz $400 Windows XP ATOM netbook at Walmart has a 9" screen, 1 GB of RAM and a 160 GB HDD.
This is quite plausibly a Vista Basic or Win-7 netbook.
You could do worse than hit the Christmas shopping season at that price point with a CPU released no earlier than April the same year.
The "Year of the Netbook" was a win for Windows.
I wrote earlier today that this year's stocking stuffer for the Windows PC is the $200 pocket HD camcorder.
"All those wonderful toys" are for the PC and the Mac. Walmart.com doesn't point you to so much as a printer.
The integrated HDTV tuner? The Blu-Ray drive? The humongous HDD? The 64 Bit OS with all the RAM you can eat for $800? The gamer's PC at a deep discount price?
Pure fantasy.
If you doing your shopping at WalMart - as most of us are these days - OEM Linux lies six feet under.
Barely visible and scarcely worth the exhumation.
Maybe the 'Year of KDE' or 'Year of GNOME' made more sense.
Why would Linux want a year anyway? It's cool because it's hard, get over it.
And to complain that popular Linux desktops try too hard to emulate Microsoft/Windows (who themselves have never been noted for a wealth of original ideas) seems kind of comical.
What I will say about Windows is, barring some of the amazing missteps with Vista, the OS is fairly consistent and that leads to usability. Linux distros are gaining ground here (obviously with companies like Canonical leading the charge), but I still haven't used one where I feel like I'm using a system that was designed top to bottom as a system. They still feel like a series of pieces, which seems natural enough considering that's the beauty of them, the very reason we have these choices. But while a geek may find it fascinating or simply expected and end-user finds inconsistency burdensome or confusing.
Then there is that schism in our community regarding the pros and cons of accepting or supporting closed software. Will we recreate all the necessary applications ourselves or concede and hope we gain enough traction to attract the vendors who have embraced Apple or Microsoft?
But these smaller experiments are more interesting anyway. With Android and the netbook markets I see good opportunities to see what happens when we try to create truly consumer-oriented products. Even try to get a little more cozy with the very developers some of us have considered the enemy.
With a little good faith and possibly a few at least somewhat unpopular decisions and '09 might be even more interesting.
Why do they give so many brainless retards mod points?
You are a retard and I am better than you.
That is all.
The "year of Linux" thing gets about as boring/delusional/repetitive as the tired old claim of "this is the year that Microsoft (server versions of windows) will finally kill Unix/Linux/etc. in the data center!"
yeah. right. more hot air and attempts to sell articles.
Linux netbooks tend to have very little storage. The equivalent Windows netbooks have 120 gig hard drives and 1 or 2 gig memories. The undersizing is probably the main reason people take them back.
If I get one, I will take advantage of the fact that the Windows netbooks are XP, squash the Windows partition on the hard drive, and install Linux as dual boot, with it being the default OS.
My biggest problem with Vista is that it will not let you reduce the hard drive partition below half its installed size, but I want to get it down to 20%.
Well, Dapper Drake is getting pretty dated. It's no longer officially supported by the Ubuntu team. Your best bet would be to stick in a LiveCD for Hardy Heron (8.04) or Intrebid Ibex (8.10) and do a fresh install.
Before doing so, copy your entire home directory off to some other media; another computer, an external hard drive, whatever. When you re-install, select a manual partition of your hard drive. Carve off a partition for /home. Complete the install normally, then copy your data back over.
Then, the next time you need to do a full upgrade, you won't be forced to do the copy off, copy back routine if you don't want to. Just select manual partition again and tell the install script not to format the partition dedicated to /home. Makes doing Linux upgrades sooo much nicer than Windows! :)
Cut 20% of the features and make some good looking UI's.
Foobar 2000 is a great player and every time i try to make my friends use it they almost puke.
Same thing goes with linux. Ubuntu brown is really bad. Openoffice looks like a cheap version of Office 97.
One more thing, grey ain't the color for everything. And lets get a good Interface design page up for everyone to get some decent ideias about it.
When i did interfaces at college we had to do some field tests to the program. This that for a geek where intuitive would be a major break dealer to most.
Well I use my netbook as an appliance, not a laptop. So the 4G ssd is a non-issue for me. There are 2G free on there still and I've been using it for almost a year now on a daily basis. Plus with the handy SD card slot, which I use if I want to save anything, it makes it easy to transfer info I've been working on off the netbook and to a desktop. Or I just email it to myself if it's not sensitive information.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Can't RTFA right now, but were they talking about the ARM Netbooks mentioned in the summary? If so, that might be missing Adobe Flash. I'd assume there is some sort of ARM port of Java. Plus, I haven't seen any web apps needing Silverlight aside from some MS-related sites.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
First of all, with Moore's law this means that a few months later, netbooks *will* be powerful enough.
It says no such thing.
Basically, Moore's observation is that the density of ICs doubles every 18 months, even though the components themselves don't get more expensive. You can extend that to say things like "computers double in crunching power every 18 months." You cannot say that computers will get better in every way!
And in some ways they get worse. More transistors means more electricity and shorter battery life. Batteries are getting better, but not in the exponential way ICs do.
ARM chips are fundamentally less powerful than the Intel chips used in most PCs. That's not a defect — they're designed that way. Moore's law may make them smaller and more cost-effective, but it can't make them more powerful. Because that would mean more transitors, which would mean more electricity, which would mean shorter battery life. And that defeats the purpose of using ARM instead of Intel in the first place.
I'm kind of oversimplifying with my comparison of ARM and Intel. Intel also makes low-power Atom chips. But these chips make the same tradeoff that ARM does: less processing power for longer battery life. Chips that want to conserve power will always be less powerful than those that don't, and Moore's Law doesn't change that.
Well the provided Linux distribution on the EEE PC runs way slower than a lightly tweaked XP. So maybe 2009 will be the year of Linux *free* sales on notebooks. But the reason isn't about speed, it's about license money. I bought my EEE with Linux preinstalled and it was gone ASAP when I found out how slow it was. So even sales number can't tell the real percentage of effective usage.
I was in Best Buy (oops) the other day and so a HP mini running XP ($400). It was about 5 times faster than my Linux-loaded eee 701 ($400 at the time of purchase a year ago).
the VISTA delusion!
Even Microsoft thinks so. That's why they are in a rush to replace it with Windows 7.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
It's frustrating, because you're doing it totally wrong.
You say you've got Ubuntu installed. Look for a program called Synaptic, or Adept. It'll ask for your root password when you start it.
Once it is running, look around for a search bar. Type what you want to do in the search bar. Not the name of the program, what you want to do. In this case, instead of 'firefox' you would type in 'web browser'.
You'll get a list of programs that may or may not meet your needs. Read the descriptions. Choose to install what you think will be interesting. Most programs are set up to put an icon on your start bar menu.
As a new user, your better off only getting programs from the official repositories. Once you've got your feet under you, it's not to hard to stray, but stay where it is safe for the time being. All the dependancies and such have already been worked out for you.
Adept/Synaptic/Yum ARE the killer apps for Linux.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
an area where Linux competes on an equal footing with Windows products (netbooks)
I'm not sure it does, at least in the two countries (Spain and the UK) where I've been round shops looking at netbooks. With one exception (Tesco, the biggest UK supermarket chain) all of them had more Windows netbooks than Linux ones. Moreover, and curiously, there was very little overlap between the hardware specs of the Linux and Windows netbooks.
The general trend was that the Linux ones had 512MB of RAM and small SSDs whereas the Windows ones had 1GB of RAM and large magnetic drives. My best guess is that those were the tradeoffs they needed to put the price point in the desired range, but the upshot is that it's not exactly a level playing field, especially as most people won't understand the SSD/magnetic distinction* and will think that the Windows machines have strictly better hardware at the same price.
* I thought 160MB was a typo until it occurred to me that it might not be an SSD.
I had my "Year of Linux" quite a while ago. I've been implementing Linux based services in every company I've worked for in the last 10-12 years.
I for one welcome our self-washing-kitten overlords
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
Nobody wants Vista and Windows 7 is just Vista rebranded. It may well be the year of Apple and Linux.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
> And I in turn reject yours. So I'm a naive Windows user installing linux for the first time. What the hell is a Gnome or a KDE? Which one do I want? In fact, which distro do I want? This is a whole layer of confusion that Windows and OSX don't have.
Well, Gnome is like Vista Ultimate and KDE is like Vista Premium.
Now, you can get others, too, that are a bit like Vista Home or Vista Business, but let's not get into all of those. I don't know if I have one to match up with all the different kinds of Vista, especially the ones that leave out certain features due to anti-trust settlements and whatnot.
I totally agree. I installed XP for my bro last night... used gparted to repartition (so easy) and got the XP pro cd key from the bottom of his ASUS laptop. Insert windows ( half hour later ) prompted for CD key. Try legitamate key ... doesn't work. WTF! So have to use 'borrowed' key ... half hour later prompted for region and password ... half hour later prompted for network settings ... finished. Now to hunt for bloody drivers! (nvidia was a pain in the arse for a geforce GO 7300). I haven't tried but Ubuntu live CD would remove need for the gparted CD, ask all questions at the start and take ~20 mins to install everything! Nvidia would be apt-get easy to install, although all hardware would probably be supported ... the hardware that is not would need some forum hunting to get to the bottom of. Bottom line ... I would prefer to install Ubuntu.
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
Without Linux and its kin (BSD and, especially, UNIX), the Internet would be a mere shadow of what it currently is, IF it would even exist at all.
All this talk I always hear about the fabled "Year of Linux" always fails to mention the little fact that, without Linux and Open-Source technology, a lot of the tech we have today would not exist or would be prohibitively expensive.
So enough of this sensationalist hype, OK? The Year of Linux came when the Internet took off, and we've been living in the Year (or years) of Linux ever since. When Microsoft and Apple can compete with the Internet, then it will be their year. Until then, let them play catch-up.
Calling a sword by a pretty name is no more than adding perfume to poison.
(And speaking of playing video without issues - trying to innovate before getting basic functionality like that working is, in my opinion, the wrong way to go about it... Functionality first - then get fancy...)
And who exactly is doing that? I've been using mplayer to play videos on Linux without issues since 2002.
It depends on the videos, of course. The version of VLC currently in Debian has awful problems with subtitles (it makes them huge when you go to fullscreen mode) - though I believe that bug's already been fixed in the version on debian-multimedia... Until recent versions of mplayer I couldn't get soft subtitles from ogg and mkv files at all.
With either version I had serious issues trying to play DVDs - some crashes and some seriously messed-up display. I'll be generous and say it could be an interaction between marginal-level defects in the DVD's encoding and the app playing it...
VLC has bugs where attempting to jump forward or back using keyboard shortcuts sometimes sends you back to the beginning of the file (for certain video formats, I guess...) I have had issues with various players not always cleaning up its child processes, too.
Of course, the situation is a lot better than it used to be. I remember "gtv" being a big improvement over "xanim"... Things are moving forward - I just think there's still a lot to do in terms of basic functionality (not just talking about video players, here...), and it's probably worth focusing on that before we try to get too fancy...
Bow-ties are cool.
The use of the linux desktop & notebook distro's is rising gradually all the time, and doesn't boom cause the general population (users of most pc's & notebooks) doesn't go for the best but for the most common. On the other side, in the industry we see that free software has won & merged with proprietary software rather well, just look at the numbers at netcraft, google, wikipedia, tivo, all those devices, robocar's, the us army and what not else. I don't agree that gnu/linux (or bsd or ....), are not inventive and triying to copy stuff from microsoft, just look how and where they are used.
I think the common sense description of a perfect mainstream consumer desktop includes also being a perfect hassle-free entertainment platform: gaming and media. OS-X is great in media, but it still sucks in gaming. Linux and media are not as hassle-free as can be. However since youtube became dominant so did the flash media format. As Adobe had their flash player for Linux and now even 64-bit Linux the old media format war became less of a moving target. VLC also made media on Mac-OSX and Linux a lot less of a hassle. Gaming is still a hassle. Despite Wine and Darwine which enables playing windows games on Linux, it's just not good enough to describe it as completely hassle-free experience.
Despite Linux being used in increasing number of consumer devices (routers, media streaming devices, etc), it is still not a easily recognized brand by mainstream consumers. It's nice to know that an increasing number of people are enjoying having a choice. More people seem swap their dull grey boxes for Imacs, their slow windows mobile devices for Iphones, crappy mp3 players for Ipods. It's also nice to see computing platforms innovate and get mainstream adoption. It's sure great to see people buy netbooks with ubuntu Linux and gladly accept something new to them like ubuntu.
But don't forget those people who don't like the perception of change. They connect change with something new to learn, they are addicted by this perception and are so addicted to Windows. Those people maybe didn't know at the time of buying their new netbook runs some thing else than windows. They maybe didn't even know there was anything else like windows all together. They are the ones to return their netbook to the store, just because it "has no Windows".
Like Apple, Linux having a community is a great thing. Windows doesn't have an outspoken community. The Microsoft community is a silent and addicted one, people who fear choice or change. But Linux still lacks the PR to make people aware that Linux is not just for hi-tec elitist and that they don't have to learn everything from scratch again. Mac-OS and Windows are backed by powerful PR machines of their owners Microsoft and Apple. Having freedom of choice (beer or something else) is it's greatest power, but also it greatest weakness (from the PR point of view). Linux is in need of a new PR model, fueled by the community and the mainstream media.
Gaming and PR, Linux has fought tougher battles and got stronger blow by blow. It is the ever growing creep. Linux will just keep creeping into our life, as it did long before the terms "Linux" and "Business Model" could be mentioned into one sentence. But for those of use who have been using Linux distro's a long time, have seen it changing:
The linux creep is underestimated. Linux will just creep as slowly as ever did or maybe be even more. No one has been able to stop it unil this date, not Microsoft and not Apple. Games, media all remaining will be assimilated, resistance to the linux creep is futile.
Every elitist or freedom ideologist knows linux, because the community was able to spread the holy world. Now it's time the mainstream component of the community starts to evangelise. And this is happening already, but their voice is just not loud enough this moment. As mainstrea
this is still Slashdot, right?
Well, Christians have been waiting for about 2000 years for some guy to come back to earth somehow. How many years have the Linux faithful been announcing the immanent Year of the Linux Desktop? Less than 20 years. That's over a factor of 100 less. Go Linux.
>users installing software and performing tasks outside of the sandbox offered by the package manager.
Why do distro makers think the solution to making software easy to install on Linux is to make a bigger pacakge repository?
It's way easier to get the sofware you want for Windows or OSX, because you can just get a binary installer for it. They never needed some overengineered package manager, just a stable set of ABIs.
Today I still can't install Firefox 3 on my distro because of library version skew, and the fact distro makers won't let you install new software without upgrading your entire distro.
Really, I'm tired of either living with old software or having to spend hours getting the dependencies to build it from source! Just give me a stable ABI and an installer any day of the week.
It's true, I do use Ubuntu on my desktop PC at home and there's an NSLU2 running Linux as well, so we're not unfamiliar with it, but the price of the smallest EEEPC (linux only) is now $327AUD which suddenly makes it a helluva bargain compared with a second hand notebook. You'll be seeing them everywhere, very soon.
THAT is the problem.
Too often, the adoption of Linux isn't being driven by user choice or market forces, it's being driven by ideology and politics.
Your target is the third world education minister and your driving force, El Presidente, elected for life.
But El Presidente exits the stage.
The petro king finds a new hobbyhorse to ride - and funding for the XO-1 heads South. The Green Party in your coalition loses strength in the municipal elections. You have won the elite, but you have never won the masses.
The mandate is a subtle and dangerous temptation for the geek - who is fundamentally technocratic not libertarian and more in tune with the cathedral than the bazaar.
To be fair about this, though, Microsoft also does a lot of copying of others, including Linux-based distros and their components.
Linux distros in general, I think, tend to have a much better packaging and distribution system than Microsoft, but it's not making Linux distros stand out. Until recently, Open Source organisations and developers provided a much better web browser than Microsoft, and many people would say they still do. These are things that Microsoft will probably copy sooner or later, just as others (including OSS developers) copy Microsoft.
The 'Year of the Linux Desktop' is never achieved because nobody actually knows or cares about what it is. I've been using Linux distros (mostly Debian) for my desktop for about 6 years now, and it works perfectly for me. Does this mean 2002 was the "year of the Linux Desktop"?
Unless anyone actually defines it with something measurable, and a certain way to determine if Microsoft stuff has actually been surpassed, it'll never happen because these sorts of stories and comparisons are never serious anyway. They'll only pick out things to make the article sound interesting enough to get readers, and typically that means pointing out flaws.
Perhaps if people looked back at 2008 and explained why it was the "year of the linux desktop" instead of trying to find reasons that it wasn't, everyone might feel better about themselves and they could go for pony rides or boat rides or something.
I wonder when the Linux community will realize that Linux really doesn't apply. There are really about two dozen different operating systems with Linux and Distro attached all competing with each other.
They also have the desktop manager problem to solve.
When the "Linux" installer just installs the OS and when I can download any executable that says "Linux" and install it without having to track down 3 or 4 other distros libraries or even 3 or 4 other open source projects worth of dependencies. Then and only then will Linux start to be a viable desktop platform.
I have the same pet peeve with open source project software that requires me to find and install other open source libraries or projects before they will run. It's annoying and a waste of my time. So, with all of you guys screaming that closed source software is so bad, at least its self contained and it just installs.
Why bother
'And, oh yeah, Palm might save Linux, too.'
You mean Linux might save palm right? Linux is growing, not dying. Why do we need a year of the Linux desktop? Linux will keep plodding along if this is this is the coming decade of the Linux desktop.
Last year, I continued using Linux while trying several Linux distros and Desktops on VMWare (Windows host).
This year, I continued using Linux while trying several Linux distros and Desktops on VMWare (Windows host).
Next year, I will continue using Linux while trying several Linux distros and Desktops on VMWare (Windows host).
If I ever need performance or need to run an app that won't work virtualized, I'll find a machine to install it onto without virtualization.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I realy dont understand the buzz about linux on a ARM as if it is something new only linux could do. /word etc etc.
If you want to close your eyes okay, ok slashdot is i gues funded by SUN, it would explain a lot about the topics here.
But in a real world without marketing of symbian.. that world is filled with PocketPC devices.
While they dont sell as much as mobiles... the reason their just good, people dont change them each year.
And thats perhaps the negative point of windows pocketpc, it just works too well to be a succes for selling new devices.
I'm sure you dont believe me, but wait till you see integration with outlook / excel
Actual a friend of me is running his whole planning for his company on a small pocketPC...
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
On three continents I only need to run M$ W-x, under virtualisation, to work round bugs in IE-y, which BTW has an uncondonably poor ACID compliance.
Windows is insecure junk.
Since I buy my machines from the Taiwan/China factories that supply HP & Dell, and I havn't bought a Linux Box distro in 10 years no install counts in the Gartner/IDG returns, which exist only to mislead end users.
Computers are like the finance market, if you don't know what you are doing you get clipped.
I got two fascinating and almost-helpful replies to my post, yet between them lies the culture change that makes my point.
You remark that Drake (From June 2006 per Ubuntu wiki) is no longer supported!? Over in Windows land we're coming up on the 8th anniversary of Win XP and still lamenting the failings of "New Kid Vista".
The other reply said I should not look for Firefox ... but instead look for "web browsers that might be interesting". Uh... I'm interested in Firefox. If they have a package updater that figures out the weird dependencies, I'll try for that.
Why can't I have a distro that "just works" for 5 years and when I grab an app produced the following year it behaves?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I am not saying Linux is bad or van Damme is bad, but we hear this all the time, don't we?
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
I prefer all my Mac hardware to Windows . Huh?!
And I like my Logitech keyboard better than WordPerfect.
For what you pay for a Mac you can get PC hardware at a level of engineering excellence that Mac owners can only dream of...and it will run Windows. Is it only on Slashdot that people don't seem to know that Microsoft does not make computers?
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
But which is easier to use on the couch? A laptop or an iPhone?
Windows does run on ARMs as well as MIPS. It's called Windows CE.
And depending on the application, the license costs 1 dolar per device, which is darn cheap. Depending on what you need to do, it's cheaper to buy WinCE licenses than pay an embedded linux expert.
You can actually even develop the thing before paying up for licenses since M$ will give you supported trial for 6 months.
I'm not trying to promote anything, just want to point how silly this argument is.
Now, had you made your notebooks with AVR32, that would be true :D
I think 2008 already was the year of the Linux desktop. It wasn't as big and flashy as everyone hoped, but for the first time I've seen a non-computer geek running Linux on their laptop-- not for any political or ideological issues, but because it was cheap and easy and did everything they needed. There are distributions that are polished enough that I'm feeling like I could install Linux on my mother's machine and she'd have less trouble than running Windows XP.
This was the year my sister, wife, and dad all converted to Ubuntu (Xubuntu for my dad 'cuz his laptop is ~7 years old)
I've been using Linux for 10 years now, and my sister had a little bit of Linux experience, but my dad is one of the most computer-dumb people I've ever met. His computer was totally virus-ridden and after having his Antivirus software tell me it had located the viruses but couldn't remove them, I told him the only thing I could do is put Linux on it. He asked if it would have a web browser and play DVDs. I said yeah, put Xubuntu on w/ firefox and deCSS, it all worked, and now he tells his co-workers he's a "geek".
My wife didn't know what Linux was two years ago and wasn't impressed when I had Debian on my Gateway, but when I got a new Ubuntu Dell laptop she was so impressed she wanted one too. When the time came to wipe out XP, I suggested setting up a dual-boot instead but she demanded I wipe her whole HD. Her only Linux experience was occasionally using my pc when she didn't feel like turning hers on, but all I had to teach her on Ubuntu was how to use Synaptic. Everything else was self-explanatory. And I had to spend about half an hour figuring out how to get her scanner to work, but every other device just worked, and I remember a time when I had to spend a good couple hours monkeying around with EVERY device.
So yeah, I think this was the year of Linux. The mainstream computing press may never look back on it and say it was the year that Linux went mainstream, but I'll always look back on 2008 as the year when normal, non-nerdy people I know converted.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
BTW, I can also now troubleshoot my Dad's PC over the phone, something I haven't been able to do with Windows since 3.1.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Well, they should be stored inside the extended attributes.
If only the Linux programmers would finally understand 99.9% of Desktop-Linux systems use a file system with extended attributes and would stop developing for the remaining 0.1%.
It is one of the reasons I use a Mac these days: No Mac Programmer thinks twice about using extended attributes when they are the right solution to the problem.
And this only one example - dozens of system features which could make live a lot easier lay dormant on Linux systems because the application programmers think to much about some 0.1 to 5 % minority which won't have the feature available.
Different on Mac OS X: if a feature is there it's used and live becomes a lot easier for it.
We all know what the "in" in inflammable means.
I REALLY like Linux. But.... Suppose you give your mom a really well configured Linux box. All works fine. The she buys USB Flashdrive and plugs it in. It just won't work. She would have to do exotic things like "mounting" In Windows I plug it in - and I use it. Similar to most other devices. Software installation ? How do I explain a packet manager to my mom ? "Oh no mom, that software is Debian Package but you run SuSE - sorry" Windows: click "setup.exe" THAT is why Linux will not conquer the desktop for the masses.
And.. how is that the user's fault?
3 different apps to do the same or similar things means little consistency. That's the problem with linux distros and has always been a problem. Too much choice and not very much consistency with apps installed by default and their GUIs.
"Most apps run in a browser window?" There are many web applications out there, yet I find myself using real applications when they are available.
It's called hyperbole. My browser doesn't run in a browser window, for one.
I am puzzled as to why SELinux matters on a desktop system.
Just two quick examples on what you can do on Fedora 10:
Eventually, should Linux gain enough market share as to make it appealing to virus writers, SELinux could help block most of them.
I think that most non-geeks buy their software boxed in the shops, not online.
Better than what? People keep comparing Amarok with WMP, with obvious results. But there are many good advanced media players with management capabilities available on Windows, both free and paid. Here's one.
As VLC is written in cross-platform Qt4, it doesn't have "better OS integration", certainly not as far as UI is concerned. MPlayer UI is really spartan and inconvenient compared to any other player out there, regardless of the platform.
On the whole, why would a non-geek even know, much less care, about VLC or mplayer? He mostly watches DVD movies (probably with a DVD player that came preinstalled with his PC, such as PowerDVD or WinDVD), and online videos on YouTube and the like; maybe also an occasional mpeg, which WMP will happily play. Matroska? Theora? What is that, even, and why should he care?
Uh... "non-geek"??
Vista memory manager is not as different from Linux one as you might think, and performance is pretty close as well. On the whole, a non-geek won't care about the figure in megabytes per second - he'll care about how fast his files are copied (Linux wins), or, say, how fast his Office suite starts (Windows wins).
Compared to Vista, it's the same for both.
Debateful. Gnome - which seems to be the most popular in the "beginner" distros recently - is not more customizable than the Windows desktop. Number of Windows XP/Vista themes positively dwarves the number of both Gtk and KDE themes combines (though in all three cases, the vast majority of themes are crap anyway).
Aside from Vista/2008, what other release of a Microsoft OS missed its release date by a significant margin?
But windows still has better players - better user interfaces, better format support, and far better OS integration.
4. Best videogame console emulators. Since many emulators are open source (with notable exceptions) they are primarily developed as linux apps with windows ports that lag behind in features.
Simply false; despite e.g. mupen64 being an open source project, you'll find that it's the linux port that lags in features.
I am trolling
I almost forgot. The author says that Linux doesn't have all the available plugins to enjoy the web. What plugins is he talking about? The most commonly used plugin is Flash and it has been available for a while. Java is available too and Silverlight support is close to done the last time I looked. Which magical plugins am I missing on my Linux laptop? Whatever they may be they haven't seemed to hinder me yet.
In my books "support being close to done" just doesn't cut it. A plugin has to be stable and easily installable to really be concidered "available".
Hi Tubal-Cain.
Your answer may be the best of all, though I got generally better stuff this second time around.
I'm willing to consider Debian Proper in exchange for a wee less Newbie-fying if that's what it takes to get a more coherent rolling experience.
I did listen to some advice from a friend back then, and did settle on Drake on purpose as a LTS... but apparently it's for varying shades of "long".
This is a campaign inside of a mini-psychology experiment with myself as as sort of Generic GuineaBird. I see the remark that there's arguably a few months left of support for Drake, but the state of affairs is becoming clear by this point.
The good, if funny, news is that "NothingOfValueWasLost". I did absolutely nothing on the Drake box except poke around at a glacial pace. Therefore I can basically nuke the entire thing and rebuild it.
The interesting question becomes uBuntu vs. Debian proper. I'll have to do my research on that whole Proprietary-but-easy vs. Ultra-Free thing. But at least I'm hearing that the problems I am running into are not a mirage either.
As part of my slow campaign, I never set a "cutoff" date when Linux had to be "perfect for me".
Your other note had the crucial remark that the next version of uBuntu is the one with OO3. To me, THAT is THE killer App I need, so I will plan my entire strategy around that. I think I'm slowly evolving into the decision to use that as a trial run, and then get the NEXT LTS release (whatever animal that comes out to) as my Park distro that I camp out on and "just do work".
Good stuff. Thanks.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This is just another shirts-and-skins thing that shouldn't be so high on our list, when we should take some time out to shovel the sidewalk,fix the windows and join our families and friends for dinner and stories.
It's a pretty amusing typewriter no wonder what we put in it, but it will never love you more than your children, feed you better than your garden, or comfort you as much as a familiar snore.
No: Mac OS X is just easier.
But first: Thanks to automount flash-drives work with modern Linux distros out ouf the box.
Did you know that on a Mac you de-install software by drag and drop it into the trashcan. In fact drag and drop to the trashcan is so intuitive that Windows has an extra warning that it won't what you might expect: de-install the application.
Martin
That's the problem with linux distros and has always been a problem. Too much choice and not very much consistency with apps installed by default and their GUIs.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.media/vista.png
Don't forget good ol' Portage!
I find the absence of a Visio clone on linux puzzling.
FOSS software is mostly self-serving: for techies, by techies. Visio is quite likely the single most popular tool for presenting process and system architectures, use case models, domain object models, storyboards, etc. One would think that a powerful techie tool like this would be almost immediately built for planning and documenting linux developments. If I was a developing in a linux environment, I would quickly tire of switching to Windows every time I wanted to do something at a level of abstraction higher than code.
Is it only Windows developers that use things like UML models to think about what they are doing?
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I think that most non-geeks buy their software boxed in the shops, not online.
Yeah, and when you show them Add/Remove Programs in Ubuntu, it blows their minds.
Better than what? People keep comparing Amarok with WMP, with obvious results.
Yes, because that's the fair comparison. The media player that comes with KDE and the media player that comes with Windows. Shit, even Rhythmbox beats WMP.
Best videogame console emulators.
Uh... "non-geek"??
Yeah, non-geek. I showed my kid brother (non-geek) DOSBox, said "remember all those badass games we used to play on mom's old computer when we were little?" and pointed him to some abandonware sites. Made a believer out of him.
Gnome - which seems to be the most popular in the "beginner" distros recently - is not more customizable than the Windows desktop. Number of Windows XP/Vista themes positively dwarves the number of both Gtk and KDE themes combines (though in all three cases, the vast majority of themes are crap anyway).
Okay, I'm as much a Gnome-hater as the next geek, but to say it's "not much more customizable than the Windows desktop" is pushing it even for me. And the difference here is native theming, as opposed to running some third-party hack on Windows. I've never once seen a non-geek running a themed Windows box. But it's trivial to show them Appearance in the Gnome Preferences menu and let them have at it. It's even more trivial to show them Appearance in the KDE System Settings and let them download and install themes from a dialog box right there. There is simply no comparison.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I'm not a big multimedia person, but I don't seem to be missing much in the way of online streaming or interactive content.
So, Shockwave Flash, which I have plugin for in my IceWeasel 3.0.3 installation is not capable of handling this Shockwave content of which you speak?
Perhaps you use the mplayer-qt plugin as I do?
So sad... a buffer overflow sounds like fun.
Well, there's Quicktime, but I sure as hell don't miss it.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Hmm strange - did work for me most of the time. But then SuSE went downhill ever since Novell took over. But this does highlight a problem with Linux: Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. Ask for help because your web cam does not work - get three answers "for me it works".
In the end I spend to much time getting things to work and I switched to Mac
Martin
People here will help you solve the problem you mentioned, and most problems are eventually solvable, (and caused by either "doing it wrong" or by having unsupported or weird hardware), but your experience is similar to mine. I've used Linux off and on for 10 years now, installing it on probably 15 different machines. And it seems like I'm always in the group of problems that "don't count." Hardware that doesn't work. Installations that mostly work, but are goofy in some way. Desiring features that "most people" don't need.
I have no beef against linux overall, but that seems to be the way of it -- you'll often have some problem with something not working right.
I'm willing to consider Debian Proper in exchange for a wee less Newbie-fying if that's what it takes to get a more coherent rolling experience.
Actually, I would recommend Testing. It is a little more up-to-date than Stable, and it is a better rolling release (make sure you remove the "lenny" and "lenny/security" entries from your /etc/apt/sources.list and replace them with "testing", because anything with a "lenny" label will eventually become stable.)
The interesting question becomes uBuntu vs. Debian proper. I'll have to do my research on that whole Proprietary-but-easy vs. Ultra-Free thing. But at least I'm hearing that the problems I am running into are not a mirage either.
Debian has non-free repositories. Here's a sample from my sources.list: /. has made a link out of my URL, ignore the TLD in square brackets)
deb ftp://debian.osuosl.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
The part that says "unstable" is where you would insert "testing", and you add "contrib" and "non-free" to the end of the entry to enable those repositories. (and
Your other note had the crucial remark that the next version of uBuntu is the one with OO3. To me, THAT is THE killer App I need, so I will plan my entire strategy around that. I think I'm slowly evolving into the decision to use that as a trial run, and then get the NEXT LTS release (whatever animal that comes out to) as my Park distro that I camp out on and "just do work".
I don't know if they have got OOo 3 into it at this time (it isn't yet in Debian Unstable, so probably not), but Jaunty had it's second Alpha release yesterday (hmm... not downloadable yet...maybe they need a few more hours to build the disc image?)
Seriously. If anything it would be Linux that might save Palm.
I'm willing to consider Debian Proper in exchange for a wee less Newbie-fying if that's what it takes to get a more coherent rolling experience.
Debian proper isn't a 'rolling' experience. There's only one supported version of each software, and it stays that way 'til you update the whole OS, it's just that they provide security patches throughout the whole product life. But if what you want is install the OS today and be able to run Firefox 5 in two years with only a 'double click', look elsewhere (Debian Testing may be a good one, as the sibling post mentioned).
I did listen to some advice from a friend back then, and did settle on Drake on purpose as a LTS... but apparently it's for varying shades of "long".
No, it's for a business-level definition of "support": you get patches for vulnerabilities and bugs, but you *don't* get the newer-and-shinier versions.
Your other note had the crucial remark that the next version of uBuntu is the one with OO3. To me, THAT is THE killer App I need, so I will plan my entire strategy around that. I think I'm slowly evolving into the decision to use that as a trial run, and then get the NEXT LTS release (whatever animal that comes out to) as my Park distro that I camp out on and "just do work".
Then you do want a rolling release, in which case there's Debian testing, or simply following the latest Ubuntu, but certainly nothing LTS, unless it includes it out-of-the-box. And even then, you'd better hope you aren't tempted by the newer version of another software, or we're gonna have this discussion again.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Okay, By this far I have learned that "support" tends to mean security patches rather than Features. Except for the whopping ones, I'm kinda less interested in security quibbles.
I'm starting to get the idea that I have to upgrade parts of the OS to enjoy new apps, which is still foreign to 10 years of Windows habits, where that's pretty rare.
What I was trying to avoid was what I saw reported when "such and such upgrade broke dependencies for this and that everywhere... this sux".
This is where the distro proliferation, while sounding fun once I finally get this, is unnerving for the moment. I don't exactly know what a set release of ubuntu provides compared to this apparently continuous stream of new items which appear in repositories like "Testing".
Good tip from that other user who noted that Non-Free repositories do exist for Debian, so by golly I can play a codec if I want to.
I'm hearing that my Drake install is mostly useless at this point, so I might as well grind through installs until this stuff gels.
Thanks gang. I am glad to be a part of Linux 2009.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Dapper Drake? THat's over 3 years old and it is probably no longer supported...time to upgrade...I don't use ubuntu much but I do keep an eye on it (7.10 was the first Linux that "just worked" for me) and 8.10 is a damned near miracle for free software....
I run debian tesing with LXDE on a 499MHz AMD (k7?) with 384MB ram and an 8GB Hdd...xfce on ubuntu is just hideous...IME anything ubuntu does Debian does better...
Okay, By this far I have learned that "support" tends to mean security patches rather than Features. Except for the whopping ones, I'm kinda less interested in security quibbles.
Well, that goes for pretty much all home users though, but businesses have nightmares with applications where a button suddenly moves to another place on the toolbar or such, so they want bugfixes and *only* bugfixes, and LTS-style distros cater to them.
I'm starting to get the idea that I have to upgrade parts of the OS to enjoy new apps, which is still foreign to 10 years of Windows habits, where that's pretty rare.
That's because, all things considered, Windows doesn't come with much so every app has to bring its own set of libraries and such. Linux, on the other hand, has little libraries for pretty much anything you may ever want to do, with the problem that you 'tie' your app to those libraries and if you update them, you probably may have to update the app as well.
This is where the distro proliferation, while sounding fun once I finally get this, is unnerving for the moment. I don't exactly know what a set release of ubuntu provides compared to this apparently continuous stream of new items which appear in repositories like "Testing".
Think of Linux as a huge software ecosystem, constantly improving and evolving. So-called 'rolling' distros, like ArchLinux or, to a certain extent, Debian Testing are a recollection of such ecosystem, trying to 'tie' the releases together and stabilize them as much as they can, but with a focus on staying up-to-date. Normal distros, like Ubuntu or Fedora, take every couple months a 'snapshot' of the best apps of that ecosystem, and proceed to support them until the time comes to take a newer snapshot. And LTS-style distros like Debian Stable or RHEL take every couple of years a 'snapshot' of the most solid, reliable apps of that ecosystem (which may or may not be the 'best') and proceed to support them for a long time.
The first cater to power users, who like to use the newest and shiniest and are able to take advantage of that, the second cater to normal users, who prefer something more stable but not 'outdated', and the third of course caters to businesses which need the assurance that if something works today, it'll continue to work the same way three years from now.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
You mean like a live CD?
Linux' power is there. We have the desktop suite including printing and scanning.
What is missing is usability. Until a linux desktop is released that looks just like Windows(TM), there is not going to be a big leap.
Until the look and feel of the most popular desktop is blatantly copied as M$ has done to KDE and GNOME and Apple with each major release of their desktop, there is no chance for Linux to gain a major share(10% or more) of the desktop/laptop market.
People want there applications to look like what they have been using for the past 10 years. They'll be fine with complaining that it doesn't work, but if they find out they can pay $300.00 less and it looks just like what they have been using, they'll take it.
As far as the lack of support for all hardware under the sun. People will deal --- as long as it looks like windows, for the next year or so after their purchase.
I dove in head first yesterday and learned a lot about your aforementioned "pretty little libraries". In principle I agree with Debian & Children's managed packages.
I tried to follow an article's published note that you can go from LTS to LTS (and from there to the more volatile rollout after it.) I think I know enough about Apt-Get now to add one or two little libraries and run the rest through Synaptic or something.
Unfortunately, I managed to run into the worst synergy of two web-published upgrade flaws in recent ubuntu, Dapper-Edgy and Anything-Hardy when all the XWindows and screen-render subsystems began to break. Once there's a known dependency break, Synaptic gives up & shuts down, and I finally hung my head in defeat after 12 hours of fighting a hydra.
Since I had no data there anyway, I'll try the iso I made of Hardy to see how the "install experience goes for newcomers".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Considering there really aren't many silverlight applications that exist now other than demoes I don't think it's an issue for anyone. Just like shockwave really isn't an issue and even though java is available it really wouldn't be much of a problem if it wasn't. Almost the entire internet at this point is available with only support for HTML/CSS, Javascript, and Flash.
Time makes more converts than reason
Adept/Synaptic/Yum ARE the killer apps for Linux.
How true!
And.. how is that the user's fault?
No one said it was his 'fault'. If I see you trying to drive a nail, but holding the hammer backwards, I don't have to lay blame to instruct you to turn the hammer around. Hopefully, with just that one short paragraph TaoPhoenix will get his feet under him and have a totally different Linux experience.
3 different apps to do the same or similar things means little consistency. That's the problem with linux distros and has always been a problem. Too much choice and not very much consistency with apps installed by default and their GUIs.
And they are all easy to install, then remove completely, free to try, and completely optional. I have needed a program to accomplish a task. I installed five, played with all of them, and removed four of them...all in less than an hour. You may not like choice, but judging by the number of brands of self-rising flour in the grocery store, I would say that you are in the extreme minority.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Various media plugins for stuff like mp3/avi/etc in web browsers tend not to be installed by default, or don't work that well.
There's no Shockwave player for Linux (no big deal, not many sites use it. Although some things like habbo hotel, isketch, and etc do).
There's no plugin for playing MIDI files embedded in webpages. This is something I'd like to see fixed.
The google,AOL,MSN,MySpace,MyWarez IE-toolbars I guess.