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Linux Needs Critics
An anonymous reader writes "Keir Thomas berates the fact that the world of Linux almost entirely lacks critics. In fact, he says, Linux people tend to see genuine critical evaluation as a bad thing. FTA: 'The problem with this anti-criticism approach is that it's damning Linux to an eternity of navel gazing. Nothing can ever get any better. The best hope we have are the instances where a few bright sparks, with their heads screwed on the right way, get together and make something cool (as happened with, say, Firefox back in the day). But that's rare and can't be relied upon.'"
Linux has plenty of critics. Developers are critical of their own code. Just look through the lkml or read the code, there are plenty of places where there is constructive criticism about how something is done.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
The critics in open source world are the young ones that get a big head one day and call your project stupid because it uses language X instead of their favorite language. Then they fork the code, write their own crappy software, get some distribution to decide to use it and then the original project gets dumped one day.
it's free, why are you complaining?
...and all I got was this lousy mod rating
Linux has driver issues!!
I have to admit, the fanbois are making me homicidal.
I LOVE Linux. I love plain old Unix. I love the command line, and the cryptic commands, and man pages, and lynx and apt/yum. I like X windows and MC. I love building from source. The whole environment is clean, somehow. It's got a sort of serenity for me that I don't see very often in my job.
And yet...It's just a tool. It's a good tool. It's my favorite tool. But it's just a tool. There is room for improvement, and, like any tool, there are places where it's not useful.
The thing that drives me nuts is the pure unthinking zealotry. I got started on old proprietary unix, and while linux has more zest and more wild features, there are things that were worthwhile in the old systems. But if you say that, then you get slapped down as a heretic.
Everything benefits from criticism, so in that sense, he's right, but really Linux has plenty of critics. Install linux for someone who is used to something else, and you'll get plenty of criticisms. What I think Linux needs is the same thing I think Mac needs and Windows needs: the people on the inside need to start listening to people who aren't already sold on their product. We have just as many fanbois as the Mac and Windows people, and we've got some of that persecution complex that makes the fanbois extra loathesome.
Just calm down, take a breath, go use something different for a while. Get some perspective. The real zealots make it harder for me to sell *nix solutions to the phbs because they're coming to expect a bias.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Burn him!
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
Keir Thomas has just proved that Linux does have critics.
If we were to criticize Linux, we would also have to criticize other OS vendors. I've been using Linux operating systems for other reasons than regular users do, due to my professional work. At work I have plenty of UNIX-es, so it's natural I have a Linux boxes at home. However I will never take Ubuntu as the first choice.
I have used Windows XP for many years too, but that's history. Of course, I may complain about Linux glitches, but look around. Look at all the software that's produced on any OS, Windows, Macs, etc. Have you not noticed that the software evolution is heading in the wrong direction? Is it only Linux that is responsible? After all, Linux is just an operating software, where as all the other software is an add-on you use.
What do you want to criticize, the operating system, or the software that comes with it?
If you would like to criticize Linuxes, you would have to first install at least 10 distros and compare them. Ubuntu for me is again not the choice. Look around, how many choices you have with Linuxes and how many with other operating systems?
My choice is Sabayon-Gentoo. One good reason â" it's easy to install and has ALL the software I need. Price is not the issue, the fact that I can have an installation for free is not the main reason I use Linuxes.
Sander85 is right and I agree with him. You would like to criticize, but you have not mentioned how much time you spent communicating problems and helping programmers solve them.
On the other hand, try and contact Microsoft saying their OS system lacks this or that, that we are threatened everyday with viruses, malware, etc, that we have to purchase tons of additional software to get the full functionality Windows doesn't have out of the box?
So far Linux distributions have evolved enormously in a way you could have hardly imagined a year ago. It makes competition tougher.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
Mostly from uneducated haters, but there's no lack of it.
Oh, and in lots of cases, it IS ready for the desktop. Either in a managed environment with a guru at the top, for those who know what they're doing, and for locked down spoon fed distros.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
...then why was this article written?
On the positive side, there are more Linux critics than Mac critics.
If you are critical of Linux, you are just berated.
If you are critical of Mac, you are mobbed, beaten, lynched and never allowed to buy a cappuccino again.
As a non Linux guy, I've been interested in installing Linux several times but the community has turned me off. If you go on a forum or something similar and suggest a feature you're often told that you're doing it wrong. That's probably true, but it's poor attitude for growing a client base. Me: I'd like mirrors on my car to assist in backing up. Linux community: The best way to back up is to turn around and look out your rear window. While technically correct, how many people back up using their mirrors?
Linux Needs Critics
Oh how true that is. I myself love to criticize things (I'm reading Slashdot, after all). But why don't I constructively criticize Linux?
I think a lot of has to do with what every argument or analysis starts with: base assumptions. So let's start with comparing Linux to the leading commercial operating systems and the most important thing to consumers--price. And the guy mentions this in his blog. But we can't get to questions like "Is feature X really worth Y dollars to me?" Because Linux does not cost money to install. It's like dividing by zero. It makes criticism of a missing component difficult because it doesn't cost me anything! How can I criticize it?! You will see people like Steve Ballmer have to dig and dig into imaginary costs of retraining, supporting and maintaining Linux to give it a "hidden cost" so that Windows can even begin to contend with Linux in price (you'll notice these concerns were suspiciously left out of advertisements when discussing the switch from XP to Vista).
Another important aspect of operating systems (at least to me) is security. And, being a pedantic ass, I cannot even comment on the security of the Microsoft operating system because I have no idea what they are doing. I can get the Linux source code pretty quickly if I felt the need to understand why it is that the userspace/kernelspace concept has failed (although, I have never done this, the option is there). So, again, we enter this point where I can't even get to criticizing Linux for susceptibility to a botnet or trojan because it doesn't practice security through obfuscation like leading operating systems.
On top of this, as a Linux user (and as evidenced above) my priorities and performance parameters are all out of whack and completely divorced from the mainstream (or so my perception goes). If they weren't, I would be using Windows primarily at home.
So I think that unless more free open source operating systems arise to compete with Linux, criticism will remain low. And you've got the cult barrier to break down where people have lived with the burden of paying out their ass for software so how can you criticize something after suffering for so long under the blah blah blah religious spiel blah blah blah.
My work here is dung.
There are critics out there for Linux. But how many of them offer quality criticism, instead of complaining? And there are developers out there who are willing to listen to quality criticism, but how many of the few critics out there comment on any specific piece of software that goes into a complete Linux system? Both sides could do more- critics could write white papers with suggested corrections. Developers could take the "Linux sux" as an indication that they need a top down audit of their project. But both of those solutions are asking too much of either side. There should be better practices on both sides. And of course, this all ignores the good work on both sides that are being done, where there is constructive criticism and receptive developers. You can always use more of both, so there is never enough of either.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
There is plenty of disagreement about every aspect of Linux. The kernel, the GUI, the apps, everything. And if you examined Linux, or a distro you aren't familiar with, you would probably find something you didn't like about it and you are quite free to criticise it.
Linux has no deficiency of people who criticise and no deficiency of people who listen and act on it.
Windows has no deficiency of people who criticise and a seemingly complete deficiency of people who listen and act on it.
MacOSX has worse than deficiency of people who criticise as they have people who actively criticise the critics and even attempt to silence them. MacOSX has a deficiency of people who listen and act on it. ...just to put it out the way I see it.
...Linux is above criticism. What we actually need is a: "-1, Microsoft fanboy" mod... or how about "-1, Dissing Linux"... or even better "-1, Heresy"...
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
More developers that can handle being criticized.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Linux FAILS on the desktop except in specific cases where a user has it installed by someone technically proficient or is technically proficient themselves.
Commercial apps for linux are few and far between.
Games on linux (that are available for Windows and OSX) basically suck and are usually bad clones of games that are awesome on other OSes.
The average user doesn't even know what the hell linux is.
(LOL, they kept the achievements?)
There. There's your bashing. I love linux in the server environment though.
Sent from your iPad.
Yes, it's free. Nobody *has* to listen to you and that's the problem in a nutshell. Nobody gives a rat's patoot about the fact that the wondrous Ubuntu can't see my USB drives and half of my other devices. Since this will never be fixed and I don't have time or inclination to dick with solving the problem, it's back to Windows. Sorry guys. That's reality. It either works like a toaster or it's crap. No OS does this now. Windows comes closer. The Mac OS is closest to true toasterhood yet, but too expensive.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The big thing I notice is that all those hard core losers who use linux always do everything using shell, VI, etc. Try getting rid of those for a month and just working with the applications. Then maybe it will be the year of the desktop because linux might have a windowing system with the productivity and attractiveness of either Mac OSX or Windows.
From mailing lists and public bug trackers, my sense is that there are plenty of critics, and they are frequently able to find the right place to criticize.
I think that the extent of criticism within the system reduces the need for lobbying in the press to get your pet peeve addressed.
With the exception of well-funded open source projects, the point of the open source community is to dramatically reduce the barriers between
1) Vincent and Venkatesh have an idea.
2) Vincent and Venkatesh release software/patches.
3) Vincent and Venkatesh's software becomes popular.
Community mechanisms make it easy for Vincent and Venkatesh to learn, receive feedback, and get attention. It's a positive feedback loop whose success begets a growing pool of talent.
Positive attention and community mechanisms are at the heart of getting to #3, but unsolicited criticism plays a very small role. I don't think the Keir Thomas "gets it."
Are you kidding?
.sigs: Just Say No!
"...Linux people tend to see genuine critical evaluation as a bad thing."
Ok first of all, are we talking about users or developers? Because if we're talking about developers I doubt he's ever read one of Torvalds gentle mails about piece of code he doesn't like. And if we're talking about users I would like to have him sit down with my mother when I first installed Ubuntu on her PC. Do that and then come tell me there's no critisism towards Linux.
I am the lawn!
There isnt any lack of critisism against Linux at all. Its all over mailing lists, irc channels, blogs and whatnot and much of it is very down to earth and true.
The problem is that it drowns out in the torrent of FUD coming from Microsofts, its apologists, astroturfers and partners. Its like shouting next to a freight train.
HTTP/1.1 400
In order to critique something you must have a baseline of what is correct and what is incorrect. The only thing incorrect in the linux/GNU OSes are coding bugs, not design features, and I think we have enough coders critiquing linux/GNU in that way. If the author wishes a community to criticize Linux, I think he should pick a distro and start there.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Let me attempt to summarize. A) PulseAudio needs to work with existing applications, so it implements an ALSA emulation layer, except, it's not complete. Only 70% of ALSA applications work. So it's like, totally ready. B) So, in the true open source fashion, you should port your app to be a native PulseAudio client. Except that you can't. There's this yet-another-audio-library called libsidney, but it's not ready yet. (Hmm, this sounds familiar...) C) Fedora led the way in incorporating PulseAudio before it was ready, breaking audio for thousands of users. Then because open source is about copying good ideas and bad ones, a ton of other distros adopted it as well. Amazing guys. In a way, you've spread bad code that breaks audio on thousands of computers faster than a virus could have. And it's immune to antivirus! D) so now that we're in this "mess" (as the lead developer of PulseAudio calls it*), LSB comes along and says "we're going to standardize how your write audio apps!" Oh, but wait, ALSA's now "old" (we hardly knew ye), and I can't directly program PulseAudio. Hmm... So the article's brilliant solution? Standardize on the PulseAudio-safe subset of ALSA. WHAT THE FUCK. I can just imagine the future alsa man page. A big listing of functions, with a nice little asterisk next to those functions that you shouldn't use unless you want your app to totally FAIL on a system which has been sodomized by Pulse Audio. I can just see the developers of commercial Linux sound apps (all three of them) jumping for joy. And thus unfolds another chapter in long history of failed sound systems on Linux. Can they make it much worse? I, for one, am excited to see how much worse they can make it until we all go back to listening to square waves on our PC speakers. * BTW, also notice that it's the PulseAudio guy calling Linux audio a mess. Did he forget that it was his project that took the existing mess, and unloaded a giant steaming turd on it? Congratufuckinglations. You've just made it worse. You're a truly a worthy OSS contributor.
He's pretty harsh, but he always has a point behind it.
FOSS / Linux needs more developers who don't ignore critics. Critics (yes, even legitimate ones) abound.
I hate linux!!!
...can you let me back in now?
My webcomic
I don't think you've heard some of the non fanboi mac users rant..
They are brutal
Especially about the OS X finder which while working isn't where it needs to be yet.
Don't get them started on the Dock.
Everything that makes sound in Ubuntu [except for the flash plugin] is leaking threads like a motherfucker.
There. That's criticism. Mostly GNOME's fault, I suspect, but I'm doing my best here.
And I need a hole in my head
Should we debate the questions: Who exactly is Linux for? What is it's job?
Linux doesn't readily inspire quite the same brand of slavering zeal on both ends of the equation as, for example, Mac OS (original or X) or even Windows does. This much is true.
But this doesn't mean it has "virtually no critics." It just means that they have a stronger tendency toward subtlety and diplomacy, just as the fanboys do. Sure, there are a few outliers on both sides, but the writer of this article appears to believe that these are the only critics and fanboys out there, and that simply isn't true.
The open nature of Linux may also help mask some fanboys and critics, because they are more able to channel their opinions into more directly useful tasks. Short of getting hired by Microsoft, a Windows fanboy or critic has little choice but to write essays about how Feature X sucks, Algorithm Y is the one true path, and Pattern Z doesn't meet the needs of users: articles that may or may not be listened to. There's nothing else they can really do. Things aren't much better on the Mac side of things, despite the source being available; in this case it's matter of development model rather than licensing. The more open developer community around Linux (and many other OSS systems) is different; assuming your code is decent and your reasoning is sound, you actually have a fairly reasonable chance of getting accepted. It's not perfect, but it sucks less, and this likely results in a greater number of critics and fanboys becoming developers rather than pundits.
A couple saying that if you criticize Linux you are berated.
Here's something to consider, why do people identify personally with on OS or brands for that matter? I've seen flame wars when folks said that RIGID power tools were really RYOBI (Techtronic, of Hong Kong, manufacturers RIGID for Emerson, RYOBI is there house brand and they outright own Milwaukee Power tools. FYI); so, it's not just OS fanboys. Same goes for Nikon or Canon fanboys.
I never got that. It's like criticizing Linux, Apple, Porsche or RIGID is criticizing you personally. It's not. Linux or Apple are OSes: not a lifestyle. Some folks just need to get a life!
Second, fix the damn graphics already. All three of the major graphics vendors have open sourced their drivers. All have linux releases of drivers. Why can I not get some modicom of 3d functionality out of the box? Even with the latest distros getting 3d acceleration to function correctly involves 2 nights of struggling, and half a case of red bull. Say what you want about "tailoring" but I don't need it to be tailored to me out of the box - I need it to work out of the box. This can be extended to all other drivers. I can't depend on hardware to work with it because the driver may require certain libraries. See complaint number 1. I can't have my fiber card suddenly not be able to access my SAN because someone decided to make a bug fix and change how a function gets used.
Has this dude visited any community involving Linux users... ever?
The standard general Linux criticisms:
1. Driver support. Usually from a lack of manufacturer support.
2. No central focus on meeting business needs (tech support). This complaint is changing with such a large amount of development occurring with programmers employed by business communities for open source development.
3. Have to give up favorite Windows programs (apps & games). This improves over time, but yes, it is a different environment, again with a different historical focus.
Plus lots more, like programmer IDEs, look & feel issues, etc., etc. Criticisms, constructive or otherwise are everywhere Linux is discussed, including countless published sources.
I've certainly encountered folks with an unconstructive beef against Linux who make complaints that it gets unfair praise for being mediocre, merely catching up to Microsoft. With those folks, yes, complaints are sometimes muted because the target of their ire is usually changing so often that their rants are stale before they speak them - so they can become embarrassed by being contradicted in the heat of a discussion too often. But even then, such complaints are still extremely commonplace in both print and online.
I really don't understand where this dude is coming from.
Ryan Fenton
RTFA.
The author makes the very good point that criticism is not what most people think it is- criticism should be positive as well as negative, and more importantly, constructive.
The problem isn't so much that critics aren't excepted though, rather that the only kind of criticism accepted as constructive is that expressed in patch form.
Of course Teh Lunix has no critics. Slashdot is an excellent example of why that is- anything said which is critical of Teh Lunix gets modded down, where nobody will ever see it. Consistant criticism of Teh Lunix will eventually get your account soft-banned, where you can only post like once or twice a day (with an -1 rating).
That falls into the category of "navel gazing" which Teh Lunis was talking about.
I gotta hand it to Teh Lunis, he's may be the only one in the Lunix community who isn't a hardcore zealot. If an average poster had said what Teh Lunis said, the results (and flames) would be unsurprising.
As someone whos been developing for some time, I think there is a general dislike for code reviews even for experienced coders.
When you've worked on something especially if its as a volunteer its hard not to take criticism of you code and design personally. Its probably harder for linux where your code is out there for all to see. So maybe there is less criticism for fear of losing another coder.
You see this a little in the scientific community where old ideas take a while before they die even after being discredited.
...adherents and users who will accept and will act upon constructive criticism. Generally, any constructive criticism of Linux is answered in three ways:
1. "We're not here to help newbs figure out how Linux works, do the research and solve the problem yourself."
2. "There is no problem, that's the way it's supposed to work, Linux is not (Windows, OSX,....)
3. "Yes there is a problem, but Linux is open source so fix it yourself."
To prove my point, I will be modded down.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The mistake is assuming that Linux needs critics like Windows has, that is to say lots of paid professional writers writing for entities supported by advertising for operating systems and applications that are sold for profit.
I've seen that environment slowly develop -- but not so much, really -- in the Linux magazines (and I used to write for one), so if you want more "critics", you need to have more paid-for commercial software and more magazines that need to break up the advert space with predictable whining from a bunch of bitchy little girls.
Thankfully, we lack that. Don't expect it any time soon.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The main problem is to have useful criticisms. That sucks does not help at all and most of criticisms i hear are along this line. What would be more useful is something like It does not work properly in this and that use cases. Of course critics have to be objective and cool headed. Fanboys that yell on [insert not-their-favourite-software] are pretty much useless and are rightfully disregarded.
I've criticized Linux for YEARS about its constantly shifting desktop APIs, about the fact that everyone seems to love dynamic linking against the latest and greatest libraries all the time (almost ensuring that distributions will become obsolete a lot faster), about the fact that there are desktop elements in desktops such as OS/2, BeOS, and even PC/GEOS which *still* haven't been implemented in the latest window managers and desktop environments for Linux, etc.
After the first decade or so of making the same comments to deaf ears, I finally got sick of it and stopped. The Linux community doesn't seem to care about the experience of people outside of the UNIX (and perhaps Windows) realm. Let Linux have its shortcomings. I'm done making suggestions.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Linux Hater's Blog
Linux Hater's Redux
Byte Corrupto (in spanish)
and... eh...
The article is quite right; there is too much groupthink and myopia. The Linux Hater's blog is a must-read as an antidote to all that, and he or she has some useful points to make. The articles on Linux Weekly News still have a Linux-centric viewpoint, naturally, but usually aren't afraid to point out shortcomings (especially when quoting the latest Linus flaming on the kernel list).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I critisize Linux all the time, and I try and criticize it for very good reasons.
Let me give you an example.
The most wide spread Groupware Suite that is freely availible in the Linux world to challenge Exchange that I can see is eGroupware. eGroupware is an excellent suite in my opinion. Now. Linux has three dedicated Groupware Clients. Kontact, which is part of KDE-PIM. Evolution, which is part of Gnome, and Thunderbird.
Now. To do anything with eGroupware other than E-mail you need XML-RPC.
Kontact has XML-RPC Support, but it has a nasty bug where if it becomes De-Synchronized, it will respawn the same events on the Calendar over and over.
Evolution has no XML-RPC support. You can rig up GroupDAV
Mozilla Sunbird has no XML-RPC Support.
What does it say about Linux's productivity-ware when two of the three Groupware clients produced by Linux developers cannot communicate with its intended native Groupware servers?
Linux smells of elderberries.
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
Linux just doesn't love critics who won't roll up their sleeves and fix things.
Ideas are cheap.
Game... blouses.
There are some things that simply won't be corrected out of love of the subject. Heck, some of those things won't even be found (and reported).
What a successful software company does that can ONLY be done by PAYING people is persuade people to analyze & create requirements, code, test, and fix ALL of the system. Yeah, the OSS community does most of it pretty well, but they simply won't do it as pervasively or as rigorously as needed unless motivated to, which usually comes in the form of being PAID (to wit: be able to eat).
This is why corporations pay managers: people who are responsible for figuring out what all actually needs to be done, paying other people to get it done, and confirming that it actually has been done. Managers are paid critics who are on the hook for following thru on their criticism. Much of the success of Linux comes precisely from companies like Ubuntu, Red Hat, IBM, Mozilla, and others who actually do pay people to get those annoying unpopular little things right.
In contrast, we end up with the situation that keeps driving me away from Linux: stuff that I need to work just doesn't, and nobody has sufficient motivation to announce the problem, and nobody has sufficient motivation to fix the problem even if known. So instead, I go to someplace like Apple & friends, who - being PAID - are fanatical about making every little thing right (ok, they make mistakes too, but are more motivated to find & fix the little things).
Hence the ultimate failing of "free software": like it or not, money motivates people to do necessary but unpopular jobs, including finding & fixing software flaws.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I presume the poster doesn't read the kernel list, or other development lists. There is no lack of constructive and informed (or otherwise) critique.
If he talks about the user experience, critique is more complicated because Linux is not that well defined when leaving the kernel. There is usually always a patch or package or distribution that does it in another way, which you will tend to be told if you just address your critique vaguely to "Linux".
It makes much more sense to critique a specific distribution, which is what is responsible for the user experience, but again, there is not really a lack of distribution specific critique either, partly due to the competition between distributions.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of someone mentioning that Linux is free and thus impervious to criticism approaches 1.
As the discussion grows even longer, the probability that someone will mod that post insightful approaches 1.
I'll go ahead and volunteer. I don't like how software installation works on Linux (Unix) systems. The various package managers are much vaunted but they exist to hide the unnecessary complexity of sprinkling files around a dozen directories to accomplish an installation. Macs had it right (at least in my pre-OSX experience with a lot of apps: installation meant dragging-dropping one icon.
For great justice.
Mac fanbois are like the audience at the Apollo. FLOSS fanbois are like parents at a kindergarten play.
That's just business (free business in most cases). Sure, you only get a few bright shining stars like Firefox. Try to look at it as a matter of market share though. How many bad programs are there for Windows? Now look at how much more marketshare Windows has. Linux just doesn't have enough share to make large enough libraries of crap to get a lot of bright sparks.
I'm a Linux lover, and use it exclusively. The issue I have is the biggest issue I have with debian (they do it the most), but all software seems to do it.
They'll change configuration settings, or how something works, and then call you an idiot for not reading their entire README document every fucking time you apt-get upgrade their pacakage, and find your entire, say, mailsystem in a broken state. (I'm looking at you, debian. *cough*update-exim4.conf*cough*).
Where do I sign up?
The biggest problem with finding "Linux Critics" is (IMO) determining what exactly they should be criticizing. In my mind, a Linux Critic has specific criticism about the kernel. If you are talking about the Desktop Environment there are plenty of /Gnome | KDE | Enlightenment | XFCE | etc/ critics out there. If it is Applications there are plenty of those as well. If it is the default programs loaded on install then you are talking about specific Distributions and again, there are plenty of /Ubuntu | Gentoo | Fedora | SuSE | RedHat | Mepis | etc/ critics out there.
Linux is not like Windows or Mac OSX where the OS, Desktop Environment and default application load are all handled by one organization. Instead, all of this is distributed. If you don't like the default desktop environment in your distro of choice you can change it, or select another distro. Same goes for default application load. If your gripe is truly Linux I suggest you look into the Kernel Developers forums and mail lists. Not only will you find plenty of critics, but you will also find lots of developers who are willing to take that criticism into consideration.
Death looks every man in the face. All any man can do is look back and smile. - Marcus Aurelius
Without critics Linux can't improve, yet it has improved steadily year after year.
Something just doesn't add up here.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
There's tons of critics of Linux. They are writing tons of articles critical of Linux. If you take a look at who they are, they are mostly columnists who for one reason or another have a vested interest in writing articles favorable to Windows or Mac OS. Unsurprisingly enough, most of the critics of Windows or Mac OS are, if not Linux users, then users of the other of these three operating systems (get it? Kind of convoluted, sorry.) And you will see tons of criticism of Linux and various Linux distributions right here on Slashdot (check my posting history, heh.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's just about nothing but criticism.
And it drives the kernel forward very effectively.
Yes, I totally agree. Linux has many, many critics, from users, "prousers / powerusers", developers, and other corporations e.g. M$ (although agreed, these are more often just attacks.)
Where I thought his article was very insightful, however, was the typical response "Linux is free..." where I agree with his analysis. This, however, reflects on us, the Linux community. I cringe when I see somebody say, "It is free, what do you expect?" or "you have no right to complain." Users have every right to (nonabusively and in a civil fashion) criticize software.
If Debian (stable) suddenly stopped working, my organization would lose thousands of person-hours of lost productivity. In many ways, doing somebody a half-favor is often worse than doing them nothing at all:
Imagine if I volunteered to repair your garage, but then did a half-assed job and quit halfway through. It would cost you MORE in the end to clean up and switch to another provider. Would it be then ok to say "I did that for FREE, how can you complain?"
Obviously this is a continuum, and many of the criticisms are unfounded or just whining. But, as a whole, if we want Linux to continue to succeed we, as developers and users alike, should listen and respond constructively ourselves to any (also constructive) criticism that is provided by the community.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
You should have used your real name. This will now have be known as "Anonymous Cowards Law". Think of the fame and fortune you could have had.
... which make up 99% of PC user.
Yeah, most of those critics are craps, but if we treat all of them like crap, then Linux will never get more than 1% of the PC market (though I don't think it need to).
And most Slashdot user won't agree with him, because there are a lot of them are in the 1% Linux users.
Two problems arise when criticizing Linux:
Thus, I doubt sincerely that constructive criticism will ever be useful or welcome in the religion of herding cats.
All about me
Try a x-fi. Why on earth does an advanced soundcard like that need to switch "enviroments" and killall sound using apps when you do it? under linux you say? no, vista AND xp.
So next time you mouth of on linux, do a little bit of research first.
There are solutions to this problem and they are the same as under windows, software.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I like how the first tag on this story is "flamebait."
In a post a bit higher I essentially said this. Linux is a great hacker OS, but an end user is just left hanging.
I know many folks who are shifting for their desktop needs Windows because they are tired of the Linux DIY attitudes and geek elitism that they need to deal with.
On the server side it is a completely different issue. But for getting things done, like development, reading email, writing documents, scanning documents, VOIP, Linux sucks!
And on Windows well it just WORKS...
The Linux sphere is chock a block full of critics. Linux is continually attacked by BSD, Windows and OS X zealots, the press, and in reams of marketing from competitors. In addition, there are many real critics (the ones with arguments worth listening to) who make coherent arguments and back them up with research and suggestions. You can find these people writing papers in universities, attending conferences, and contributing to lively discussions on mailing lists.
The idea that Linux is some kind of sacred cow is only true on sites Like slashdot that are designed to encourage this kind of group think. In reality, there is far more criticism of Linux out there than you will ever find for, say, Apple products.
You are ignoring the fact that 100% of the users benefit from improvements made by the few that have the time and resources to get involved with the code.
It would be really funny to see the Microsoft and Apple mailling lists in the open, and how they really feal about criticism and users.
It's easy to pick on Linux for anything since it's out in the open.
Apparently this guy has never subscribed to a development mailing list. Linux users who have a criticism post a bug to their distributions bug tracker or discuss it on the relevant mailing list. Linux users get so critical that they start a new distribution just because they are ticked off that the existing ones won't do things the way they want. What we don't need is non-contributing criticism. If you don't like something, post a bug report or discuss it on the appropriate list. Don't just whine on your blog.
If you are in a position to criticize Linux, you are in a position to contribute to it. Where do you think all the Linux developers come from?
So, I'm no Apple fan boy. Did however bye my first Mac. I wanted something small sitting in with my TV, something that had PC capabilities largely for media. Mac Mini fit the bill, intention was to fry the Mac OS and put linux on it.
Then the dark side got my attention. Played with Mac OS for a while. A sudden realization struck me one day, Mac is a bigger threat to Windows than Linux ever was. I got my *nix and all the traditional Linux problems are not there (drivers, software, compatibility etc). UI is intuitive enough for my wife, OS is capable enough for me.
Little treats like front row and iMovie aren't bad either. I never got around to installing Linux on it, liked it pretty much from the start.
Sorry... I missed that post or we cross-posted, you know how Slashdot does this.
But you are completely right about the Linux DIY and elitism attitude. After a while you just get tired and just want it to work. I have other problems to solve in my life.
I am tired of having to work out problems that should not need to be worked out.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Fact is Linux isn't ready. Period. STILL.
Before I go much further, let me just say that Linux has come a long way and is getting very close. But it has been this way for years.
The problems that exist are still fundamental, and aren't being addressed. I'm a normal computer professional, and I know a thing to two from my nearly 30 years of computing.
My story summary, DRIVER PROBLEMS:
I was building a big RAID box using a nice SATA Controller and a bunch of gig SATA drives. I got Ubuntu fully installed and then the fun began. I got the open source drivers from the Company and went to compile them for the kernel. The compiler errored out because Ubuntu is using a different build system than the script was expecting.
No problem, I know enough to edit the script and get the driver to compile and build right. Except the driver only sort of works. The whole system crashed for no reason (sitting idle) several times, but not kernel crash, just Gnome crash. Telnet still worked, and I could shutdown -r the server and it would reboot. Without the driver loaded, the system was rock solid, with the driver it was flakey as hell. Again, not a kernel issue, just Gnome crashing.
After several days of futzing with the setup, I grabbed a Windows Server disk and loaded it, installed the drivers and it hasn't had a hiccup once.
I REALLY wanted Linux to work, and I really tried everything I knew how to do to get it to work. And yes, it might be a "driver" problem. But the average user isn't going to say it is a driver problem, they are going to say it is a Linux problem. It is a Linux problem when stuff that is supposed to work, doesn't.
Now the driver in question had installers for Debian, Redhat, SuSE and FreeBSD, but not for Ubuntu. Shouldn't Linux be Linux? Three different flavors of Linux, and each requires its own installer? And why did I have to edit a install script to build the module at all?
Again, this isn't a bash against Linux itself, as I use it all the time for all sorts of things. But I run into issues all the time where stuff just doesn't work right, or at all, or I have to spend three days futzing trying to get it to work.
I tend to return to Mac and Windows to actually get stuff done, because I don't have to fight the system to work right.
These types of problems have come along way from the early days of Linux. But they still are there. And blaming the Driver manufacturer for the problems isn't good enough. It isn't the driver's fault that they have to make three or more versions to cover all the distributions out there.
It still needs a lot of work, and often in the same areas that needed work 5 years ago.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This may purely just be me having a bad experience, and in no way indicative of others experiences, but I've often found that people who develop for or are strongly supportive of FOSS tend to be far less receptive to criticism than proprietary software.
I've often criticised Microsoft in forums, chat, in person, whatever, and generally find that if something is genuinely stuffed, they'll admit it and accept something needs to be done. Examples: Security is fucked and needs an overhaul, IIS is a mess and FTP support is rubbish, resource usage in modern versions is higher than it should be and needs to be reduced. The responses are generally quite receptive, and follow a trend of "Yes, this is sub-optimal, and needs to be worked on.".
I find it interesting that often when I've done the same for FOSS software (predominantly Linux, mainly because I use it more than BSD/Solaris/etc...), the response tends to be that either I don't understand what I'm talking about at all, or that what I perceive as a flaw is entirely by design and a work of technical genius (even if, while the programmmer might think its great, it doesn't necessarily translate to greatness as far as the user is concerned). Examples: X.org is a mess and needs an overhaul, code quality/API stability in KDE 4, and others I forget, but probably fairly minor.
Maybe this is a result of being more developer orientated than user orientated? I'm not sure. But I find it striking that when I complain about Microsoft to MS-fans, the result I tend to get is an admission of a genuine fuck-up where Microsoft has dropped the ball, and they need to fix it. Not always, but frequently with Linux, I get the reverse: that this is entirely by design, nothing at all is wrong or will be changed, and I just don't know what I'm talking about.
Is this just me being unlucky?
I disagree: there are plenty of criticisms (though more smart critism as from the Linux hater's blog would be nice), what is unfortunate is the amount of fanboys kneejerk 'answers' instead of just accepting that Linux has some issue.
I remember a 'criticism' I and many had: Linux boots much more slower than BeOS did on much more powerful HW.
The fanboys answers: Linux is much better in foo that's why it's takes more time (or don't reboot Linux!).
Some times later Arjan van de Ven made Linux boot in 5s(SSD)/10s(HDD) showing that all the previous answer were completely wrong: it's just a lack of optimisation..
Note that the criticism is still valid as Arjan's proof of concept isn't available currently for normal users.
One interesting 'criticism' lately is Chrome: it is really in fact a 'Firefox criticism': Google wanted to have a standard compliant, robust browser and Firefox is the former but not the later so they developed their own solution.
When Chrome has a plugin API and is available for Linux and MacOSX, I expect a lot of migration from Firefox to Chrome.
In a word, bullshit.
This guy is just...well hell he says it himself:
What I am is a journalist and author. In other words, I'm an end-user. I'm a very good end user, as it happens. I might even be called a professional end-user. I wouldn't be able to write my books otherwise.
As I was reading his rant...er artical the scene from Mel Brooks 'History of the World Part I' came into my head of the 'birth of the critic.' This guy just wants to validate his own right to rant on something. Without having to get his hands too dirty mind you.
The world of Linux needs critics. Even more so nowadays as Linux slowly seeps into all kinds of industries (the Linux revolution is finally happening, but in slow motion). New people are coming into contact with Linux. Most of them will have high expectations--the same expectations they have of commercial software. If things ain't right, they're gonna say so. Linux people are going to have to get a thick skin. They have to learn to deal with criticism, and--even more important--they're going to have to use it to their advantage.
Slowly? Golly I guess someone better run and tell Google that they better get cracking. Just to name one rather large example of how behind the curve this guy is.
FOSS has plenty of critics. What this ass want's to do is make sure that the nitche of having just enough knowledge to sell his books will survive as FOSS takes a bigger hold.
-1 Troll for TFA.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I suspect there are plenty of technical critics. People who care about how things work, developing cool new stuff, getting the architecture right, etc. etc.
Problem is all that doesn't necessarily make a usable system for common users, aka a windows user. And the technical critics, developers, etc. don't really slow down to see this side of things. Being open source, once something is more or less done, there's nobody to assign the "now make it usable" tasks to. In companies, paying customers can usually force these issues.
Having developed on Linux and Windows for longer than I care to think about now, they both have their strengths and weaknesses. Oddly they share one thing in common. I still have to reboot each box about once every week or so to prevent either one from getting hopelessly bogged down and/or freezing up.
Fix the program installing problem for good! Repositories isn't the placenta that the linux community thinks it is. Windows 1 download/1 click packaging is FAR superior. (And I'm a Ubuntu user, folks) Pidgin is at 2.5.5 and it's still stuck in 2.4 or such in the Ubuntu 8.04 repository. Believe me, I gave up on Pidgin and use Kopete now, because it's nearly impossible to install without a repository. OpenOffice is still v2.4!
Also make a place where code that is fixed, is used, instead of old code. I installed Ubuntu 8.04.01 and had wonderful luck with it, it's running on a laptop that I couldn't install Ubuntu on before. Then tried 8.10, Guess what? An old bug that's at least 2 years old (Debian 4) popped up. Why is it, an update should have an old bug that should have been fixed and elimated 2 years ago?
I use Ubuntu to *work* not to spend weeks downloading and installing programs.
Fix the bugs! Fix the programming installing problem!
After that, push Ubuntu to get rid of Winders for good.
-- Kevin C. Redden kcredden@ gmail 392992
There are plenty on Slashdot, they all get modded troll though regardless of the validity of their statements...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
You missed the point. You make a statement "its not their problem" but then the argument you use is about assigning blame. Like the guy said, its *not* the developer's fault but it *IS* their problem. The problem is that a lot of people have all this hardware that won't work with Linux and won't just spend money that they probably don't have just so they can use Linux. Why switch to something that only works with x% of the hardware out there when you can use something that works with (x+y)% of the hardware, where "y" is usually a significantly sized number. So its their problem insofar as they have to figure out a way to pass this hurdle, otherwise you'll never reach critical mass in terms of people adopting Linux.
I would agree than Linux has few critics within the Linux community (of users and developers). Outside the community it has many critics, or rather, attackers.
Even within the Linux community, I don't think we are in denial - we all know Linux's weaknesses as well as its strengths. We mostly acknowledge that its main weakness is integration and support from PC manufacturers, who are mostly in exclusive deals with Microsoft.
Most of the points about "external" criticism so far ignore the fact that there is not one common use-case nor external viewpoint. A big difference between OSS code and commercial products is that there is not a single funded owner/developer working from a commercial market strategy.
So there simply does not exist a target user community (as identified in the market strategy) from which a proper survey or critical basis can be extracted. People make (often) false assumptions that they personally are the target audience for OSS code, when in fact they may not be.
The lack of simple 1:1 correspondences between OSS markets and consumer markets is what causes much of the friction. Until you learn the vocabulary and expectations of both worlds, it is hard to imagine why "criticism" is ignored.
In the OSS world, you really do need to find an advocate who is aligned with your interests if you expect things to improve for your use case. Such an advocate can be your own developers funded to work on OSS, or a commercial re-seller working on an OSS-based release you can use and support. Sometimes you can be lucky and find an existing advocate proceeding without your economic support, in which case you may beable to ride along for free. But nobody is particularly concerned with the critiques coming from a parasitic user base.
Things usually go like this:
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Signed, Bill
The fundamental problems is that Linux doesn't have organized usability testing. One would think that Red Hat or Novell or VA Linux (remember VA Linux?) would be doing some of this, but they're not.
What's needed is not bug reports. What's needed is more organized.
Basic usability testing looks like this. You have some machines set up, arranged with video recording to record both the screen and the user's face and voice. You bring in some naive users for testing. (A good way to do this today would be to rent a vacant store in a mall.) Each user gets a card with some basic tasks, like "Write and print a letter" or "Download a song and listen to it". Their efforts to do this are recorded. More advanced tasks are provided for users with previous experience.
The recordings then have to be analyzed, looking for obstacles to progress. At what points did the user stop making progress on the task and get stuck? Did they need to use a help facility? How much time did they spend with the help facility? Did it solve their problem? Did they have to back up and retry something? Did the user become angry or frustrated? Did they need outside help? Did they complete the task? How long did it take?
The analysis summaries are used to determine what needs to be fixed. Any single problem that stopped more than one tester is a bug. Anything that made more than one user angry or frustrated is a bug. This is not a matter of opinion.
Microsoft does this for Windows. Apple does it for the Mac. Nobody does it for Linux. That's a big part of why Linux on the desktop still sucks.
Now and then there are attempts to deal with this by papering over the warts of the operating system. At various times, SGI, Asus, and HP have tried. It sort of works if you severely limit what the user can do, but otherwise, the mold shows through the wallpaper.
Linux needs a platform like DirectX that makes it very easy for people to make games!!!
Don't say OpenGL because I'm no game dev but from what I've read it is much harder to develop for OpenGL. And from what I've seen there are no games on Linux.
It is the only thing stopping me from using Linux exclusively. I absolutely love it. I have had my mother and sister using Ubuntu 8.10 for the last 5 months, as well as a few of my friends. I love not having to clean out the viruses and spyware every other week.
People who say Linux isn't ready haven't really tried it. Ask my mother if it's ready she will say " what is linux? ", she doesn't even know she uses it every day it's just the computer to her.
DVD read speed is horrible. It is not DMA. It is related to lib-ata driver. Centos 5 and debian don't have this problem and it is on multiple pieces of hardware I have noticed.
ubuntu:
hdparm -t /dev/sr0 /dev/sr0:
Timing buffered disk reads: 6 MB in 4.14 seconds = 1.45 MB/sec
ATAPI CD-ROM, with removable media
Model Number: TSSTcorp DVD+/-RW TS-L632H
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2
Centos 5 same hardware: /dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 74 MB in 3.70 seconds = 20.01 MB/sec
Linux is a kernel, licensed under a free software license.
Wanna change it? Go right ahead, alter the code to your heart's content. Or hire anybody to do it for you.
Your use of "fault" suggests you don't understand what Moryath said. And your example seems to support Moryath's conclusion very well.
If a manufacturer makes a MOBO that doesn't support a type of HDD that PC World is selling, it isn't the manufacturer's fault, but it is their problem. At least, it is their problem if they want more people to buy their MOBOs. If you support a fraction of the hardware out there, you get a fraction of the customers. That fraction consists of people that bought pieces specifically to work with your product and people that just happen to have pieces that work with your product.
Its not about fault. Its about figuring out a goal. If your goal is to get more desktop users to run Linux on their DVR, then available hardware thats incompatible with your software becomes your problem. It becomes a challenge you have to overcome to reach your goal.
As far as linux spreading on the desktop, I couldn't guess at how many developers actually have a goal of making an OS for the average desktop user. I've spoken with a few that set goals of making the platform stable, or fast, or capable of doing a specific task they are interested in. All of that is fine and, I believe, necessary. But if there are people that actually want linux to gain market share on the desktop, they will have to face the problems of achieving that goal, even if its not their fault the problems exist.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
I ma not sure what the reason is, but after my first venture into ubunto after a lifetime of windows. I got to say i am not impressed, I am sure it is a fine OS for many things, but i have no plans to migrate from windows any time soon.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You just need to lower your threshold down to see below the Score 1 posts.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I disagree with the premise that Linux lacks critics. What may be lacking is a certain degree of understanding on the part of Linux fans when people who don't "get" Linux have a problem with it.
I am reminded of Linus Torvald's answer to the question, "What if Linux never catches on?" He just shrugged his shoulders and said, "I'll just keep working on it."
It doesn't matter if anyone likes it. It doesn't matter if Linux is "damned to an eternity of navel-gazing". The people who want to work on it will keep working on it, and the people who want to use it will keep using it. Like any other perfectly innocuous activity (bird watching, knitting, woodcarving) its relative popularity is unimportant.
Proverbs 21:19
Either directly or via "independent testing companies" they finance. The important question is how much of this is valid compared to propaganda? And does anyone in the Linux world bother to pay attention?
Tell me where I sign and I will happily tell what I think is wrong. For free. The problem is there is no such place. There's nowhere truly open community accepting this kind of comment.
"Linux Needs Critics"
Awesome, I love to criticize things. Here's an example:
@Linux: Your fat, you smell, and no one likes you.
So, how much does the position pay and when can I start?
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Which, in the end, proves the point Keir is trying to make: Linux has no critics. Who cares what the developers write as comments in their code? This is irrelevant to the end user. What's needed are critics of the end-user experience. If you find someone criticizing the Linux experience, look at the answers they get. They may be drowned in technical gibberish, they may told "don't domplain, after all it's free", they may be told to go read an FAQ. What they won't get is someone saying: "oh, you're right, that's hard to understand, let's fix it".
The end user does not care about comments in the source code.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Yes, and a lot of those developers are happy to sit back, examine creative criticism, and fix problems.
However, the ones that are generally the most noticeable are the ones that bitch and rant and generally make everyone else look bad.
Pretty much par for any group though, not just linux users/developers.
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/ Tell me he's not a critic, and a big one at that... theres a lot more people like that around than you realize..... Hell half the people designing code for Linux critic each others stuff as well.....
Linux has plenty of critics and down-right enemies. You can't do much better then Microsoft for both, and there's scores more critics in average joe user land.
Linux simply needs some one who is willing to invest in marketing for it. You can get an army of geeks to code a great collection of operating systems and tools becuase that's fun for geeks, but we can't throw a collection of products at marketeers, they require funding. If something could be cobbled together though,, you'd see Linux make enormous inroads in the user space. People like to be sold, they simply aren't willing to explore.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
As the author points out in the article, there is a difference between complaining and criticising. Well structured criticism is useful and is not necessarily done to seek redress. It isn't necessarily expressing a grievance either. A criticism is the beginning of an improvement.
GNU/Linux has many detractors and opponents (mostly being, or representing, commercial entities which see the danger to their business models) and for years there has been a strong culture of supposed 'Linux advocacy'. This has gone way beyond advocacy and in fact been relentless and aggressive promotion by adherents, that is religious evangelism in all but name. Evangelism doesn't accommodate criticism of the faith, positive or otherwise and is practised irrespective of context, reception, appropriateness or usefulness. Any deviation from full unthinking worship is apostacy. Hagiography mostly excludes review and peer review in the world of free software. There are even cults around distributions. There are some exceptions, but you only have to see what happens when someone makes an honest appraisal of a cult's idol to appreciate this. You can, occasionally and from very few authors, read positive and well informed reviews but because they are not shameless hagiographies the author gets berated, slandered, harangued and harassed and occasionally death threats are made! Look at reviews over the last year of Slackware and Puppy to see this actually happen. It's pretty remarkable. I even read this on the Slackware board at LQ this week: " I agree yet again. The only reason *buntu is better than Window$ is because it's FLOSS and marginally more secure (not due to the distro itself but due to the nature of FLOSS ... generally less buggy and full of holes). Other than that, no real difference between the two." This is actually insane, yet comes from a well established priest of the cult, sorry I meant board member and, and naturally it went unremarked. There is no real difference between Windows and Ubuntu. Hmmm. And PV was born of a virgin and RMS has stigmata which look like Penguins (actually that last one may be true).
I think this kind of thinking applies far more to the communities around the code than the way the code is peer reviewed, but it does mean that honest, constructive and useful criticism in broad terms is very unlikley to be offered. Even a discussion is impossible. That has to have an impact on filtering the people who contribute and on they way they contribute and on what they contribute. It isn't healthy. Not many people will volunteer to be the witch in the witch hunt more than once.
Luckily I'm above that kind of thinking. I'm rational and broad minded enough that I will happily use either of Debian Stable or Debian Testing. I'm not fussed.
They seem to spend a lot of time and money criticizing Linux, even though most have no clue as to what it is. Oh hang on, were we talking genuine criticism, not demonizing via misinformation? Somehow I doubt their intentions are to make Linux better....unless their Microsoft sponsored dictionary has "better" defined as "extinct".
I've been saying this for _years_. I would write a long winded rant here but since I have written a blog entry on it ages ago you might as well read it there - Clicky here! Needless to say the guy is spot and the fact that there is now over 300+ comments on this thread means that he certainly touched a nerve.
*SIGH.*
There are three possible reactions to finding out that a piece of hardware doesn't work with an OS (that you are trying to convince other people to use):
#1 - Write the drivers yourself (doable if you're a code-monkey, not doable for the majority of people, even the majority of Linux users).
#2 - Convince the company that made the product to write the drivers.
#3 - Run around screaming about how much the company "sucks", and what an "idiot" anyone who bought the hardware (using another OS where the support is present) is for buying hardware that isn't supported under an OS they probably had no intention of running.
Most Linux guys tend to go with #3. Unfortunately, the reality is that #3 not only does nothing to help get new users into your platform, but actually causes them to turn away from it on the basis that "those guys are fucking nuts."
It's very simple psychology, "linux geeks" sits in their ivory towers, thinking they are all knowing, and anyone saying anything else is a arrogant, stupid script kiddie (no matter of their experience, age nor merits).
They simply DO NOT realize how wrong they are, because they cannot see beyond their own ego.
Being rather highly skilled, i found it frustrating with some non-mainstream software supposed to be enterprise quality: Documentation at the very best lacking, expectation to read all of it and memorize all of it, and when asking questions you are faced with arrogance, egoistic replies such as "You are just too stupid to understand it", too stupid to understand that Gimp does not have any visible cue for drawing a line, but the way is buried into the 1000page manual? (One real life example from years back)
More technical it gets, more aggressive behaviour you will meet.
This lead me to ultimately abandon the whole community as a bunch of egoistic maniacs, who are too blind from their ego to even realize their own mistakes.
I read lately an article which described in terms of psychology 4-types of a coder, i've found many OSS community "gurus" are on the first ladder, the "copy paste guys, who think they know all there is to it, and even refuses to hear otherwise", that group describes these people the best.
One common denominator is that unless you already know everything they know (read knowledge) you must be an idiot. And the only way to know it all is to be one of the developers, and adopting the very same bad practices.
I'm not saying all OSS is like that or all people affiliated with OSS, just that MOST are like that.
If you need support, and actual answers, stick with commercial (OSS or proprietary), especially if you need HA (High Availability) solutions.
What i'm saying will be confirmed with the flood of flamebaits & trolling following this as a reply.
Want proof? Just try to ask some rather simplistic, non-documented feature/tidbit in IRC for projects like: Exim, Qmail, Asterix(Not the worst by far), Linux kernel, Bind or others with similarly requiring skill & knowledge level. The same can aswell be seen on some more mainstream projects such as Gimp.
On the flipside of the coin, if you get accepted to the community, or get to communicate with more professional people (who do it for professional reasons, not personal) you can actually expect good answers and conversations, but they are golden nuggets. If you get accepted to the community, don't dare to speak aloud your out-of-the-box ideas, or trying to drive innovation, they are highly unacceptable by the same Ivory Tower Demigods. In their world you are basicly attacking them socially and claiming they are dumber than you are, and will in turn deny all merit in your ideas and call you dumb script kiddie. (Oh, Why, Why, Why is it such a TABU to make user friendly software? Oh, Why, Why, Why is it such a TABU to automate simple configuration in more complex software? Or provide readable error messages)
One example lately i had was when talking about C# when developing around an OSS solution, i disliked C#s tendency to seek excuses for crashes, and the immensive need for try catch calls, especially on errors which are not that fatal it was nauseating to develop 75% fail-safes on the nature of the language, and 25% actual business logic! I got attacked strongly against as being incapable of proper code, while the issue was the stupidity of spending most of the time making these try catch clauses, and functions for parsing through a whole object tree to see if that FINAL variable / object exists. Why isn't it sufficient to just check the last one directly, WITHOUT a crash? Why do i have to parse through the whole tree from down to up to see it's existence? Did i check it directly, or not, in any scenario the result is 100% the same: It either exists, or does not exist.
Because of insisting that language design should be the exact opposite: Seeking reasons to continue instead of crashing UNLESS specifically told to crash if an error is met, i were many things, none of them were positive.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Keir Thomas berates the fact that the world of Linux almost entirely lacks critics. In fact, he says, Linux people tend to see genuine critical evaluation as a bad thing.
Keir Thomas is a witch! He gave me the evil eye, and now my laptop has dropped three pixels! He'll crash your servers if you let him run free! Burn him! :)
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I'm running ubuntu on a dell laptop...
and it just randomly ejected the cd (happens to be the vista disk that came with the laptop)
Self-identified underdog psychology is the worst of in-group/out-group behaviors.
When a group forms and identifies itself as an underdog, it closes ranks and will not criticize the prevailing dogma because it perceives itself as too weak already.
This is in dramatic contrast to psychological compensation, or cognitive dissonance, wherein people who paid too much for an art deco Macintosh need to invent some moral superiority to what they do as no evidence suggests technical superiority.
Linux advocates can escape underdog psychology by looking at the positive data first: Linux has a firmly entrenched market share doing what it does best. It will always have this base and it has a growing hobbyist base, which is where all the interesting stuff (IMO) occurs in computing anyway.
Anti-Microsoft rants, etc. conceal the fact that Windows still rules the desktop and Linux may never be ready to take on the software base of win32 applications developed over the past thirty years. When Linux users rant at Microsoft, they reinforce the sense of inferiority that fuels the underdog complex.
Futurist Traditionalism
Good critique comes from having one place to complain and to have your complaints read, where you can build a reputation as a critic. Instead, there are a million gripers on thousands of boards.
Linux enthusiasts like the freedom of something they can customize and like being different. But you can't be a good critic of every customization. So you can't build a reputation as having thoughtful comments and putting in hard work. So what is the point of putting in hard work? Thus, no one puts any work into the critique.
Shut down all the other forums, move everything to linux.org, implement a rating/karma system (that is better than Slashdot's), and start asking for critiques about specifics. Insightful comments are waiting to be written, collated, rated, read, and ultimately implemented. But there is no leadership.
It's a hacker's system. The problem is distros and people try to make it into something it's not. Yeah, you can run a business with it, do homework and burn DVD's but it's just not refined enough for average Joe to use it for those things. The community is fooling themselves if they think it's anywhere near ready for the ol' cliche 'prime time'. I love tinkering with Linux, but that's all it's good for in my opinion - tinkering. I don't believe it needs criticism because I don't believe its got any chance of being worthy of being useful enough to need criticism. It's sortof like saying Hyundias should have Bose stereos. Give me a break. Don't try to make a diamond out of a rough piece of carbon. Linux kicks ass, but not that kind of ass.
Well being a programmer myself and using Linux as my main desktop, this is "also" my problem. I'm an end-user as well.
The last irritating things I have found: I just installed opensuse 11, running KDE 4. Well I love it and I don't understand all the fuss around it. Anyway I had to zip several files. I had to send them by email to a client....So simple is it? I openned this new dolhpin. I selected them, right click,actions and then the list appeared:
What kind of paranoid menu is this ? I've got 4 encryption features out of six. I simply need a very simple "compress..." or "Archive" like KDE 3.X to make a simple "zip file" or a tar.gz, I will attach it to my email and that's it. I couldn't find it, so I openned terminal and I typed the proper command line...
See how stupid it is?
Sometimes you feel like what Linux lacks the most is simply "common sense". Sure I will customise that annoying/stupid action submenu when I will have the required time to document myself...But It is truly annoying, even if you are a developer. Some guy out there was so proud of his encryption scheme that he puts 4 commands.
Not all problems are driver related, user-friendliness is also a "big" problem.
Hmm.
Your point has been disproven.
PS Critics need to be more critique than negative. "GIMP is a stupid name" is the level most criticism of Linux is at and it's no bloody use to anyone 'cept MS zealots.
Linux is a terrific operating system, and provides a functionality that is unparalleled for a great deal of technologies that do not have good support from other operating systems. Yet for years, it was just too hard to use for most people. This has finally changed with recent distros like Ubuntu, but the time that it took to get "it just works" versions into peoples hands was fueled by developer's not listening to lay users who had trouble with the OS. Here's a useful experiment... I think we are finally at a point where I could give a go live version of Ubuntu to my mother and expect her to have some success in using it though this is perhaps not yet true for many other distros.
I always feel the need to return to Windows; I NEED my viruses to work damnit. When will the Linux guys get their asses off their sofas and make my viruses work? It's no good pleading with them that only a fully malware compatible OS will ever reach the mainstream, they feel that malware is "bad" for the users so they don't want to go there. How am I expected to pull my weight in the botnet if my PC won't send out it's spam? Don't tell me to RTFM, malware writers ignore the Linux market and are too busy infecting more Windows boxes to care. It's not the malware writers fault that their viruses don't work on Linux. It's all Linux's fault.
Perhaps I should switch to a more malware compatible distro. Novell have risked their business on having more interoperability with Windows, so maybe SLED would be a good option yes?
Linux has similar technologies and forks of technologies, it's pretty evolutionary. It's really astonishing how one app can run on various different filesystems with different window managers. More diversity is welcome, there should be forks of everything.
There's plenty critics, the problem is the vendor-customer relationship or rather the lack of one. For one I'm not paying for support, but even if I did then support is mostly about bug fixes or other "polish" things that distributions do. When it comes to development a support agreement could only help a on a few core package, for everything else upstream would go "Well good for them but Canonical/SUSE/Red Hat isn't paying us just packaging it up so go fish". Not that vendors listen that much to single customers either, but money being money means they'll always go for the mass market and deliver the features most people want.
It's been touted around quite a bit that Linux does not need sales, it can thrive and grow without them. Which is true, but most people don't want to hear the flip side of the coin. Sales come from user demand, and not needing sales means the same as not needing to listen to your users. Where a commercial company would go "Our revenue is down, we need to concentrate of features X, Y and Z that our customers want and stop these pet projects" or "we need to hire in someone to redo the network code that nobody's maintaining" most open source software is like "We do what we feel like, when we feel like, how we feel like with the developers available and our market share is whatever it ends up being." Sure most want their project to be successful and popular but it's not really hitting them in the wallet.
It's not the special needs I'm talking about where you have custom development or bounties, I'm talking about basic market alignment. The good kind of market alignment, in which you try satisfying the users most common needs. In closed source software it often turns sour with featuritis, planned obsolesence and other tricks but open source at times have this wonderful ability to say "Yes, that would be a good idea and lots of people would benefit but nobody's doing it so it's not going to get done." Also known as "Code it yourself". The market, and thus the users aren't in the driving seat. They're just hitch-haiking along to where the developers are going hoping it's the right direction. While with commercial software you've paid a fare that at least gives you some right to complain.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I just submitted a story the other day, which was rejected by Slashdot, who has has rejected 3:3 of my stories now.
The last story I submitted was titled: When Open Source Follows the Bad Examples of Closed Source. It may not be earth-shattering, but I thought it was rejected because it might cause controversy.
Quick-Starters Need to Die! Quick-starters were probably devised by marketing people in an effort to make programs appear to bloated software appear to start faster. The catch is: they must always make the program larger. Sadly, even OpenOffice.org succumbed to using uses a quick-starter by default.
When was the last time you wanted your computer to boot slower?
Why must programs use obfuscated file formats? Do, you have Mozilla Thunderbird? Do you want to transfer a few emails and contacts to another machine? You probably will not because Thunderbird saves all it's email in the mbox format variant, so you can just forget about dragging the mails out. Yes, there are header databases, but those could just as easily work for some atomic/modular format scheme, but they do not. This gives the perhaps unfounded appearance of a commercial-style lock-in attempt. It also makes Squirrel Mail looks a little cuter and furrier. I love Thunderbird, so why do this to me?
Would not it be nice to have all your contacts in a folder in V-Cards, or something similar? If they were V-Cards, you could share them more easily, and even sort them by date, in a GUI file manager or command line.
Why hide user data? I am willing to bet you do not know the name of the random string Thunderbird or Firefox assigned to your profile. No peeking! Perhaps, you have two profiles--which one are you using? Users should be prompted for meaningful profile names instead of using random strings for their data. Why even hide user data in "Application Data" in Windows? I know that it is where it is supposed to go, but often it's not backed up--because by default the users cannot even see it. In Linux, we put a dot in front of the file name, so we can also forget that it is our data to be backed up. Is there something wrong about placing it a folder called "Mail" in our home folder, where we can see it, and let multiple programs access it?
Why must Gnome users use Evolution? Do you use Thunderbird or another email client? Well, good luck ridding your system of Evolution. My fiend thought I was kidding--until he tried to take off of his wife's netbook, for which it was too large, in a few ways. What's good for Novell--might not be what's best for the average Gnome user. Loosen the deathgrip, please. Overall Gnome needs to be more modular. Divide and conquer, just like Mozilla did.
Why carrying bad design choices forward? Blender is a powerful program, and coupled with the equally powerful Yaffray ray-tracer, it has been used for impressive animations, such as "Uncle Buck Bunny" and "Elephant's Dream." With this said, it has a dirty, not-so-secret: its user interface.
While people are hard at work making the changes in Blender that will accept the changes in the user interface, will the Blender team, and the column of users who have maladjusted to its current user interface--also accept change? There is a lot good in Blender, but asking the user to right-click to select and object is a most grievous insult, and user interface default.
Why emulate the Windows registry? Sigh, this insecure-by-design abomination has been used and emulated too much be open source software. What's that, you can't password protect levels of a registry like you could in folders and directories? You just need to create a registry emulation for a Linux version? Does not this slow the Linux version development?
Why use mono? It's Microsoft's horse, and you can't drive it. Follow it, and you shall follow.
Open source programs need not emulate the bad habits of their their commercial counterparts. Controversial: perhaps, flame-bait, perhaps also, but it is my hope that to encourage open source developers to take a peripheral view of their software
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
'bringing the (ahem) "skills" of a literature graduate to the world of Linux has been interesting.'
See, he's being hip here, showing how he's integrated himself into hacker culture. "Skills" is hacker slang used to refer to one's learned abilities...
Bow-ties are cool.
Gentlemen, I like Linux.
Gentlemen, I like Linux.
Gentlemen, I love Linux!
I like X11. I like user accounts. I like init levels. I like the command line.
I like iptables. I like ssh. I like grub. I like lilo. I like partitions.
cd. mv. du. fsck. ps. chron. grep. dd. awk. rm. cut. exec. sed. paste. fortune. latex. convert. wget. make.
I love every program that can be run from the prompt!
I like umounting entire directories and mounting new partitions in their place. When I see my home directory on a seperate disk seamlessly becoming part of a new filesystem, my heart dances.
I like showing windows users the power of the interfaces at my command. When they saw me editing config files in vi and emacs without a mouse and fled screaming from the server room, my heart leapt.
I like it when a long and tedious task is automated with single perl program. I remember being moved upon seeing a simple quick script make thousands of complex edits again and again.
Having total control over the machine as root is unendurably exciting. Seeing multiple users being logged out and their process terminated, as my own finger falls, was spectacular.
When the filesystem was failing with multiple bad sectors, and we hotswapped it all from tape backup without a reboot, I was at my height.
I like it when things go catastrophically wrong. It is a sad thing to see a newb be fooled into running "#rm -rf /".
I like being outperformed in security and reliability by BSD servers. Having to fix bug after bug and constantly update the kernel while they run unmaintained for years is the ultimate disgrace.
Gentlemen...I desire a distro that is like hell.
Gentlemen, my companions in Slashdot, who follow the penguin...Gentlemen, what do you desire?
Do you desire a distro as well? Do you desire a distro with no mercy!?
Do you desire a setup of boxen that stretches the limits of solder, fans, power supply, and heat sinks to the limit!? One that will overclock all the CPUs on this planet?!? ...
Very well...then we shall have LINUX!!
May the Maths Be with you!
Linux's root-is-omnipotent approach is so 1980's compared to Vista's UAC and ACL structure (inherited in large part from VMS). (most Windows users don't benefit because the dumb-ass installer doesn't get them to make a user account). SELinux bolts on some ACL but you have to be a total guru to design new rules, or even to get things to work. Fedora thinks that application developers aren't to be trusted with securing their own apps, so we wait for the experts. Meanwhile I've disabled it to get my mail/antivirus to work ..
Sometimes you cannot just *make* a driver. Some hardware is overwhelmingly complicated, and if the hardware manufacturer cannot or will not release the source for their driver or technical documents for the hardware, then you are SOL. My laptop's integrated modem has no free drivers, and the only Linux driver available is from a team that is under an NDA. The attempts to write a free driver were nothing even close to something useful, and those attempts have been undertaken for 10 years.
Palm trees and 8
Linuxers wonder how people can think Windows is so good
My experience with Windows users is that they don't necessarily think Windows is "so good". Rather, they use it because (a) it's what they know, (b) it came with the computer they bought, (c) it's what their friends use, or (d) all of the above.
My GF uses Windows and will continue doing so despite all of the grief she has to put up with from malware, crapware, nagware, viruses, etc. She comes over to my place, uses my Linux machine, and absolutely loves it, but gets irritable and defensive if I suggest that she could install it on her own machine, too. Dell gave her Windows with her computer, and maybe running Linux would break it or cause it to explode... or something.
* Archive
:-) Nice, neat ordering. Let the filechooser decide what to encrypt.
* Archive & Sign
* Archive & Encrypt <- implies signing
* Decrypt Files
* Start a slideshow
* Open terminal here
Bam, 5 options.
Yeah, good point. It's more of that "Scratch my itch" vs. "Clean, Consistent, UI design"
Something Linux in general lacks.
The problem is that too many people in the open-source community have the "I'm always right" or "my way is better" mentality in the first place. This is why we see so much forking of projects, which usually doesn't benefit anyone except the person who wants to boost their own ego by having their own project.
So even if you had more critics, I don't think a lot of these developers would ever listen. Take GIMP for example. People have complained about the interface for years. But it's still the same as it ever was.
Of course, the "fanbase" is just as guilty, because as someone in these very comments pointed out, if you complain about a piece of open-source software, you get dugg down, marked as a troll, told you're an idiot, etc etc. The open-source world is just very incapable of accepting criticism. Yet they very easily dish it out.
Opinions are like a$$holes, everybody has one, and I am going to share mine with you. How thoughtful of me! :)
I am both a Linux user and a Windows user. At home I use gentoo, though I've used slackware, mandrake (before it became so commercial) and several other flavors. At work, I am a windows administrator simply because it provides me more opportunities for work. So you can say that I am more or less operating system agnostic. Does that qualify me to be critical of both systems? Maybe, but keep in mind this is my opinion.
The problem with linux seems to be a lack of focus. The author of the article seems to dwell on the lack of criticism for Linux. I tend to disagree that there is no criticism, I think linux gets more criticism from "new users" than windows ever did. Most new users of windows don't complain because everything just "seems" to work, they have nothing to complain about. Now as most of the more advanced windows users and linux zealots will so adamantly point out, windows is slow, buggy, proprietary, etc. The general consensus however is that windows works fine for most uses. On the flip side of that coin, a vanilla install of ubuntu, or some other mainstream distro will probably have the same result that windows had with new users, it generally just works. For the more advanced users, Linux is like moving a to a new city; you are forced to re-learn certain things, and will inevitably be forced to "tweak" the system somehow to meet your needs. Most of us are ok with his, and many of us complain, but in the end we just use whatever fits the bill the best. The most advanced of the users, namely the programmers, are the same way but they posses the capacity to change the operating system as they see fit. As a result what the rest of us tend to see is only what the programmers thought was useful.
.
What point am I trying to make here? Well, Im simply stating the obvious, that the users just use whatever is available to them in whatever form best fits their needs. Occasionally a altruistic programmer will update some mundane end user code, but for the most part most of the tweaking happens on the back end, at least with linux. Windows on the other hand has commercial interests to keep in mind. They know that 80% of their customers are inexperienced users and risk losing market share if they dont cater to their needs. Thus 80% of their efforts go to features that make windows easier to use for the end user, which is inherently going to give Windows an advantage in that market. Open source programmers in general, with the exception of Red Hat programmers and other corporate paid distros, have no such requirement or concern. They tailor their code to their needs for the most part and rarely step outside of the box to understand the concerns of the people using their code. In other words the difference here seems to be the inherent lack of risk in open source programming. Most open source programmers simply dont understand or communicate with a majority of their users because they simply dont have to. In most cases they dont risk losing their career over a disagreement on whether or not they want drag and drop support in their GUI or something. Their excuse is that these things are not important but users have proved time and time again that they are.
This is why windows has been so successful they have figured out what users "expect" they understand that rote learning is not the way to go about creating an operating system. They understand the simple needs of the end user and they cater to those needs. Why? Because their jobs depend on it. How many of the typical computer users are spending their time setting up HTPC boxes to record 3 channels and encode them simultaneously or build a web server to remote control their home automation unit? How many users have a need to schedule cron jobs and create shell scripts to compile source code? Honestly? That is such a small portion of the market, but those seem to be the people that linux caters to. There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with that at all, but if anybody ever expects linux to be successful in the desktop market or ever become more mainstream, these are the kind of criticisms that the linux developers must acknowledge.
I've been complaining about the dumbing down of Gnome (they think gnome users are idiots - just look at the file dialog for one example), the crappy Flash player Adobe puts out for Firefox (why can't DHTML float over flash like it can in MSIE? Is the problem Flash or Firefox? Either way, it's been broken since day one and needs fixing), OpenOffice is spaghetti code and I/O is very slow, *something* needs to be done so more preconfigured systems can be shipped (NVidia & GPL "license" incompatibility creates legal issues when it comes to shipping preinstalled systems), X11 and VNC are horribly inefficient over a WAN, whereas Windows' Remote Desktop Protocol works great even over dial-up connections, oh, and yeah, developers still suck when it comes with users who bother to submit bug reports - especially the OpenOffice folks. They just don't want to fix horrid architectural issues or bugs, because developing new buggy features is more interesting than fixing their previous garbage.
Having said that, I do recommend Linux whenever and wherever it makes sense. I've slowly been convincing the Rabbi at my congregation to go F/OSS at home, the congregation's infrastructure is going to be 90% linux, my business is >90% Linux, and some of my customers run Linux. However, there are many cases where Linux just is not a good fit. It's not the one-size-fits-all BFH. Sometimes a a screwdriver or wrench is a more appropriate tool.
Where is AutoCAD?
Where is the Adobe Creative Suite? (I personally get by with inkscape + gimp + pdfedit + Krita, but my art director NEEDS the Adobe CS (So it's Windows at work and OS X at home for him). It takes me ~3 hours to do a task that takes him under a half hour in Illustrator or Gimp, because to get the same final product requires a lot more manual steps in Gimp and Inkscape; no layer effects, no droplets, Macro recording and playback doesn't exist in any user-friendly way (and no I am NOT about to get into scripting gimp. I'll stick to shell scripting server maintenance and monitoring, and writing installers. thanks anyway!)
Where is Quickbooks for Linux? They have a server component that runs on Linux, but where is the Quickbooks Pro desktop app?
Where are Linux-based embroidery apps? Windows XP is going to be on my new Dell Precision notebook so I can design embroidery patterns. I draw them in Inkscape but I need them to be converted to an embroidery format my machine can understand. So, I do the design AND conversion in Windows, then I don't have to reboot to run the embroidery machine.
Also, more specific to Linux itself (meaning the kernel, not the integrated distro end users refer to as Linux): Where are the merges from RedHat, Ubuntu, Novell, and so forth? Each vendor has incredible extensions to the kernel which makes automounting, user-space drivers, WiFi, and various other features work better than the vanilla kernel. Why can't LSB become a reality, and along with that, a more stable-yet-almost-bleeding-edge kernel come from kernel.org? That would make it much easier for users of $foo and $bar distros to run new hardware without losing fixes and enhancements added by the various vendors? Ubuntu works extremely well with WiFi (but I hate their standard desktops, and I hate ubuntu's administrative GUI) and with 11.x OpenSuse works almost-but-not-quite as well as Ubuntu. DeadRat, er, RedHat/Centos, not so much. Fedora? Every time I've tried it, it's been on bleeding-edge motherboards and would kernel panic or simply not boot, whereas (K)Ubuntu and OpenSuSE would always Just Work(TM). Centos/RedHat? I run it on servers, but hate it for desktops.
I love running Linux, but it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. I can't even use it as my sole OS at home any more because embroidery software I need doesn't exist. :(
Lots of us users are plenty critical of Linux, even though we are Linux evangelists. It's just that while many/most developers take feedback readily (the KDE team is particularly good in this regard!) others
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The set of Linux developers does not completely (or even greatly) overlap the set of Linux advocates. It is the advocates' problem when hardware doesn't work, not the developers'. The key to getting your unsupported hardware worked on is to find the subset of developers and advocates who overlap and will work for free to help you out, or buy some hardware for a developer and help them reverse engineer it and debug the drivers.
It does lack focus, though, and that's "by design". There are tons of projects that exist solely because someone has fun working on them, not because they're "strategic".
If I may, I'd like to suggest one project where I'd really like to see feature parity with Windows.
I want transparent access to virtual file systems from any console or GUI program. I.e. I should be able to do "cat cifs://computername/sharename/filename.txt" on the console, just like in Windows.
Yes, the motherboard manufacturer's fault.
Sure beats idiots running around whining and sniveling about software they got for free that doesn't work perfectly with unsupported and under-documented hardware they bought completely without regard for the system they are trying to use it with.
I'd happily volunteer my services.
I'm blunt, hypercritical and am allergic to excuses, stupidity, bullshit, and responsibility cop-outs.
I'll even give a couple for free:
If I have to tinker with it to make it work, it's crap and needs improvement.
If I have to edit a text file instead of using a configuration GUI, it's crap and needs improvement.
And yes, I use Linux at work, but Windows XP at home because game support is crap (see #1 above).
Question everything
Some guy out there was so proud of his encryption scheme that he puts 4 commands.
Not all problems are driver related, user-friendliness is also a "big" problem.
He assumed that the end user needed the same functionality as him, so that's what he put on his menu. The average linux distro team is too busy recruiting people to hack on the code to even care about recruiting usability testers, if they even feel they need one. (There was a slashdot story ages ago about one distro where the whole philosophy was "if you're not 1337 enough to use this, we don't want you to".) The other problem of course is that the average distro just doesn't have the resources to do wide scale usability testing. They can't go out and pay a bunch of people to sit around and use there systems and write down everything that went wrong, and the people who'd do it for free usually don't run into the same problems or found a work around so they don't feel it's worth reporting the problem. Linux gui problems have been discussed to death on slashdot, and the general consensus is that most projects either can't or won't deal with them.
open source modern art: laser taggi
It's really sad when hacks pretend they want constructive criticism.
I have nothing compelling to say
Linux is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Of course Linux has critics. Linux has everything. Those who say otherwise should be flogged and forced to shut the fuck up. Stop denigrating Linux you bastards!
Yeah, this is an important point. Contributing to free software isn't just a technical thing - it's an interpersonal thing, too. To contribute to an existing free software project, you have to convince the project managers to adopt the change. Creating a new project or a fork is not much good unless you get people to use it, and distributions to include it - otherwise that effort is wasted. And unless you intend to support that project forever, the project dead-ends when you leave it, unless you form a team of people who will take up the slack if you take a break.
Communication, leadership, and effective collaboration are all very important if you want to create change in the free software world.
Bow-ties are cool.
Keir Thomas obviously doesn't know how to search google for "Linux criticism"... There's a lot of critics of Linux if you look for them. The thing is most Linux users don't really care what someone else thinks about Linux.
And happens on the lists of many projects, from kernel to KDE.
As to "Navel gazing", and "Things not getting better"
1) 'aptitude' et al makes software easier to install than on windows
2) I am running KDE4 + Compiz on a laptop that could barely handle Vista+Aero. My wife looked at it and said "Wow, its kinda like what Vista was supposed to be".
Everything I do under Kubuntu is faster than under Vista. Apparently Windows 7 is supposed to be a lot faster. So doubtlessly, this will lead to some improvement in Linux, nothing like some competition.
Some areas are still rough around the edges, like video, audio, and other drivers. But this is usually due to pigheaded NDAs.
I was suprised to find my laptop's webcam works better under Linux than Vista. The vista driver sucks.
UI wise, I love KDE. I can make it behave how I like. Windows/Macs often feel like I am working with some fingers chopped off.
Back in the 90s I read the Linux Advocacy FAQ - back then I was in college and very enthusiastic about Linux, and very anti-Microsoft. The Advocacy FAQ was a good read - above all it urged the reader to be realistic about the limitations of Linux when advocating it. Very good advice.
Bow-ties are cool.
FLOSS zealot:"Free software doesn't want to be anything."
FLOSS zealot (five minutes later):"We want the desktop."
FLOSS zealot:"Quit criticizing what you're getting for free."
FLOSS zealot (five minutes later):"Quit insulting us by saying you get what you pay for with Linux."
FLOSS zealot:"Linux is a movement that will one day take over the desktop."
FLOSS zealot (five minutes later):"Linux is just a kernel, moron. Quit criticizing a kernel for an application's UI being crappy."
FLOSS zealot:"No one's forcing you to use linux."
FLOSS zealot (five minutes later):"Write your congressman to force your government, employer, and children's school to convert to linux."
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Linux recognizes criticism as either damage or censorship and either routes around it or blames the reporter.
Blaming the reporter also deflects apparent Statement Of Truth attacks, which are resolved in a few weeks/months/years by patches, new distributions, or kernel updates.
Failing a resolution, these SOT attacks are resolved by personal attacks on the reporter.
For reference, look up posts on the Interweb related to WiFi on Linux, MythTV, or IPv6.
That should hold you until next April 1.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I have to agree with a lot of what I'm seeing here. I switched from windows to only ubuntu about 3 months ago, and self taught myself everything I know now (had no choice, live overseas!). I even somehow managed to compile code- all from instructions. Now I have that nifty compizfusion mangager 0.7.6, with all the nice effects.
My view, after reading Slashdot for years now, and living with tech people all through college, is that linux's biggest problem is this:
You have to search for help with EVERYTHING. Even simple stuff. Fortunately, there are a lot of people willing to help you, but a lot of people say RTFM, etc.
The overlying assumption is, from my view, that anyone who CHOOSES to move to Linux is motivated enough to do so, but easily lost- and running into simple problems constantly that you have to search for cryptic answers is a pain. There is either the assumption you are clueless, or should be able to "fix it yourself".
Until developers start addressing simple concerns SERIOUSLY from newbies like me (ie: why does Gnome not have any way to organize files by track #???), linux will quickly frustrate and confuse every average Joe Sixpack that tries to use it, to the point where they swear it off forever.
Not everyone is as patient as me- that's the problem, and it's something Linux developers need to take more seriously. The majority of people aren't clever & patient. We need to learn to work with that, and address their concerns quickly and honestly, without sending them through hoops.
What about Apple elitisim? We've all see the ads.
I am really tired of this. Some blogger/journalist shares with us his ingenious thoughts what is Linux doing wrong and how it can get better. The crowd disagrees, discussion under the blog/article turns to flameware and nothing is accomplished.
The blogger/journalist is angry that the crowd didn't agreed and developers didn't "fixed" the "obvious" failures he has pointed out. So he writes another blog/article how "these Linux guys" do not like critics.
Dear blogger/journalist, everyone "has great ideas" and everyone "knows how to fix the world". But at the end of the day it is the doers who change the world while nobody cares about blogs.
So next time please, either spend money for some commercial distro and write your suggestions/criticism to them or keep using your free of charge Ubuntu (at least it seems according to TFA that this is what you were using) and help the community to improve the product, there are plenty of tasks even for non-programmers. But do not keep saying "they" should improve that, "they" should listen to my criticism...
As a side note to the all enticing free-ness of open source software is it's ability to be reviewed/restructured within a peer editing environment (at the very least). So, imo, this whole notion of no criticism lacks any support. Needless to say (but I want to anyways), I got half way down Keir's article and got..eh..tired of it.
Present and accounted for
Linux doesn't have its Roger Ebert, that's the problem. Someone who brings up issues, and someone to whom people actually listen. someone who makes consistently good points, enough that the "won't fix" bugs turn into "Roger Ebert ripped us a new one and he has a point, so let's at least try" bugs.
There are many people who are critical, but no one is a true critic, trusted and proven and consistent. Linus makes good points, but many app teams dismiss him as the low-level guy. Stallman can be polarizing and principled, instead of pragmatic. Many others have their areas of concern, but stay out of other more wide-ranging issues. that ends up being a sci-fi critic, a drama critic, a cinematography critic, an indy film critic, but still no Roger Ebert.
Ebert is of course not always right, and doesn't know everything about everything, but there are lots of people who will at least consider his opinion where they would dismiss the average joker.
Like the guy said, its *not* the developer's fault but it *IS* their problem.
No it's not. That kind of absurd expectation (that every piece of hardware in the world will work flawlessly, despite the apathy and even animosity of manufacturers) is put on no one else, because it's ridiculous.
Look, it's like this. You buy a doodad, let's say a TV card, from LittleGuyPCI Inc. Try to stick it in your Windows box, it doesn't work. "Goddamn LittleGuy!" Try to stick it in your Mac, it doesn't work. "Goddamn LittleGuy!" Try to stick it in your Linux box, it doesn't work. "Goddamn Linux!"
Do you see a disconnect there anywhere?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
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When was the last time Bill Gates, or any developer at MS or Apple, to respond to your problems when you call. At least in Open Source land, you have a fairly good chance of really talking to someone that built the software you are complaining about.
Yea, linux is not perfect, and neither are the communities that support it. Anyone that has been around though say over the last 5 to 10 years will appreciate just how far it has come in such a short while.
It took MS 30+ years to reach the crappy state of its software. Linux has come up almost neck and neck in about 3-5 years (or less, depending on how you count)
Living in Chile
OK, this one is a point I bring up from time to time, because it's something I want to address. I feel like Linux has outgrown the Unix shell. This is a bit tricky because the people who like the shell generally like it how it is - and for the most part, those who don't just go with a GUI instead. So I honestly don't know if a redesigned shell could seriously catch on. But personally I want a shell that's designed along the same basic lines as the traditional Unix shells, but is better suited to acting as an interface to the software running on my computer.
One of the most basic problems is that the shell has no notion of any data types when it comes to communicating with other programs. This is a tough problem because the shell can't have any notion of abstraction layers over the data exchanges unless the programs in question play along - at least to the extent of telling the shell what type of data they will emit or consume. But it's a problem that contributes to every limitation of the shell, as every moderately complicated problem of linking "small tools" together to do a bigger job turns into a parsing/serialization problem to translate one ad-hoc format to another.
Lack of support for objects is another limitation, though less severe. "Object Oriented" is a buzzword which sometimes adds no value to a program - but it also represents some real functionality which could be an asset to the shell. Being able to deal with a piece of data as an "object" means that some of the key operations which would be performed on that data can be performed with the specific context of that data in mind. Being able to deal with a running process as an "object" means that you can start the process and issue commands to it as it runs. It is possible to design a program which, once invocated, forks a copy of itself, and successive invocations issue instructions to this copy running in the background - but even then there is no means for the shell to track a reference to that "object" (for instance, in an environment variable) and provide notification when the reference is no longer needed - due to the various limitations and complications few utilities are written to operate in this way.
What I want is for the shell to have a good method for accessing the wealth of libraries available in Perl or Python - I want to have access to wi-fi maangement in the shell that equals what I get in the GUI - and I want the two interfaces to cooperate. Instead of all this new functionality being built up in ways that does an end-run around the shell (which ought to be the core of the whole OS interface) I want it to be integrated and accessible.
Bow-ties are cool.
Linux does need more useful, constructive critics. The Linux Haters blog is a good example of the sort of criticism that can do a lot of good. So was this famous ESR rant and its followup. Another good example, albeit not from the Linux world, is the Bill Gates memo that shows up on Slashdot from time to time to time.
The other thing Linux, and Open Source in general, needs is a developer community that responds to that kind of criticism by actually improving things, even when the critic isn't a well known name like ESR or Gates.
PulseAudio makes me crazy. On Fedora Core 9. First I had to remove pulse audio to get sound. [FC9 updates between each sentence here ...]
Some months
later I had to switch skype from /dev/dsp to /dev/dsp1. Weeks later I had to switch skype
back
to /dev/dsp. Weeks later I had to reinstall
pulseaudio to make sound work. And now
while sound plays, the microphone is nonfunctional.
Summary: maddening -- every few weeks with
normal updates sound stops working and I have
to spend hours of research and do something odd(!) to get it working at all.
As a non Linux guy, I've been interested in installing Linux several times but the community has turned me off. If you go on a forum or something similar and suggest a feature you're often told that you're doing it wrong. That's probably true, but it's poor attitude for growing a client base. Me: I'd like mirrors on my car to assist in backing up. Linux community: The best way to back up is to turn around and look out your rear window. While technically correct, how many people back up using their mirrors?
Perhaps you're taking the wrong attitude. You want the mirrors because they would help you with backing up. That's not going to be very helpful, because you, as somebody who they know jack about, are creating work for them. Everybody knows how people like others to create additional work.
Try volunteering to help out. Start working for them, not delegating to them. Then when they understand that you're putting an effort to contribute to the project even though you're not coding, you can explain to them how you were trying to perform the task of backing up and that while you know you can just look over your shoulder to perform this task, having a set a mirrors would make for a better user experience.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
You are missing the point ....
It's not their 'fault' that it doesn't work on your hardware - The hardware manufacturer will not release the specs so they cannot easily write a driver and if they reverse engineer one it may not work properly
It's not their 'problem' that it doesn't work on your hardware - They do not really care if it works on every possible hardware configuration just the ones they use (which tend to be the *very* popular, the ones the manufacturer will release the specs for or will write a Linux driver for themselves)
Unlike a manufacturer they do not sell anything, so while they would like it to work on your hardware they have no real incentive to make it work ...they do not sell the hardware, they do not sell the software, you have not paid them anything ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Linux problem is the critic. Check out the Linux operating system how even the Linus Torvalds, the father of the operating system, gives critic about it.
We do not need critics but marketing. We do not see Microsoft giving critic about Windows NT or the whole software system like Vista or 7 until they are the older versions and new one is coming out.
Check out how RedHat or Mandriva gives critic about their distribution. KDE developers giving it for KDE and Gnome developers about KDE and vice versa.
And to proof of this is the infamous distrowars about who is building best software system and who configures the linux operating system best way.
And the critic is very constructive, you always find out what is wrong and how it should be fixed and that is the problem. Those who would like to use Linux OS on their product, they end up to see only problems on it and they look more likely to MS products because they dont see ciritic of them any where else then from FOSS side.
Peer review is the essence of producing good software. Having your source code open for all to see and gawk (pun intended) at is extremely motivating to produce efficient and working code. The writer of this story has not done his homework. People are constantly calling Linux kernel hackers out on the carpet (Alan Cox, Linus Torvalds), this has lead to many hurt feelings. Luckily, if you want to change it, you just do it yourself and then convince your friends to use your patches.
Unix and Linux are different, but it's not enough to mindjob you. Logs are in /var/adm instead of /var/log. ps has different flags. Old unix systems don't have commands like "less" (though, at least with old Solaris, they do have "more". Go figure.) Everything is still piled in /etc. All the userspace stuff is still in /usr/local/. Unless you're using MPE/iX, you're probably going to be okay.
I've had plenty of bad forum experiences though. Sometimes even educated users need help, and the Unix learning curve is such that you can use it for years and still not know some things.
Still, I've had crap experiences on Windows forums as well, and Mac forums are of little practical use.
Unix and Linux are just hard. You have to dig in, and work at it. You gotta ditch the GUI, because the GUI isn't reliable (especially in Linux) for managing and configuring daemons (I don't think it's that reliable in Windows either (Fuck you IIS 7), but there isn't a good alternative.)
The only way to do it is to sit and play with it. I've never had a really really good unix course; they're all so short, it's just a bare taste.
I've found that Linux is actually easier than windows. The logs in Linux can be more informative than the windows alerts. /etc can be manipulated with your choice of text editors, and there is pretty good separation of application files. There are built in utilities that can tell you which application has a file open; not just the drive in use message.
Windows has the registry, a monolithic single point of failure and corruption.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
First tag: flamebait.
Does anyone else see the irony here?
This is all nonsense. Linux has so many critics that it is ingrained in its culture. In its defense, everyone screams out on how great it is (it is great). Sometimes it seems like fanboy cronyism, but what can you expect when everyone treats your favorite OS like a black sheep? I'm an avid linux user and have been critical of it all along. I submit my bug reports whenever I find an issue (rarely am I the first). If gnu/linux didn't have critics, it simply wouldn't improve. We have seen dramatic improvements just the last few years and this speaks volumes about critical commentary. If you want something recent, look at KDE 4.0 and the resulting backlash. Even Linus got involved in the criticism and moved to Gnome (mere months after talking smack about that).I know I know... KDE isn't linux. But hey, it's the same community.
Where's my sock? There it is...
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It seems many Linux supporters believe that only those who can fix an issue or make a change to the code should be allowed to criticize Linux. This, of course, leaves out everyone who is not a programmer including not only most everyone who gets Linux installed at a Linux Install Day event, but also system administrators and other technical professionals.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
He probably LAMENTS the fact that Linux has few critics.
Self awareness - try it!
In many ways thus guy has it exactly backward, we see far too much re-inventing the wheel when we have already a perfectly working one, but this is only serious because of its prevalence, rather than the tendancy itself.
.Net. In both these areas we do _NOT_ want to be too late, and allow the Word-Macro, Excell, ... type lock in.
... for example and this is one of the our most common failure modes.
Sometimes, re-engineering what already exists is very beneficial, especially when it is part of the core toolkit itself and this is particularly true in the kernel and in the core tools arena, binutils (gold) and the gcc C++ effort by Ian Taylor. The simple range of Linux has reached the point where Windows, with all M$ cash, cannot compete and this is becoming increasingly obvious in the server, embedded and netbook spaces, and we certainly have not seen the end of this trend given the downturn and an emerging appliance marketplace.
That said we do have some tech-culture problems which have not been adaquately addressed by the Linux Businesses and the Distributions, and these either are or will be serious hinderances to linux adoption.
The twin lack of (a) Exchange/Outlook compatibility, which often mandates the running of (a vitualised copy) of Windows on Linux desktops to effectively collaberate in the Enterprise and ActiveDirectory/SingleSignOn, and (b) C# and
Since we are now clearly nearing the tipping point of OS choice by merit not marketing it is important not to drop this ball, and timelyness is of the essence here so we do not have the luxury of having good solutions mature and emerge slowly here.
One other are where we must be careful is the "lets re-write it" because it isn't written in C++, Ruby
Another common failure mode is to adopt over complex frameworks, and then force the solution to meet the framework needs, an example is the recent redesign of freshmeat.net, which has migrated a simple convenient solution to a form-over-function nightmare.
Damn, all that typing, and then I saw the comment below... Well, here is my 2c anyways.
#4 Run around calling Linux developers dirt bags because this particular piece of hardware doesn't scratch their itch.
And to the other discussion on who's problem it is. Well, in this specific case, it's nobody's problem, except for this guys buddies. He's happy with WinXP (Until he changes to a different windows...), the linux developers don't feel interested enough to both with this board, and the board developers don't care.
But in general, the problem sits with the guy who wants to use something that isn't supported. It's up to him to encourage others to want to support it for him.
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This is precisely where the disconnect is, and why you can't talk about issues that a set of users have as being a problem that belongs to a developer of a set of software that the user wants to use.
Because FOSS developers don't have a profit motive, things that you would typically consider to be a problem for a company who wants to ship lots of units aren't a problem for a FOSS developer. A failure to understand the motives of the developers who are actually doing the work is just going to annoy the developers and the people who think that the developers should solve the user's problems.
This very thread is a classic example of this misunderstanding, as it's seeking to figure out whose problem it is, or who is at fault, so they can be browbeaten into submission. What should be done instead is to identify the problem, and figure out how you can get people who can solve the problem to want to solve the problem. Sometimes that often means recognizing that the person who can solve the problem is yourself, and getting yourself to solve it by learning about the problem is the way to solve the problem. In cases when it isn't, making it as easy, as fun, and as painless as possible for the FOSS developers who can is what you want to do.
After all, if a FOSS developer isn't having fun solving your problem, why should they bother with it?
http://www.donarmstrong.com
I'll be the first to say that I regret daily the transition I made a couple of months ago from Fedora 7 to Kubuntu 8.04. Before anyone mistakenly assumes I'm attacking Kubuntu let me say this -- the problem is not necessarily Kubuntu but rather that Linux in general is undergoing transitions all around and problems abound.
I have been using Linux at home since 1997 and running my business with it (simulation-oriented software engineering) for the past 6 years. My needs largely distill down to: 1) web browsing, 2) e-mail, 3) wordprocessing/spreadsheet, and 4) development (Qt mostly). Excluding the development tools (fortunately) most every other application I depend on is in some way broken. Where the HELL is the notion of regression testing these days?? Let's take a brief tour of my gripes....
First, Fedora
In a production environment I can't afford to chase the bleeding edge. My Dell D800 notebook ran Fedora 1, Fedora 3, and Fedora 7 before Hardy. My home system ran Fedora 1, 5, and 6. I have always hated RPM dependency hell and Red Hat / Fedora for sticking with that format. Yumex made it tolerable (for purely superficial reasons) but it is still a bandaid on oozing puss. When Fedora 6 broke Firewire and hosed my external drives and DVD mastering I vowed to give it up. Not wanting to run two disparate distros I rode it out, though, until my work project schedule allowed enough slack to handle the switch. I thought I'd try Kubuntu 8.04 as I've grown to like KDE and Konqueror. Mistake
Timing sucked
The state of KDE is horribly broken right now and I just don't like Gnome. First, I had a hell of a time getting my D800's wireless working under Hardy. The KDE 3.5.9/3.5.10 tools to manage the connection absolutely SUCK. They're broken. Don't work. Complete crap. Things were so bad I ditched Hardy and installed 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. WiFi was fine but a) getting KDE 4.1 to support my (required) TwinView dual-monitor work environment was impossible, b) Dolphin is not ready for prime time, and, c) Konqueror under KDE 4.1 is a shell of a joke. Make up your mind KDE -- Konqueror or Dolphin. Make one that is great, not two that suck.
So I reformat and revert back to Hardy. After loading the Ubuntu Desktop package just to get some WiFi support that worked, and a workable TwinView environment again, I found a litany of other little bugs -- they're everywhere. It's like no one bothers to test KDE 3.5.x changes anymore now that 4.x is "out" (not that it is production-ready). So I check my Fedora options and find I'm no better. If I want to dodge KDE 4.x beta-quality I've got to revert all the way back to Fedora 8. For now I am really hoping that Fedora 11 in May will fix the crap I'm seeing in Hardy/Intrepid (again, not necessarily Kubuntu's fault -- I am really impressed with Adept, which is part of the reason I left Fedora in the first place).
Apps that Suck
Here's a list of regression bitches: Firefox 3.0 sucks -- I loved Firefox 2.0. The current dog often crashes when I attempt to load some pages (taking all of my tabs with it). Pages load slowwwww, I've seen Javascript & bits of CSS even hang page loads right here on Slashdot. Add to that half of the YouTube videos I try to view won't play. Open Office 2.4 has new quirks. In 2.0.x I liked the fact that the little "save" icon was only enabled when actual changes had been made. Now it's enabled all the time just like in Word. Stupid change in my opinion. Next, when I go to output a PDF, Oo 2.4 no longer bothers to prompt if it's about to overwrite an existing file of the same name -- sloppy programming to change for no good reason. Lastly, inserting graphics from files on disk provides a "Preview" button that doesn't do a damned thing any more.
It doesn't seem like there is a single blame point for all of the crap that has crept in lately. However, I'm really regretting disturbi
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Perfect example of the mentality.
Linux is forever locked in the engineer mindset: "look at all the power you have! Isn't it great?" Well, sometimes. Actually, more specifically, no. If things don't Just Work, then it isn't great. Anything less is shoddy engineering, plain and simple. And I say that as a developer. Getting things to the point where they shouldn't have many bugs doesn't mean you're done, it means you can start working on the usability issues that directly affect users.
I don't want to edit a configuration file.
I don't want to download the firmware from my wireless card to use with drivers.
I don't want to choose a sound server.
All these things should either happen automatically (warning me if it is dangerous) or have some sort of intuitive UI. Requiring users to read the README file is not acceptable. Worse still is expecting users to read through your bug list on SF or whatnot and ascertain that they "shouldn't use such and such feature."
Many packages just reek of this amateur nonsense where they write all the 'fun' parts of code and then shirk away from doing the boring stuff. In other words, know that users do not suspend judgment just because something's free. And they shouldn't.
"I've made a handful of blog postings recently that have been critical of Linux (in the sense of pointing out perceived failings)", Keir
.. The only obstacle remaining for the settlement to take effect is final court approval .. a number of interested parties might lodge objections .. what does raise an eyebrow is the source of New York Law's funding on this matter: Microsoft'
Well and good Kier, but rather than posting on a public blog wouldn't you have been more constructive in contacting the developers directly. As given the vast amount of anti-Open Source astroturfing that goes on, such constructive criticism would tend to cause damage , as all people would see is yet another 'Linux' controversy. Why, there are even commercial companies who pay people to trash their competitors under the guise of constructive criticism.
'Google settled the lawsuit brought against
Sometimes you feel like what Linux lacks the most is simply "common sense"
Linux, IMHO, lacks an 80/20 filter. Windows has a pretty good one in parts; menus hide things that haven't been used recently. Linux types are so big on making sure that it can do *everything* they lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the time a single option would have sufficed. Allowing an extended set of choices is fine but there has to be some way to hide it so that life can be simple. Sometimes people actually want to get something accomplished and not just play with their OS.
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'One example lately i had was when talking about C# when developing around an OSS solution, i disliked C#s tendency to seek excuses for crashes .. I got attacked strongly against as being incapable of proper code .. i were many things, none of them were positive'
What forum did this conversation take place? What license did you release it under?
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You guys keep discussing drivers, as if it were the only problem with Linux. But Linux has many issues.
For instance, within a "short time" (2 or 3 KDE GNOME releases, that is, around 1 1/2 year), bloat will render your machine useless.
On the other side of the fence, Joe Sixpack still has Windows XP because it just works. A Vista or Mac OS user will also have a longer lifetime and he/she won't have to jump through all the hoops just to get the damn thing updated.
Updates, for instance: even on a modern distro, updates just break, because most C/Linux developers have no theory about what to do - except keep doing what they do, which is making it up as they go along (contrast: OpenSuSE SAT solver for packages).
On GUIs: GNOME, for example, has conducted one usability study in more than 10 years (!) (that I know of). Spinning cubes do not make a smart solution or improvement on GUIs - it's eye candy
Another example: the UNIX help system. Will it ever use AI?
Linux and BSD are open but they benefit very little from experimentation and smart choices - exception made to OS systems programming - and this is a field very removed from the normal user.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
We've all see the ads.
Yeah, Lauren was pretty hot!
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Mac Fanbois are the critics of PC Architecture, MS Fanbois are the critics of everything, and ignorance is the critic of linux.
What about, oh I don't know, the entirety of the mainstream software industry? Every major proprietary developer? Every company and individual that has ever looked at the (generally cost-free) open source software and yet decided to go with something else? They're all critics you know, and they're all the people Linux (et al) are working very hard to try to impress.
And there are internal critics too- just look at the so-called "distribution wars". Every time a new distro starts, it is generally as a response to something that the developers believe is being done wrong. Take Ubuntu- originally it was launched to take the tech of Debian and put it in a professional development environment (specifically, regular releases more than once every 3 years). Take also KDE/GNOME/XFCE/etc. All of them are constantly competing on their respective merits, and all of their adherents are constantly criticizing the rivals.
Criticism is there if you look for it. It just doesn't have as many critics as Windows, due entirely to the fact that it isn't quite so mind numbingly awful.
The man doesn't know what he is talking about, we are always criticizing Windows, MVS, VMS, Mono, Silverlight and whatnot.
See it's this type of criticism of Windows that gets under my skin. Have you actually used Windows lately? I can easily download FFDshow and VLC media player and be covered on every type of media format. You do realize that most open source programs have been ported, right?
Some couple of years ago, Brazil's government cut taxes for "popular" computers - low-end machines that came with Linux out-of-the-box. The idea was to create a competitive atmosphere and offer a cheap alternative to Windows XP.
This was an epic fail. The UI was so badly done - obviously by a Linux nerd who spent too much time in his life with fluxbox, that Linux looked, 2 years ago, something out of the stone age.
Massive uninstalls was what happened. A great time for computer technicians to install XP.
You talk to people who used those out-of-the-box Linux and they shudder just to hear about it. They describe it as something terribly outdated. The other day I was talking to a sales guys at the audio/video section at FNAC (a French chain also present in Brazil). I told him he should install Linux on one the PlayStation 3 units and show people how flexible the PS3 is - you get a BluRay DVD player, a video game that's the best on the market AND a nice operating system for the home. Do you know what he said? "Oh, but isn't Linux kinda old - it looks very old." Of course, I was thinking about gorgeous Englightement TerraSoft used on PS3's, but he was thinking about the pathetic thingies he saw.
Now, you might not care about killing a niche for Linux on a big market, but many people do. But when linux developers act like autistic nerds (when they're not autistic), then it's suicidal.
See: http://www.linux.com/articles/59637
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
After all, if a FOSS developer isn't having fun solving your problem, why should they bother with it?
That's the problem facing widespread Linux adoption on the desktop.
A commercial developer actually wants something from prospective customers - their money - and therefore has a reason to drive development with an eye towards making as many end-users as happy with the product as possible.
A FOSS developer wants nothing from his prospective end-users (who cannot be considered customers because they aren't paying for anything and have no legal claim on the developer), is unconcerned with any usability problems they might have, and is more concerned with having fun than making end-users happy.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
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I like Linux, I really do. I've installed and played with about a dozen distros over the last few years. Sometimes they get a lot of stuff right, but sometimes they don't. For instance, I installed Ubuntu 6 back when I only had dial up access to the internet. I was shocked to find that it didn't include the program to configure dial up internet access. It was available in the repository, but w/o the internet it was a catch-22. It was especially shocking since Ubuntu was meant for use all over the world, including many countries whose only access to the internet would be via dial up.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
[... hopeful, if naive, attempt to address this problem...] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1114137
It's Keir Thomas. He wrote Beginning Ubuntu Linux.
I bought it when I switched to Ubuntu with 5.10. Since I started way back with Commodore but was still a Linux noob, I though I'd review the book for /., because wouldn't it be great if dot'ers knew about a good book they could hand to people with the Ubuntu LiveCD? That'd be very useful.
Trouble was, it wasn't a good book. It was half bad, and reviewing a bad book is much harder than a good book because you have to dig very thoroughly to be sure you're not missing the good bits. But in the end, the flawed book couldn't be THE good book that dot'ers needed to know about, so I dropped the project.
Keir, here's your constructive criticism:
First, the web is large. Anything you say about Linux, or about anything with fans, will send dipshits to their keyboards to flame you. Emails and forum posts are in no way the same sort of general feedback as a theater audience. Hecklers and morons are amplified.
Second, for godssakes man, you aren't talking about Linux, you're talking about Linux Desktop Distros.
Third, and related, if you're going to talk about criticism about Linux Desktop Distros then at /least/ review how user and developers feedback works for all the projects that make up a distro.
I'll leave it at that. Keir, I don't think you're an idiot, so I think you can expand those points to consider what they mean. Next time you open your mouth to make another quick prop of your pundit career, think about digging in as journalist. Then maybe you'll get positive feedback from people who know what they're talking about, to balance the twits a little. Right now you're largely ignored as a misinformed twit yourself.
(AC because we share a publisher, and I might want another contract someday.)
The number one goal I keep seeing in Slashdot is to make year 200x the year of the Linux Desktop. Ok, but we still aren't there yet. People want their packages and products to be used by the general public, just like their Windows counterparts.
The problem is when stuff dosen't work out of the box or breaks. The number one response outside insulting the user is "Well, you code it!". This really isn't a valid response to a majority of the users out there. Sure, they may be smart enough to install Linux, install additional applications, etc. but to expect them to pick up C++, C, Java, etc. just because that is what your APIs are written in, is very short-sighted.
It may be that these people DO want to contribute back to the community, but have no good way to do it. Should they go to a community college and learn a programming language? Sure, that would be great, but after two semesters, would you allow this newbie programmer to start coding patchrs to your app?
It's not that there aren't critics to linux, it just that the community dosen't hear them. They dismis them before they understand where the person is coming from.
Disconnect, most certainly. You are right, as far as you go. However, the constructive criticism being sought seeks to identify and correct that disconnect. Your example with "Goddam LittleGuy" accurately portrays the average computer user. He KNOWS that every hardware manufacturer in the world supports Microsoft. (I know, they don't, but Joe Sixpack KNOWS it, just the same.) So, whatever he buys that does NOT work in windows just has to be faulty. Simple, in his little world, there is nothing to figure out. On the other hand, anything that doesn't work in Linux has to be Linux' fault. Again, simple. This IS a hurdle to adoption of Linux by the average user, and it IS a problem that Linux must address. How do we connect, in spite of the disconnect that you pointed out?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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and this is where YOU are missing the point. If Linux only works for certain hardware combinations then it IS their problem because it's either a bug or something is missing.
There maybe good reasons for why it's missing however that doesn't mean it stops being their problem and to continue stating otherwise just makes you look like an amateur.
But do they want widespread adoption? That's the essential question. Lot's of people inside the Linux Community seem to want everyone to use Linux. A noble goal. You're right that FOSS people (excepting companies like RH or Canonical) aren't trying to sell a product, but many if not most of them are trying to sell an idea. The idea that their software, and in some cases even their whole mindset, is superior to closed alternatives. If they want to sell their ideas, or even their ideals to the rest of the world (as many of them seem to want to), then these hardware issues are their problem. Because Mr. Joe Average isn't going to go out and buy a new computer, a new printer, or a new wireless card purely for the privileged of FOSS using software. It's all well and good to complain about a person who already uses Linux, or is specifically buying a computer FOR Linux not having done their research, but in actual fact I'd venture that most new user Linux installs are going to be on whatever hardware the user already has.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Look, it's like this. You buy a doodad, let's say a TV card, from LittleGuyPCI Inc. Try to stick it in your Windows box, it doesn't work. "Goddamn LittleGuy!" Try to stick it in your Mac, it doesn't work. "Goddamn LittleGuy!" Try to stick it in your Linux box, it doesn't work. "Goddamn Linux!"
Do you see a disconnect there anywhere?
Yes, absolutely. When I stick it into the Windows box, it actually works, so the rest is all meaningless conjecture. ~
Seriously though, I wouldn't say that the problem is "developer's problem", really - this implies that developers care about adoption, which they often do not. But it is a problem of those who wish Linux to be adopted. It doesn't matter whose fault it really is - but if it hinders adoption rate, and you want that to change, then it is your problem; it's really that simple.
All too often coders meet criticism along the lines of "the file selection box is awkward" (most programs using X-widgets instead of Qt), "the interface is hard to use (e.g. the Gimp and Blender)" with the retort: "You're free to code it yourself then.". Which is something the average user simply isn't prepared to do, even if he could, which is usually not the case.
Developers are always reluctant to throw away an entire approach (like switching to Qt from X widgets as opposed to ditching a few subroutines) and are never as critical of software usability as a gormless end-user who wants things to "just work" without hassle and especially without him having to so much glance at a manual.
Developers tend to write code that provides adequate functionality for people who are OK with reading documentation (even documentation as horrible as the average man page), and who are willing to lift their arms from the desktop in order to type a command.
In other words: such developers tend to write code that does not cater to the "average" (read: "dumb and lazy") end-user. Commercial software on the other hand tends to be written especially to cater for that category of user, and will therefore usually be more palatable to said end-user. After all, MS Windows doesn't owe its 90% market share *exclusively* to smart bundling and lock-in.
As I see it, Linux stands at a crossroads. Either it's happy to remain "command-line oriented as Linux ought to be" and "a power tool for people willing to read the manual", in which case it will remain a niche product on the desktop forever. Or it aims at achieving 80% market-share on the desktop within 10 years, in which case it needs to shed its attitude and pander to end-users who are as dumb as they are lazy.
I prefer the latter, but I'm not about to work up a sweat trying to bring that about. Except perhaps as a critic and reporter-of-bugs.
"It took MS 30+ years to reach the crappy state of its software. Linux has come up almost neck and neck in about 3-5 years (or less, depending on how you count)"
Awesome. The Windows NT branch was around in 1978, but Linux sprang into existence sometime in 2006 (or sooner!). It's that kind of reality-based thinking that's driven Linux from a sub-1% of the desktop market share 15 years ago to its current sub-1% market share.
"Neck and neck" with MS bwhahahahaha that's a good one.
I can't change my mouse sensitivity in linux... With mouse acceleration off it is barely even usable. And mouse acceleration sucks.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
other problem of course is that the average distro just doesn't have the resources to do wide scale usability testing.
If there weren't 500 projects all trying to do the same thing, they might be able to combine their resources to do that sort of thing.
That just seems like common sense. Oh, yeah, there's that word again.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
is a pretty good way of getting them to tell you to shut the fuck up.
Which then you take to justify your attitude that made you say they were egotistical.
And so the spiral continues.
ASK ADOBE.
FFS.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Part of the issue is that you're talking about two completely different groups of people with two completely different views of computers and you're equating them directly as if they were interchangeable parts.
The developer doesn't have a problem from the user not using his software due to idiosyncratic hardware unless the developer actually cares that the user uses his software. If the developer makes the software for those who want it and user X doesn't want it, then user X may not be of any concern to the developer.
Another difference is that many people think of software as "something to use on my computer". That's understandable since the physical computer is what usually gets marketed at them, but it is a totally naive notion. That's not how software people think. To a software person, and properly I might add, the software is what people really want. The computer is the means to run the software.
It makes no sense to want the computer except for the software it can run. So why not specify the hardware for the software? Sure, that's difficult when you specify high-end specialized IBM, HP, SGI or Sun hardware for your software. Specifying commodity PC hardware that costs a few dollars more shouldn't be an issue if the user really wants the software to work with it.
In the stated anecdotal example of Windows vs. Linux for this guy's media center, he's using hardware specced to the software already. The hardware is specced to Windows almost exclusively. That's why it works decently there. If he wants his hardware to work with Linux, he needs to buy hardware that works with Linux. It's not as if there's a paucity of affordable hardware that works well enough with it. Most of what works for Linux is also better quality hardware that will offer better service under Windows, too. The manufacturers who make things work under Linux are the kind who think about their customers enough to make it work for more people, after all.
The unanswered question here is "what reason does that guy have not to put in those 4 commands?". I really wonder about the motivation of guys developing these "friendly" GUIs. Where I work I often write a couple of scripts to automate some of my repetitive work. I am then often reproached by colleagues for not making them easier for them to use. Now, I have tried and failed at the whole GUI thing -- I get so fed up that I am no longer solving my problems that I just toss the whole thing and go back to my CLI. Surely only the paid guys working for Red Hat or Suse can afford to work on making their stuff user friendly in ways that make it harder for them to use.
To put it shortly: If the developers thought it was bad, they would change it (and would appreciate a new perspective they agreed with), but when they disagree about the usability, what motivation do they have to change it?
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
A majority of Linux users are total fucking assholes. I'm not going to sugar coat it to keep my karma high. They believe they are superior because they believe they are using a superior OS. Every criticism will be drown in a sea of fallacies, lies, and ignorance. Because attacking Linux means you are attacking their choice. A choice they made in large part to be different.
Could the same be said about Windows or Mac users? Or perhaps people who prefer GM over Toyota? Yes, but it's not black and white. The percentage ratio of "normal people" to "real assholes" is way off balance with Linux. Something I believe was inherited by old Unix veterans themselves.
Does Linux need more critics? Not really. It's users just need to grow up so they will listen to the ones they have now. It won't happen.
"When you see a unixer brainwashed beyond saving, kick him out of the door." - Xah Lee
It is a strange world, I'll admit. One thing that I tell people looking at adoption is "get ready to relearn everything you thought you knew about your computer". I find your signature particularly ironic because I think Linux philosophy has many close parallels to the philosophy of conservatism and virtually immune to the damning effects of democracy.
One of the things that I feel has hurt Windows over the years is that Microsoft has lost touch with what works. Development is strongly driven by criticism, and what people want is what they will get. This is most apparent in Vista where their top down development model was strongly influenced by user feedback. It SEEMS like a great idea, and honestly it is almost difficult to understand why it failed so miserably.
This is where Linux takes almost the opposite approach, but 'approach' seems to imply a type of central control that does not exist, but looking past that; Linux is COMPLETELY decentralized. Not only is development bottom-up, but so is influence, criticism, standards, motivation, and anything that might be interpreted as 'marketing'. With the money being removed from the structure of Linux development, it is really one of the purest / idealistic forms of liberty to have ever existed. While today I don't think many fundamentally understand the difference between Liberty and Anarchy, I think many are dumbfounded that a pure merit based system that completely relies on personally responsibility could have accomplished anything. I consider myself a pretty hard core libertarian compared to some (but that may have something to do with living in California), but as I get more involved in Ubuntu development, I often don't understand why anything developed this way doesn't just cause all my hardware to burst into flames.
On the flip side, you can only get so far making people do things they don't want to do. In Linux, If I want something that doesn't exist, it is my personal responsibility to develop it or get it developed. Yelling at the computer and flaming message boards only gets you so far, and it should be of little surprise that no one is intimidated let alone motivated to rush out on their free time fix that issue for you. At the end of the day, someone must actually write the code, and do all the things that are involved in getting that code to you, and in by far MOST cases, writing a code patch and emailing it to you won't be good enough. You don't want me to code it; if you use Ubuntu, you want me to write a blue print, register the appropriate branch, put together a team, write the code, debug it, test it, share it, get it reviewed, revise it, propose for merge, voted on and approved, merge, package, and integrate into repository; and as if that wasn't good enough, you want it for your platform, back-ported, automatically updated on your system, and then maintained indefinitely. Sorry, but the only way I am doing that in my free time, for free, is that I really want it myself, and even then, if we disagree, if I am stuck doing all the work, I am going to implement and design parts however I feel like.
So while it may seem really rude or a brush off when people say "do it yourself", it isn't that they are heartless or lazy, I think they are really trying to save you some effort. If you consider the greatly consolidated steps mentioned above as 'X', and 'Y' as the amount of effort it may take to convince someone else to do the work, does it really need to be explained that 'X
If you don't want to develop, and you don't manage a team and pay for development, and you kinda just want it to work, people will be happy to let you know that a that level of influence, and that level of personal responsibility, that level of merit earns you "whatever exists". No one dictates these rules, it is just nature. Imagine being stranded on an island, whose responsibility is it that you survive? If ALL your faith is in the coast guard to come bail you out, you could put all your effort into waiting patiently, screaming at the sky, or
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
You're making the problem out to be that people aren't switching to Linux because hardware that didn't work in the first place won't work now. People aren't switching because hardware that IS working now WON'T work with Linux. So if you want people to switch, you need to support that hardware. That's the problem. NOW, who benefits the most from answering that problem? The hardware manufacturer? No, or else it'd be done already. The end user? they can'd to anything about it but spend more money. The Linux community? Yes.
Your situation isn't the problematic one, though it may be an issue itself. The problem that is being presented here, the problem that I'm saying the developers should address (even if its not their fault) is this: Person A has a 3 boxes, Windows, Mac, and some Linux distro. They put the card in the Windows box and it works. They put the card in the Mac box and it works. They put the card in the Linux box and lo and behold, it doesn't work.
Who's problem is that? The manufacturer is losing very little by not having Linux drivers. The Linux community is losing A LOT because they're trying to increase market share and this is one of the biggest hurdles they have. So, who is this a problem for? The Linux community. It's not their fault, but they suffer. So, they should fix it. I don't understand the purpose of this elitist idea that if its not your fault, you shouldn't have to fix it. Or if you're unjustly blamed, you shouldn't have to fix it. Again, you made the same mistake as another post. We're not placing the blame on Linux, but its causing a problem for Linux. They need to solve it or else they won't succeed. I don't care whose fault it is, its an obstruction to Linux's success so why are people like you avoiding trying to solve it?
Research before you buy.
If you buy a piece of hardware made for XP instead of 2000 is that windows fault?
I haven't had problems in years with my Nvidia drivers, whatever wifi I try, my printers, etc...
I don't buy more expensive stuff. I just do a google search right before I buy something to be sure.
And that search usually doesn't take more than a minute to get an answer.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1114223
For posterity. Have fun digging!
My Babylon
You can talk about those issues belonging to that developer if you are saying it in the context I described. If the software developer's goal is to increase the marketshare of that software, then the issues the users have become that developer's problem.
When I said ^that^ I was referring to the developers working for reasons other than increasing the marketshare of linux. That sort of work is definately necessary and I don't believe any developer should be browbeaten or blamed if the scope of their goals does not include making the products appealing to the average end-user.
I believe the real disconnect is between people that want to develop the software and people that want to grow the marketshare of a piece of software, or linux, or FOSS as a whole.
If the goal is to grow marketshare, dealing with end-user constructive criticism is a necessity because that's a problem the developer seeking to grow marketshare has chosen to address. Right now I see people on both sides of the disconnect getting frustrated and angry about all of this and I think its misguided. There are developers that haven't chosen to address these sorts of end-users criticisms and that's completely up to them. There are users that are looking for someone that has chosen to address these issues. If that person doesn't exist, then those end users need to accept the software is not being developed for the mainstream. If that person does exist, the end user should be providing that person with useful, unemotional, constructive criticism.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Weird. Every time I stick a piece of hardware in a Windows box it doesn't work. Then I install the drivers from the CD and it still doesn't work. Next I get the drivers from the vendors site and then it sometimes works. In the final step I figure out the chipset and get a driver from its creator and then it works most of the time.
With Linux all I do is check about the state of the hardware support before buying and most of the time it just works without doing any of the above.
I'm running YDL 6.1 which is CentOS based for stability so it's got older packages. So, intrigued by your post, I start up d3lphin,
and right click on a folder and choose Actions. The actions listed are:
Which is slightly more sensible than your actions listing. So obviously someone has been messing with it.
Here's my unedumacated and unsolicited opinion about this. Think of the "average OSS developer", what sort of image springs to your head. It might be something like the following.
uses emacs as their desktop environment from within GNU screen.
uses IRC from within emacs
browses the web within emacs
if they use IM they use a command line client and only use the Jabber protocol.
This is the sort of person who would change an actions dialog to have a half dozen signing/encryption options, because of course, they sign all their mail with gnupg..from within emacs, and want everyone else to use gnupg too. They're just that much privacy oriented that they don't understand why most people don't care, and would rarely, if ever, encypt any folder.
My version of d3lphin lists the developers e-mail address so why don't you contact them and explain how the "average non-developer" would use d3lphin.
Apple's been very good at responding to my problems, actually. To be fair, my problems have usually been their problems, and have resulted in fixes.
I can't speak for Microsoft... I've always lacked the patience to actually get to a real human being who can help. I'm not sure if it's me, or if their system is just set up that way.
Open source, on the other hand, I sometimes get a response. It's unpredictable. But the response is rarely helpful, and usually arrogant. But I've usually figured out what I need on my own, and when the problem is the open source and it's serious, usually someone else is willing and able to run the ridiculous gauntlet to get a real response.
What I'm saying here is that the support is shit everywhere. Open source is not much better than the others on good days, and not much worse on the others.
You miss the point. I want to learn to drive stick-shift, however I won't make my next car purchase a stick shift unless I already know I can drive stick shift. Its sorta the same thing with OSes. I'll buy new hardware with an OS I know how to use, but I won't buy hardware specced for an OS that I'm unsure I'll like. I'd rather test drive it and learn how to use it first. You can't expect people to just take that kind of cost just to try something out. You need to allow them to enter gradually. It's not so much that the hardware is specced to Windows, its just the software is within specs. Linux specs needs to try and overlap more with Windows specs so people can give it a test drive on their own hardware. Why would I spend more money on more hardware and then possibly find out that I don't enjoy the experience? Plus, you're not thinking like the average user. To them, an OS controls the hardware. If some newfangled OS can't even control what I'm already using, why should I switch to it? Plus, which distro are they gonna spec to? Not all hardware works out of the box on every distro and if it doesn't work out of the box, you can forget it. You just lost the average user.
You might be able to get new users when they're switching out their old hardware, but what about people who want to give this Linux a shot but don't want to invest in new hardware. They'll see it won't work and bam, bad impression of Linux for a long time, if not forever. Virtually everyone on slashdot is not your average user so you gotta stop thinking like you do and think thats just the way it is. What we see is the real problem isn't the problem that the average user sees. We gotta solve their problem, not try to make them understand that they're just doing it wrong.
There. One post to Slashdot elicits critics galore.
Happy now?
Linux people tend to see genuine critical evaluation as a bad thing.
First tag in the slashdot summary? "Flamebait".
Is a great example of the delusion of Open Source and the Model of Free in addition to the free for all that is the idiocy of all of these "distros".
As bad as Windows is, I am getting things done and not spending my life chasing problems, suckers. Life is too short to think your going to be able to patch it all and in the end, you still have issues anyway.
Have a friend who went linux a few months ago, have not heard form him since and heard he and the wife are having a tough time, gee I wonder why.
Could Linux be saved, sure it could and it would rock but, like anything thats worthy, its gonna cost since people with talent want to be paid and right now, windows pays. Maybe that will change who knows but with the Free Army of Linux Droids manning the marketing and philosphy of free, you may as well forget it.
Sure lock yourself away, code to your hearts delete and for what? Some worthless honorable mention. Atlas is not only shrugging but he's gonna slap you so hard your momma will shriek.
You're not the average user so don't assume that people should do what you do. The average user doesn't do that. Usually they go by what's on the box, not what they searched for in Google. It doesn't matter if they're screwing themselves. The problem still results in Linux not being adopted. Stop trying to shift blame and just find solutions. What do you do about users who go by whats on the box, not extra research done online. Ultimately, you *need* to win that user to gain any significant market share. Why do you think Windows' and Macs' ads always say how easy it is to do everything. Yet Linux's answer is always, "you should be doing more work."
You can't expect the non-Linux advocates to fix the problems of Linux not being able to gain market share.
Of course, if you don't have any problem with Linux's market share, well, you're not one of the people we're addressing with the criticisms. No one can give any sort of criticism about a problem if you just don't care about the problem.
I am critical, but I also have choices about what when and how to use linux. So why be vocal about what you dislike?
"Every endeavour of human stupidity has its champion."
nuff said
Seriously, it's not hard to find people complaining about it, or any other open source project.
What various open source projects tend to lack are enough people to perform triage on bug reports, people that know how to produce bug reports that are actually useful to developers, and people willing to pay developers to work on issues that matter to them and to provide their fixes upstream.
I didn't miss any point. The fact that there's a chicken and egg problem is not unique to Linux. Let's use a few car analogies, since you brought us around to that staple of Slashdot discussion.
Many people would like to have all-electric cars. The cars currently can't recharge very fast. That means your range is limited by an overnight charge. If we had fast-charging cars, then we could have rapid recharging stations alongside the road like we have gas stations. Nobody will build these until there is a fast-charging car. Nobody is building a fast-charging car because there's no rapid recharging infrastructure. there is also the issue of technology, but it is largely a logistics issue.
Likewise, it's difficult to sell people in the US bio diesel because they drive gasoline cars. It's difficult to sell people diesel cars on the understanding that they'll use bio diesel, because there's not that much bio diesel available. Petroleum diesel has a reputation for being smelly, dirty, and expensive. This is largely because it can be and in the past was smelly, dirty, and expensive and currently can be expensive still. Nobody wants to use a smelly, dirty, expensive fuel so they'll have a vehicle ready for a cleaner, less expensive fuel some random time in the future. Many of the advancements made in Europe with conventional diesel aren't even recognized widely in the US because the volume of these cleaner diesels is so small on US roads.
It's difficult to sell people small cars because they like the safety of big cars. We'd all be safer in auto accidents (and probably have fewer of them, since it's easier to steer and stop a smaller car) if we were all in smaller cars. Yet the people in smaller cars are in more danger if they get hit by someone in a larger car.
It's more fuel efficient to travel by rail than by individual cars, but rail doesn't run everywhere. To get rail running everywhere, we'll have to roll out hundreds of thousands of trucks and construction machines. In the meantime, people have to drive sometimes quite a distance to a train station, then go far out of their way making many extra stops in order to save energy, thereby wasting much of their time and using some energy to get to the depot.
Yes, BTW, one issue really is that a lot of the hardware out there is specced to Windows. It is designed to work with Windows. The drivers are written for Windows. The hardware is tested under Windows. Microsoft certifies the driver to work with Windows. Microsoft has been known to pay marketing fees for companies to advertise that hardware is designed for a particular version of Windows. The drivers are a necessary part of many hardware peripherals, because it's cheaper to put a DSP or a microcontroller on a board and provide it with programming than to develop the hardware from scratch. Yet those drivers are often closed-source and available only for Windows.
Hmm... you have some good criticism there (which just goes to show that Linux does have good sources of criticism).
I disagree with the bloat issue. It's gotten bigger, yes, but...
I just retired a Dell Optiplex as my primary work machine. I was running the Jaunty Jackalope alpha on it, including all that eye candy you mention. Now it's my Windows XP test machine. The performance is WAY down, especially video. I can't imagine just how bad Vista would be on it.
So, yes, Linux is getting a bit of bloat, but it still (in my personal experience) has less bloat than the aged XP.
On the subject of a help interface... well, on that one you're right on the spot. I use man pages (which, REALLY, isn't it time we stop expecting average users to need them?) or go Google. The help system is improving, but it still isn't anything I turn to when I need information.
Life is short: void the warranty.
That may be true, but since I reject your very premise, I didn't even bother to address your conclusions.
Sure; people who are interested in increasing market share (for whatever reason) need to put in the effort to deal with the issues required, both to increase market share, and that stem from increased market share. There are some people who have done a huge amount of work towards this end, but it always seems to be easier for people to be vocal than to actually sit down and do the work. (I'd be very surprised if the author of this article has actually contributed meaningfully, for example.)
http://www.donarmstrong.com
I'll simply cite what happened when KDE4 was prematurely released into the wild, as in packaged as the default with the KDE versions of most major Linux distros.
Lots of critics, both in user forums and in professional publications (I wrote some of the harsher criticisms myself.)
Every once in a while, some group in the OpenSource community will pull off an EPIC FAIL. And when that happens, I've never noticed anybody being shy about ripping that group a new asshole or collection of new assholes.
Of couse, there will also be idiot fanboys who will scream "how dare anyone say evil of [fill in the blank]", but the proper response is to stomp them as obstacles to progress who are just as dangerous to the future of Linux as MS's legal staff is and move on.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Perhaps the reason why there aren't that many critics of Linux is that it is actually quite good, and Well gee... its tough to criticise something that is FREE after all.
Tried Linux and don't like it? Simnple. Dont use it. Many of us DO like it just the way it is, thanks.
Even if you just toss it, you lose nothing as it didn't cost you a penny, plus even by just trying it out, you also learned something you didn't know before.
I wish I could say the same about Vista.
Initially modded up to +2, Informative.
Free is worth 1% of the desktop as viewed from the web. Operating System Market Share
Free wins two HP "Mobile Internet" netbooks a ride on the Walmart.com Linux merry-go-round.
Here today, gone tomorrow. Not available in stores.
Pricing is a wash.
$20 more or $20 less than the bog standard Windows netbook with a gig of RAM and a 160 GB HDD.
Not a clue to what distro is installed, what software is available, what peripherals are supported.
Don't forget to write.
This is symptomatic of a failure to listen to the user, to understand his needs and values.
Apple and Microsoft have been in this game for over thirty years and it shows.
They know that "free" doesn't convey a sense of value.
They know that the geek isn't their market.
The decision-makers in business, government, and the military are their market. Small business. The home.
It is their itches and pains that matter. Not yours.
This post is clearly a day late.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Look, this is where you need a car analogy.
I'm a Linux nerd, driving carefully down the road.
The guy in front is a hardware vendor, drives like an idiot.
His bad driving certainly isn't my fault, but when his car crashes, it becomes my problem.
Oh, and there's a Linux newbie in a Honda Civic driving along behind me. He wants to bolt insanely expensive flanged speed-holes onto his ride, and it's apparently my problem (though not my fault) that the vendor has crashed because that distracts the newbie into crashing into me...
K.
You obviously haven't used MS Windows lately. MS Office 2007, Vista, Internet Explorer 7, and numerous other Microsoft application make absolutely no sense. I can't even burn a CD without clicking through three menus in Vista that have nothing to do with burning a CD. I can't instruct someone to go to Start -> whatever since "Start" is no longer there. It's a logo? What am I suppose to tell people "go to the MS logo". They are baffled. Want to tell someone to print a file? Where did file go? These changes make computing more difficult for the masses and yet you are criticizing GNU/Linux for what is essentially some parts being copied. You really need to go back to the source of these problems and that is we need to stop copying Microsoft's stupid moves.
DVD-RW - tons of issues here
Easy prototyping database front end (to replace MSACCESS) - OpenOffice's 'Base' is pathetic. I'd use ORACLE but for the price.
Easy office interconnectivity - eg. Email merge letters from a database. May seem simple, but the steps to make it happen are incredibly convoluted.
Samba - I love it, but it operates very inconsistently between distros (vis. KDE 4.x on SuSE 11.x) - connecting can be a MAJOR hassle.
Proprietary crap - Bought a Canon Video Camera. The chances of a) opening the files and b) manipulating them are zip.
Modems, laptops and PCMCIA cards are all a bit of a crap-shoot.
IM compatibility - pidgin works, but various features don't. Kopete works but it's not terribly stable.
All that said, I'm a HUGE Linux fan. Been a member of various LUGS for over a decade. Used everything from RedHat 4.x to Gentoo. I push Linux on people all the time and HATE seeing them get burned by M$ and Apple. The problem is that the hardware vendors are petrified of their competition getting ahold of their driver code. This part of the equation will never change and we have to resign ourself to the difficult interplay between proprietary code and open source code. This economy may make many people switch. With momentum comes choice. Choice is opportunity. Let's hope it knocks.
*** Don't be dull.***
how do you propose they support all this manufacturer-unsupported, undocumented hardware?
I think its more an issue of lack of ability rather than lack of want.
:x
The problem is not really any of these things. While it may be a problem in meeting the goal of GNU/Linux adoption- it really isn't a problem that some hardware doesn't work. The problem is users don't have easy access to hardware that works well and they are given expectations that it will work when it won't work well. If you stop telling people to "switch" the operating system and rather tell them to "buy a GNU/Linux computer" then we'll have solved the problem. Apple doesn't have compatibility either with every off-the-shelf product but nobody has a problem with it. The same could be true of GNU/Linux and the fact remains that GNU/Linux is compatible with more hardware than MS Winodws, Mac or any other operating system in history. It just doesn't have the labeling of compatibility and support out of the box with the latest hardware. If people knew what would work and what wouldn't it resolves the issue.
But do they want widespread adoption?
I don't know if they do or not, but I definitely get the feeling at times that there are many people who use Linux because it distinguishes them from Joe Sixpack and his mates, as much as for any other reason.
If this is the case then, consciously or sub-consciously, they would not want Linux adopted much more widely than it is at present - after all, if the world and her granny are all using Linux, what makes it so special any more?
(I fully acknowledge that there are many Linux users whose motivation is very different to this, its just that this is how it seems at times)
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I have ubuntu studio installed on my machine along side XP. I like the idea of opensource, and I want to try using it for a photo project. I know I will miss my standard adobe apps, and it will be a transition. I think the reason I want to do this is so that I ca work it into a not for profit photo course curriculum and a community project. It would fit the bill and run on cheap hardware. I have one problem I cannot overcome, and it's my own fault. I have a ntfs raid that I store all my photo data on (raid 1, sil soft raid card, sata) and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to mount and use the raid in ubuntu. Everything else has worked fine.... or I have been able to figure it out. I want to like linux and I guess maybe my system is just weird, but I figured this sort of stuff would be easy to make work. I think for educational projects it is a good fit, it would make a small budget have a little wiggle room by eliminating the need for $500 worth of software. Ubuntu Studio is an interesting option and I want to try to exploit it.
The average user doesn't do that. Usually they go by what's on the box, not what they searched for in Google.
Well in that case whatever they just bought said it supports linux right on the box. Sounds like it'll work out great for them.
:x
If you stop telling people to "switch" the operating system and rather tell them to "buy a GNU/Linux computer" then we'll have solved the problem. Apple doesn't have compatibility either with every off-the-shelf product but nobody has a problem with it.
This is certainly true, but, unfortunately, most of "download a Live CD and switch to Linux today!" propaganda misses the fact.
What its missing is specs the manufacturers aren't releasing. Reverse engineering stuff is a royal pain in the ass. People do it, but its slow going.
Your assumption that proper code = 100% hardware compatibility makes me think you've never written any hardware interfaces.
:x
If Linux never comes to general use. Why? Malware. IMHO Linux never really face the onslaught that Windoze has and once Joe 6 pack gets on board I *will* need to install virus scanners (and all related the crud). Right now even my relatively old hardware runs faster than the latest with Windoze installed simply because, there's no security software scanning every byte written to/ read from the disk and network.
BTW Let's see how this one goes. My posts never get modded up :-)
By at least the legion of shills hired by Microsoft, Linux's criticism karma is paid up until about 2034, assuming Microsoft quits this year.
Incidentally, Linux is provably the *most-hated* operating system in all of history, by the idiots who percieve it as a threat. That Linux can succeed at all despite all of this friction which no other system has to face speaks volumes about just how good it is.
OMG! They're criticizing Linux! To the pitchforks and shovels, men, we've got to fight them off!
Oops, a day late and a dollar short.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"its *not* the developer's fault but it *IS* their problem. The problem is that a lot of people have all this hardware that won't work with Linux and won't just spend money that they probably don't have just so they can use Linux."
And now, how those other people's problem becomes the developer's problem? The developer owns a hardware that will work with his system; he can hack his way out when there's a problem and he won't either get a dime nor owe a dime on those other nonworking systems. How is it that it is his problem?
He, of course, can take the burden of *making* those other people's problems their own problems, but that doesn't mean it *is* his problem, only that he will take the path of Teresa of Calcutta to resolve it out of his own good will.
"So its their problem insofar as they have to figure out a way to pass this hurdle, otherwise you'll never reach critical mass in terms of people adopting Linux."
I've been succesfully and almost exclusively using Linux since about 2000 (I used HP-Ux, Solaris, FreeBSD and minimally, some version of Windows too). I'm decently satisfied with its performance and usability. Can you please provide me with moving reasons about why I should push out of my expenditure for a wider Linux adoption? I know it might be of benefit for you, or for average Joe, but how will it benefit me and by extension the very people that can not only talk about it but effectively make it happen?
You see, going every morning to my job is quite a shitty proposition, but my boss provides me with moving reasons to do it, namely a decent paycheck at the end of the month. Now, let see what you can put on the table for me working on things I'm not really so interested in.
One major problem I have with Linux is consistency between distributions.
How do I unlock a user's account on any given distro (preferably without having to drop to a command line)? How do I configure network settings? In KDE 4 it's through the network manager which lives in the system tray-not in the system settings where I'd expect it to be and where it is on some other distros.
Then there's limitations in the GUIs (where there are GUIs). On Windows, Mac OS everything can be configured through the GUI. Is it even possible to configure more advanced options e.g. WOL through KDE's network manager? Why should I have to remember lots of commands and config file hacks to do a simple job that I can do through a GUI in Windows in a fraction of the time? A average home user might not notice this sort of thing but anyone trying to work with it in a workplace environment would be cursing it.
I'm not sure I agree with it mind you, but the point is that, as someone trying to give constructive criticism, *he* feels that the Linux community actively discourages it.
I tend to disagree on a couple of levels,
A) the myth of the Monolithic Linux Community. One would not really conceive of accusing "All Microsoft Groups" of being overly sensitive because a specific third party program didn't handle criticism well - but Linux does seem to get all lumped together on things like that. I remember being very irritated when what seemed (to me) to be an obvious bug in Glest was shouted down in the forums by a few individuals. But that was Glest, not the "Linux Community".
B) Frankly, it doesn't match my experience - I can give the example of Glest as an irritating example because it *was* a memorable exception. By and large, although I am far closer to end-user than programmer, when I have reported bugs in code, gui, or even simple bad logic from the end-user perspective, they have resulted in serious discussion as to how they can be fixed, or sometimes why I may have a point but it's outweighed by other factors, but hardly shouted down.
But although I grant I am a stubborn and arrogant soul, perfectly willing to shoot my mouth off to people smarter than me, the author doesn't seem like a sensitive soul that cry's over namecalling either, so although I would like details about the how and why of his experience's, I'm inclined to take it as a serious indication of some level of legitimate issue.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Simple common sense that I think has been touted for years? use the CLI. GUI is more often an excuse to not learn anything than to really actually simplify any task. The IDEA behind a gui is data organization; complex things can be expressed in images that can be difficult to express textually, for example, GIMP is much more practical than sed for image editing. I could do a lot of what I use GIMP for using sed with a reasonable understanding of the image format specification, and sometimes that can be fun... but honestly, I'll take the circle tool over an XOR of (cos(Î-r)-sinÎ)(r^4-2r^2cos(2Î+2.4)+0.9)+(0.62r)^1000<0 as some kind of regular expression. And if precision is an issue, I'll just do it as an svg and again, I'll be using Inkscape, not vi.
:)
I love Blender, Lyx, compiz-settings-manager, and I play WoW not MUDS... but I also use Gnome. Gnome is simple and tries to stick to 'make a gui where a gui makes sense, or don't make one'. In my opinion, for lack of a better example, gnome is for the people that want to learn how to write beautiful, powerful, and useful expressions; kde would like to give you a carefully organized list of beautiful, powerful and useful expressions with easy to follow instructions and buttons to click that will explain and perform whatever the expressions were meant to do.
A friend once told me that he used kde for a long time, until one day he imagined developing an "intuitive" regular expression generator gui for grep, sed, awk, etc in order to bring the power of the command line to the typical user. It was an epiphany "Ooh, now I get it!" he exclaimed, and switched to Gnome.
When instead of just trying to make things "better" you put upper and lower limits on design policy, imo, you end up with something much more simple, much more clean, and honestly more productive. Intuition is for experts (anyone read The Pragmatic Programmer?), not novices. Good interfaces should be designed with the idea that the user is going to be able to get smarter and more productive as they learn the system. The things that may be tedious for those people are the kinds of things that should be simplified. In your case, things were designed for those that think a man page means constitutes difficult work, and could only end up one way: BLOATED with the feature of the day, and yesterday, and the day before.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
"If a manufacturer makes a MOBO that doesn't support a type of HDD that PC World is selling, it isn't the manufacturer's fault, but it is their problem. At least, it is their problem if they want more people to buy their MOBOs."
What for?
Oh, yes, I see! The manufacturer makes more money the more MOBOs they sell, that's why they want more people buing them... So cute!
"But if there are people that actually want linux to gain market share on the desktop"
What for?
It's only the developers' problem if they care. If they don't -- and many don't -- then it's the user's problem. Or, I guess, more accurately, the Linux evangelist's problem. Note that many Linux developers are not also Linux evangelists. A lot of us are happy to hack on and run our own stuff and be left alone. If other people want to use it, great. If not, well, that's fine too.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Also done within Emacs....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
A vocal minority of Linux guys tend to go with #3
There, fixed that for you.
Sorry, but most of us just want to quietly hack on our platform, have a good time, enjoy the fruits of our labor, and be left alone. If we can come up with something that others find useful, that's great. If not, well, as long as it's fun to hack on and we find it useful for ourselves, that's fine too.
I'll be frank: dealing with users is the biggest time-sink in any open source project. I can't think of anything else that takes more time away from actual coding than dealing with users. Don't get me wrong: I do value interaction with users of my software. I value it quite a lot. But it takes time, and it's totally understandable (to me at least) that some developers (myself included, sometimes) get hostile when confronted with someone who just seems to be whining with a sense of entitlement.
And in the end, yes, the user is at "fault" if they say "I want to build a Linux DVR" and then go and buy hardware without first doing research to make sure it's compatible. I have no sympathy for people like that who have problems, and I refuse to make their problem my problem. If that drives them away from Linux, that's fine by me.
Now, the user who is currently running (for example) a WinXP-based DVR... there might be some group of people who woke up one day thinking "well, I want to figure out how to get these WinXP DVR guys to switch their *existing* hardware over to Linux." And sure, those people have a problem: they need to make sure the typical kinds of hardware people have in their WinXP DVR will work with Linux as well. But that's not my problem, and it may not even be the Linux DVR application writer's problem. It's the we-want-you-to-convert evangelist's problem.
Please don't confuse specific evangelists with the general OSS developer community. There is some overlap, but very often they are distinct groups of people.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
But they will spend money to get the new version of MSWind? And the new hardware that it requires?
Yes, I understand it as being a valid problem, but if I can't do anything about it, then I can't do anything about it. And in that case, I've got enough problems that I *can* work on.
I do understand about there being valid reasons for not switching. I've still got an MSWind95 box, because of software lock-in. What that taught me is that software lock-in is to be avoided. When people refuse to learn that...I can't accept their problems as my own. It's their choice. I can advise, but that's about as far as I'll go. If they're someone close, I'll look for ways around the problem. For my wife I'll search diligently over a period of years. (And sometimes there doesn't seem to be an acceptable solution.)
But I *KNOW* that eventually my MSWind95 box will die. And it can't even be installed on new hardware. So any captive data is doomed, unless it escapes before then.
I've got a Mac that has Finale on it. Linux Music Score editors just aren't good enough. One can't control the appearance of the score printout. (OK. Possibly if you hand-edit Lilypad files you can. That's not an acceptable answer.) I'm currently looking for a good solution, and I have been for years. Now...I'm preparing to export the Finale files into etf format, and transfer those over to a Linux system. Then those can be run through etf2ly and the work is saved. But the editing is done in Finale, because there's no acceptable program on Linux. Which means that I've got to keep a Mac system viable. (And license changes mean it's a Mac system from a year or two ago.)
So it *IS* my problem. I've got quasi-answers in lots of special cases. And I recognize that real answers are legally prohibited. When people don't realize that, they blame developers for problems with another source. The only real answer is to refuse to use programs that lock their data behind impenetrable walls...and it doesn't matter whether the obstacles are technical or legal. But lots of people don't want to hear that answer. Sorry. There's lots of features about reality that I'm not to fond of myself.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In short, people don't understand the FOSS model.
Linux has plenty of critics. What it needs are people who understand that no one has to listen to their criticisms.
Nobody is going to starve if Linux desktop adoption doesn't grow at a certain rate (and yet, it does grow). All of the logic in the article and thread hangs on this idea that "linux needs to do X if it wants Y". Linux is free to the world. It doesn't want anything. The Linux Foundation and Red Hat could disappear tomorrow and we'd still have the code.
Everyone is frustrtated with software. But claiming that Linux as a whole lacks critics is just FUD. The internet is crawling with critics, but the arguments in the article and in comments here are just variations of "I can't have x therefore Linux is bad". No amount of dressing up changes the core reality that FOSS is for and largely by coders, not users. There will be exceptions of course. But you're missing the point if you think your criticism should carry weight, it never will.
Noone cares.
The care factor is all-important to ongoing development in the FOSS world: if the developer doesn't care about feature x it doesn't happen. No amount of whining and complaining or so-called "constructive criticism" will make any difference if it isn't on the developers agenda. The commercial vendors would have you believe that this is solved by throwing money at developers. Wrong again. Commercial vendors, in addition to the care factor, have a financial stake in NOT caring too. Near enough is good enough for market dominance. It wasn't FOSS who thought up software patents.
Is this arrogance? So what if it is? Care factor zero.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
As manufacturer-unsupported, undocumented hardware has had drivers written for it on linux in the past, it is within the realm of possibility. Hard, hell yea. Impossible? Not really. If Linux wants to compete, it has some hurdles that Mac and Windows didn't have to overcome. It sucks, but its there.
If you'd pay the projects to combine, I'm sure most of them would be willing. If nobody does, they'll do what they find most interesting.
I'm frankly surprised that it's worked out anywhere NEAR as well as it has. I didn't believe that it ever would. And I switched anyway because I despised the new EULA that MS was trying to foist on me.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You wouldn't benefit from increased compatibility from most major manufacturers? I'm shocked. I honestly wouldn't have expected that. Manufacturers will cooperate and GIVE YOU DRIVERS if theres enough people to make it worth their while. So unless you'd rather hack your hardware every time you get new hardware, you'll *definitely* benefit. I'm honestly surprised you had to ask how one could benefit from a larger adoption. I mean, this could force standards across the web. Standards on exchange of data. I'm barely giving it any thought and those GINORMOUS benefits just came to me.
The only possible correction is to get Linux machines sold pre-configured with Linux. Then the vendor ensures that the configuration works before selling it.
This is something that MS knows, which is why they sabotaged Linux on Netbooks.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Would you be happier if manufacturers gave you the drivers for the hardware and didn't require you to hack it? If the extra effort wasn't required to make it work, would that be something you'd like? Because that would be the outcome of Linux having greater market share. Manufacturers wouldn't ignore you.
Windows has a pretty good one in parts; menus hide things that haven't been used recently.
When's the last time you used Windows? That feature was introduced in Windows/Office 2000, and completely discarded by Windows XP/Office 2003. It was also a godawful UI idea that was rightly criticized by pretty much everybody when it was introduced.
The fact that you're basically encouraging Linux to adopt a feature that has already been tried soundly rejected by the entire computer-using industry says something.
Comment of the year
Linux is as usable/more than anything made by M$, especially if pre-configured by your hardware vendor or by your Enterprise IT department, and everything works, out of the box. If you want to play own Systems Integrator, then you need to know what you are doing and your job will be infinitely harder if you use cheap, rip-off hardware that came out last week, and even more so if its USB and its USB Man:Dev code has been changed to 'protect the innocent', a frequent asian trick.
... , all without intruding on the enterprise host network management, you can even do C#/.Net development on either side, and cross test and you can ensure that your web pages render under IE/Firefox/Opera/Konqueror ...
If you want painless Google is your friend, but even that is very conservative, eg I have been using Brother printers for years, and using their raster utility, and my own Perl Fax/Printer driver it takes 5 minutes to get a new model up.
In these days of virtualization you can run, say XP, in a linux virtual and keep all your data safe on the Linux side. You will be very unlucky/careless if your v Win is ever compromised, but if it is you re-image it from a CD in 5 minutes. You install more Win software re-cut the CD from the Linux side, no Ghost, no hassle. Finally YOU have control of what your Win system can do, eg no phone home. This is how I use my private Linux laptop in the enterprise and that way you can Outlook PIM functions, read corporate mail
Clearly you aren't subscribed to any of the BSD or Plan 9 lists.
for the bashing from users/developers of BSD, OS X, Windows, and other groups, plus Sun, Microsoft, Apple, and a whole range of corporate special interests. Oh, and then there are all the computer columnists who are paid off by Microsoft, Apple, and other companies.
Maybe KDE doesn't have the same rules that every other OS does, but...
Aren't right-click menus supposed to be *contextual?* Why would it have both "encrypt" and "decrypt" on it? If the file was encrypted, it should only show decrypt. If it wasn't, it should only show encrypt-related options.
That's a lot more basic flaw that the excitement over encryption, the contextual menu *isn't contextual*.
Comment of the year
Yeah, I do... when Vista first came out and driver issues were all over the place, it wasn't "goddamn Littleguy", it was "goddamn Vista". It was the same way back when XP was new and didn't work all that great -- it was all XP. So... are you just making stuff up to shield Linux from criticism? Sounds like something I read recently..
http://www.tenjou.net/
From my machine, I can do Rightclick > Compress > Compress To... and make a .zip from there.
I'm running Dolphin 1.2.1 on KDE 4.2.2; I don't know what version OpenSuse 11 has.
The hour, the GNOME foundation released plans for GNOME 3.0, the discussion of the new ideas started. There was quite a lot of criticism.
my criticism is shown by not using Linux until app install and removal is simple.
Please stop. This sort of prejudice has been following OSS developers since forever, but is nothing more than a load of crap. I'm going to say it one more time: we DON'T use emacs, we use vim!
When I saw this news on /. I thought this is outrageous and ridiculous, but then I read the article and I can see now his problem. He was unhappy with certain functions and features in Linux desktop environments and their associated applications.
Furthermore it looks like he has chosen the wrong forums and mailing-lists to look for help. In addition he might have made unpleasant remarks. So he provoked such replies.
Linux needs chicks, not critics.
"You wouldn't benefit from increased compatibility from most major manufacturers?"
Yes. And I usually push for it the way I find the most cost effective for me: voting with my money. No Linux support Mr. Epson? OK, no problem; it's only you won't get to see my wallet, Mr HP will do.
"I'm honestly surprised you had to ask how one could benefit from a larger adoption."
Benefit as in net benefit. Do you benefit if I give you a dime? Surely. What if you have to go for it 1000 miles away? Maybe it's not quite a good bussiness anymore. Will I benefit from Linux' mass adoption? Surely. Would it mean net benefit? It depends on the effort it will take from my part versus how much difference it will do to my live. In other words: will Humankind benefit from terraforming Mars? Surely: currently a stone the size of Manhattan (a tiny grain of salt compared with the whole planet) falling from the sky would most probably extinguish the whole human race. Would you push money out of your nose to the point of almost starve to make it happen? Hummm. But, but... all humankind extinguished is surely worse than people almost starving (*almost*, but not quite starving, I said). I think you get the point, so please no more abstract afirmations about what hardware manufacturers would do if something I really can't make happen would happen.
You were talking about average Joe and I'm talking about average Developer. I do have audio, video, a USB disk, mobile phone... all on a nice environment to work with *and* with current rates of Linux adoption. Will do I net benefit from Linux' wider adoption? Specifically, do I net benefit from Linux' wider adoption at the price of making it more Windows-like when I went away from Windows because I dislike the way it were to begin with?
The first Linux distribution I started using on a day-to-day basis was Red Hat (about the days of its 4.2 version if I recall properly). Now Red Hat has matured and it's the strongest commercial Linux distribution over there both in terms of economical benefits and number of deployments. I'd call that a success. And d'you know what? I don't use it anymore (or to be truer, I only use it under strong economical incentives -that's the second option I mentioned on a different post about "making in happen" on FOSS along with "hack it yourself" and "take what is given to you for free and be grateful"). Do you know why? Because it becomed too user friendly in the Windows' bad sense. It has a lot of wizards, assistants and graphical tools that are very helpful for unkwoledgeable people but, alas, at the expense of doing things "their own way" and being in the middle if you happen to know your trade. It happens I know my trade and it happens I avoid working on Red Hat now as much as possible.
With all the feedback I gave to you I think you won't be surprised when I tell you I usually don't care so much about greater Linux adoption by the Joe Sixpacks of this world (I don't think I'd get such a big benefit from it) and that I explicitly don't want greater adoption if it's at the cost of "windowzing" it (I know it would directly hurt me). It's not elitism but simply the way it most benefits me.
When I deploy a little script, fill a bug report or create a patch for a program I use, I scratch my own itch; I have a problem, expend some time/money/effort and get it solutioned. Let's take the example of the script: maybe I publish so others can take advantage for it. Then someone makes a constructive criticism about some new function than can be added. Well, it can be added, but it's my own itch no more. How will it benefit *me* having him using my script? I know the world will be a better place with that new feature; I know that user will benefit from having that new feature. But does it mean a net benefit for me *now*? I ask this not out of nothing but because my time is limited and I do have other things to do that will mean a net benefit for me now (even if in such esoteric and subjective terms as the minutes
like its an excuse because someone has volunteered you shouldn't complain about really shitty work?
I volunteer in none IT fields too and I make damn sure the quality of my work is *better* than if I was being paid - just because I'm volunteering
But dare you, complain about shoddy work you just get flamed because they "volunteered" like that's some kind of excuse???
Ubuntu bug tracker is full of this...
Its that kind of attitude that will kill linux in a morass of barely just adequate coding...
Speaking of criticism of Linux; I had a HP nw9440 which was a lemon, no Linux ever really ran on it properly. Now I have a HP EliteBook 8730w which they sent me to shut me up (heh heh - at least I don't call them any more.) This is ten times the machine the nw9440 was, mostly because there's actually some metal in it. You can feel the difference when you set your hands on the thing. Until you turn off the "Fan Always On while on AC Power" option, Linux won't boot. Once you do, Sabayon 4 still sucks - it failed to chown my homedir to me, then went into a loop asking me to choose my desktop experience. This morning I downloaded the AMD64 desktop LiveCD (Among the many other improvements over my last system, this one has a Core 2 Duo) and turned it into a LiveUSB, then installed it in the space where I'd last placed Sabayon. I'm now in the process of churning up the 'net installing all the packages you need to turn it into something I want to use, but so far there's been few hitches - that is to say, so far every problem has been surmountable, and indeed solved by someone else. If I had access to my web history from Windows right now, I'd make an appropriate link. Anyway, the Intrepid Ibex has struck again... and so has HP. Now, I just need to transfer my linuxant license to my new system, and see if it works any better than it did on my last one, with my last shitty conexant modem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Firstly, he's wrong, there are plenty of critics.
Secondly, this dude got his medium completely wrong. Critics in other mediums are important because it saves people from wasting their money and because it is the only way to let a company know about its mistakes and lacks.
Linux is free, accept bug reports and feature requests, why do you need (more) critics that we already have?
But... the future refused to change.
This should have been posted yesterday morning.
Stupidity is its own reward.
#4 - Proclaim as loudly as you can, "Linux is not ready for the desktop."
I'll be a critic
I'm implementing OpenSolaris in my all Linux environment so that I can use zfs to ease backing up my MySQL databases that can't handle lock table locks. LVM snapshots (and restoring them) suck something fierce, and zfs is a thing of beauty in comparison.
You are an idiot if you say Linux->fuse->zfs for backing up MySQL for this purpose, so keep your karma points from taking a dip and don't respond.
Yep, I know Btrfs is coming, and I'm damn happy it is and have extremely high hopes for it. Though, Dtrace and Solaris Zones ability needs addressing too. Those are the BIG three that Solaris has to offer over Linux.
This very thread is a classic example of this misunderstanding
You are right, this thread is an example of a misunderstanding, but not the one you mean.
The originating poster is not talking to those open source developers who don't care about wider Linux adoption, or who are only scratching their own itch, etc. The poster is speaking (and responding) specifically to that subset of the community that DOES care about wider adoption, that advocates for wider adoption, or that belittles those who don't use Linux on technical, moral or other grounds. Your response IS understood, but you are not who the conversation is targeted towards. To those who don't care, fine, we accept it. But there are those who DO CARE, and the conversation is directed to them. It would be nice to stop getting constant feedback from the don't care group since it does not add to the conversation.
It's like someone asking "What can we do to combat world hunger" and lots of people piping up saying "We don't care about world hunger, we don't feel guilty about it, it is not our problem or interest" whereas they should have realized the intended meaning was really "For those who are interested in combating world hunger, what can we do to combat world hunger?, and if you are not interested, that's fine, but let us who are talk about it"
(By the way, I don't care whether Linux adoption grows or not, but I find it disturbing for people to constantly talk past each other.)
"Standard" critical appraisal, like movie critics, book critics, product, software, or GUI critics, etc, are people who excel in analysis from *outside* the realm of the created item. Movie directors and actors are not cited as movie critics -- they are the creators.
The linux kernel et al. projects tend to resist criticism by anyone not able or willing to implement the code. Of those foolish enough to try, heaven help them getting it into a form acceptable for kernel inclusion.
Developers being critical don't qualify as 'critics'. That's just good software development practice.
Of course, if you don't have any problem with Linux's market share, well, you're not one of the people we're addressing with the criticisms. No one can give any sort of criticism about a problem if you just don't care about the problem.
I'd say that people like you don't care about Linux's marketshare either.
People that mention marketshare and Linux only do so to bitch. I don't see the devs complaining about their markertshare.
Once those people's hardware works, then they will bitch about the UI.
It's silly to try to adapt a project to other people's whims. There are too many people to ever succeed doing that.
Ugh, can everyone please communicate effectively? I know that's hard for geeks, but... :P
IMO what the OP seemed to be trying to say, in their own silly way ("THEEEIR PROBLEM"! THEEEEIR "FAULT"!) is that Linux issues effects everyone, especially for a community project like Linux, so everyone should care about all issues.
For instance, one user could want more games for Linux, and another could want better printer support. Well guess what? If you had better printer support, Linux adoption would be higher than without better printer support. This in turn allows there to be more use of Linux, which carries the weight of there being a higher demand for games. Everything effects everything else in the Linux ecosphere.
As for "fault", everyone knows there is no such thing, you can always blame both sides, "fault" is just based on what is expected, and given that fact, Linux driver development being on the side of Linux developers *is* what is expected, but I totally agree that it shouldn't *have* to be that way, but who cares. The important thing is to always try to make things better, period.
Now to actually respond to your post...better. ^^
Yes, you're right that for Windows and Mac, the fault is shifted to the manufacturer, while for Linux it is shifted to random or specific Linux developers. That's because typically that's who is doing the driver support in each case. Again, you can still blame both sides, just because one or the other is expected doesn't mean each side can't do things better. You have to look at each situation for what it is.
Linux: Driver development more difficult in some ways (don't have to jump through Microsoft's certification hoops tho!) due to the actual maker, who knows all about the device, often not supporting Linux by making a driver for it. Tux grew up in the Antarctic and struggles to swim and keep up.
Windows: Usually always supported by the makers just because Microsoft is the gorilla, they sit around being fed driver bananas by the makers.
Mac: Like a cat, does their own thing, and doesn't really care too much about playing nicely with anyone.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
often criticism and complaining stem from misunderstanding. Lets face it learning Linux is not that easy once you get past using menu driven applications. Take for example, Netbeans. Its a wonderful and powerful application building interface. However, for someone, even with modest coding skills, it is difficult to understand how to use its full power. It is very difficult to get across the big picture, which is needed to provide insight into the devil in the details.
Often developers can get far more from "critics" if they provide better documentation, including examples that lead users into the use of the program and hence the details of the code (albeit indirectly). Likewise, the "novice", who may actually be an expert in another area of computing, can get often learn that the problem they have with a given program has often been considered and solved, but perhaps not in the same way or with the same concepts/words/ideas that might be familiar to the user. Sometimes understanding comes from using the same terminology and language (conceptual, not coding).
Linux developers and users really need to look hard at the issue of documentation and how it can be better managed, networked, integrated, and distributed, because, after all this is much of what this discussion of "criticism" is often about.
In that sense I found the original article interesting as the writer was a literature major with limited coding experience, but with sufficient users skills to be able to actually make a living writing technical books.
Making oneself clear can often remove a lot of unnecessary criticism, not to mention provide a sound foundation to build more knowledgeable Linux users.
Well put. And I have a theory about how to bridge that gap. It's a two-pronged attack.
1. More people selling Linux, top to bottom, from Dell on down to Joe Schmoe PC Repair of Podunk, Iowa. Professionals work out the kinks, Linux get put in more people's hands and they enjoy it and they have positive experiences with it and they see that shit does pretty much Just Work. And then when they buy some piece of iTrash that doesn't work with it, it'll be "goddamn iTrash" instead of "goddamn Linux." This is an ambitious program. The next part's easier.
2. Keep doing what free software has always been great at: turning n00bs into geeks. One person that's passionate about what's loaded on their machine is worth fifty Joe Users who use it because they bought it. This idea is what's been winning it for us so far (and make no mistake, we are winning). I expect it'll carry the day.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Does this put me on topic now, and not flamebait?
Yes, in comparison to any of the mature distros, Ubuntu sucks. Realize that you hitched your wagon to a hype machine and get over it, or move on.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
If they're quality open source drivers licensed acceptably, yeah, I probably would be equally happy. But personally I don't care either way. I'm not a driver developer. I'm content to limit my purchases to hardware with good Linux support (and suffer through trouble when I just "have" to have something that's poorly supported) while others work out the driver mess.
I think that's the main problem with these arguments: you're lumping me in with all other OSS developers and are assuming that we all have the same goals and care about working on the same things. I work on GUIs and desktop plumbing. While better hardware support would be nice in some cases, it really doesn't trouble me all that much.
I just don't have much of an opinion. If Linux gets large enough market share that manufacturers write good drivers and open source them, great! If not, well, that's a shame, but it doesn't really matter to me all that much.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
the problem that I'm saying the developers should address (even if its not their fault) is this: Person A has a 3 boxes, Windows, Mac, and some Linux distro. They put the card in the Windows box and it works. They put the card in the Mac box and it works. They put the card in the Linux box and lo and behold, it doesn't work.
I just don't think that scenario's very realistic. Linux supports more hardware than both of those other guys put together, and more every moment of every damn day. There's some problem children, sure. Nvidia cards spring to mind, the fuckers. Some wireless chipsets, although fewer all the time, it's amazing how fast that's happened. And work proceeds as always. But to say that's "the reason" that Linux doesn't dominate the marketplace or whatever is obtuse and a decade behind the times.
I'm going to ignore the second and more childish paragraph of your posting. But seriously, bandying about words like "elitist" and "obstruction" don't really lend you much credibility and mostly make you sound like a whiner.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Very much a different ballgame. Different development model, and coincidentally your example shows why the Linux driver model is the right one. As Joe GadgetMaker the hardware vendor, you only need to write one driver one time, and it gets maintained forever with no additional effort on your part. Do you see the difference here?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
so what you are saying is linux et al need one project to coordinate all projects. A bazaar coordinator... hmmm..
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I always say about Linux that you get great value for money. Critics and lovers alike agree with that.
Since I started using GNU/Linux more than 10 years ago I have seen "outsiders" criticise the hell out of Linux, X11, FVM2, EMACS, KDE, GNOME, ...
And it does not stop there either. Just think about KDE4 vs. KDE3. There is certainly no lack of criticism of "insiders" in that debate.
Once you are out there doing something really innovative, you are on your own by definition. Everyone (including you) can only compare it to the state of the art. Any developer who could give you useful technical criticism most likely is already developing something in this area himself/herself. So if you want to have high level criticism, try to find a related project of high quality and start reading the source code.
Well, it isn't their problem. Really. Developers are not payed pay user if at all. They couldn't care less for others' opinions. Most of developers had problem with their own hardware, solved their problem, then shared solution with the rest of the world. I'd say ATi is the one with genuine problem: some potential users won't buy ATi's hardware because this hardware limits their options and choices. Who knows, you may be willing to try this Leenooks or whatnot and you don't want to get frustrated once you do.
Therefore, before buying, ask around which hardware works with all OSes you would like to try or use and buy only those things that work with all or most.
Even if you personally don't want to ever become a Linux user, you may want to sell your computer or parts of it later. If I was in your place, I would like to own something that will be easy to sell, and it would be easy to sell if it would be still useful to someone. Linux is known to work reasonably well on older hardware, therefore old but Linux-compatible hardware would have better price.
It's not whether Linux has a driver for a particular device. The problem is that if I buy any computer, and install (Ubuntu) Linux, SOMETHING won't work. On one it's the sound, on another it's the wireless LAN. But it's ALWAYS SOMETHING. (I am not in the USA and so can not buy one with Linux preinstalled.) I use a DELL M65 and everything works except the Broadcom wireless; I have gone through THREE generations of Linux drivers and NONE of them work.
Let's get one message through to Linux developers everywhere: USERS WILL NOT RECOMPILE. They should not recompile the kernel, or the applications, or the drivers, or anything else. If necessary make your code five times larger and do run time configuration. All modern Linux systems are controlled by a package manager. Recompilation blows the crap out of the package manager.
The important thing is that it works and can run the applications. I really have to point out that very little in the way hardware actually runs in MS Windows out of the box since you get very little in the way of drivers with the OS. People rarely think this is a big deal until they try to change motherboards.
XP SP3 is not your XP f 2001. The requirements are significantly higher. While Linux gains some girth (not necessarily bloat), major distros still have minimum memory requirements of 256MB and recommend 512MB ... in a world where 1-2GB is now standard on low-end machines. Most machines made in the last five years will run modern distros flawlessly, and lightweight distros run easiely on machines back to ten years ago ... an eternity in the tech world. I just don't see the "bloat will render your machine useless" argument.
Put identity in the browser.
People will come when they are ready, and they are typically not interested in the OS at all since it is the applications that matter. When there is eventually a desktop for the average desktop user it will probably be cross platform anyway.
The bizzare difficult to manage heap with the registry and a lot of inconsistant behaviour that you see in NT3.51 and beyond is not an OS for the average desktop user - and neither was MSDOS, it's decendants and the bastard children of the two. I'm only mentioning that to show we really do not have an OS for the average desktop user and if we do get one it's probably going to come from somewhere completely different
They were pre-installed, but the OEMs did such a piss-poor job that it didn't matter. The webcams and wifi still didn't work on many of them. Linux lost the netbook war. Didn't you get the memo? ;)
Put identity in the browser.
That's a problem with propaganda in general. Let me pull up some old memories as an illustration. Back in the Win95OSR2 days ('97?), I got really frustrated with a driver and someone on-line told me to try this Red Hat thing that would completely replace Windows and still run all the same programs through Wine.
The guy was completely wrong, the system barely worked on my hardware, I had to buy a new modem to connect to my ISP, and none of my Windows programs worked.
I stayed. Do you know why? It's not a rhetorical question. I really wonder. I can't figure out myself why I stayed, but I did. I've stayed eleven years now. )Well, technically, I switched to Debian in 2004.)
Anyway, my point is that the propaganda hasn't changed a single bit. In some ways, being as good as NT4 and Win95 was a hell of a lot easier than being as good as the eight million projects MS has been pumping billions into for years. In some ways, I'd bet I'm further behind now than I was then in '97.
Some people can deal with this kind of stuff. They could be using Free software. Lots of people can't deal with anything unfamiliar. Other operating systems meet their needs. I'm fine with that.
Put identity in the browser.
Some of it is so damn hard that getting someone capable of doing it is near impossible. Some of it is actually virtually impossible to reverse engineer in any timely fashion. Some would be relatively simple to engineer but legal reasons prohibit that (because of the DMCA, patents, or others).
Some stuff is -- for all intents and purposes -- just impossible.
Put identity in the browser.
In the early part of the decade, Lexmark gave us a few drivers, and people were happy to have them for a while. Eventually, though, the Free software world moved on to CUPS, and the binary Lexmark drivers got bitrot and stopped working on any new distro.
So ... if they decide to make their driver part of the kernel, Xorg, CUPS, or whatever, I'm all for the gift and would be much happier. More likely, though, we'll just see Lexmark Driver, Episode II.
Put identity in the browser.
Windows devices have one driver available, generally speaking. One hopes that that driver is for the version of windows you currently have. If not, you're generally SOL. Most older hardware cannot be upgraded to the latest version of windows because the drivers are not available.
Linux systems may not have drivers immediately for new hardware, but once a driver is written, it generally stays around for a long time.
Generally speaking, I prefer the latter situation.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
So you reject the premise that there are developers that are working with a goal of increasing market share?
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
"If hardware doesn't work with Linux, it's not Linux's fault, but it IS a problem for them."
In what way? I agree people should make up for themselves what's best, be that windows, Linux, BSD, or whatever; but I do have a problem with that statement.
Why, if I give out something for free, am I required to go out on a limb to make it work in someone else's situation? Why do I need to invest in your hardware and eliminate all kinds of bugs from software I don't even use myself?
This doesn't count for the proprietary alternatives. I can buy a million licenses for windows; but they will not make turn it around and make it compatible with my SparcStation. They don't care that about us; they care about our money.
The "fix it yourself or live with it" attitude is a harsh one. Though this is the general attitude among proprietary and free software alike. Most of the clients of both just live with the software and try something else if it deviates too much from their goals.
Here's an option: If you are not a programmer yourself and don't have a local nerd you can somehow charm into programming; you can choose to pay a programmer to create or change a piece of software to meet your needs.
The trick is; that (mainly thanks to the GPL), there is an abunance of code which can be used free of charge which is not available when going the proprietary route. This will make development and maintenance of a certain software feature affordable for small companies which has no relation to IT.
With relation to the original subject; I would speculate there are a lot of critics; though its petty hard to separate the good from the bad ones. Other then that it doesn't matter at all because we just code for ourselves anyway :p
Having Linux work as well with hardware as Windows or OS X is *not* a whim. We're not saying "make it blue instead of red." We're coming right out and saying "hey, this is stopping people from adopting Linux."
It's not a whim and there's not too many people to succeed in doing that. MS and Apple already did it.
Nope.
I stick it into MyWeirdOS and it works okay, and I can use it just fine.
But then you come and claim I'm stupid for using MyWeirdOS and I should switch to YourSuperiorOS which is so much greater.
Then I try switching to YourSuperiorOS and it doesn't work. Then I ask, what to do about it and you tell me to discard my (working) TV card and buy a different one.
So I just go back to MyWeirdOS and continue using it there.
It's not -my- problem any more. I'm mostly satisfied with what I have and I don't give a shit about anyone claiming YourSuperiorOS is better. I consider them liars and ignore them.
It is -your- problem that I don't trust you and consider you a liar, that you want me to use your OS and I refuse to do so, that you try to convince others and I tell them my little story about the TV card and they don't follow you.
I don't care that LittleGuyPCI CEO is allergic to YourSuperiorOS and you just can't get the required specs. It's not my problem - I have MyWeirdOS and just _don't care_. Neither do I care that it's not your fault. But YOU care that I give you a bad name because I say your OS sucks whenever asked about it. It is YOUR problem.
Maybe, just maybe, the problem is in your universally claiming YourSuperiorOS is ultimately and unconditionally superior to MyWeirdOS while in fact it may be better in certain situations, but when it comes to a LittleGuyPCI hardware, it sucks a big time?
Users don't care whose fault it is that something doesn't work.
"If X+Y works and X+Z doesn't, Y is better than Z."
They don't care about Z's excuses that it's X and Y's conspiracy.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I really have to point out that very little in the way hardware actually runs in MS Windows out of the box since you get very little in the way of drivers with the OS.
This was true for XP, not anymore for Vista and 7. Now that they have a DVD to put the distro on, there's plenty of space for drivers - and sure enough, MS squeezed a lot of them for most of hardware from the last few years. Furthermore, Windows Update can now automatically check for and download drivers for unrecognized hardware - and it actually handles that pretty well.
Video cards and wireless stuff are probably one of the most common peripherals for the average user. I had issues getting DVDs to work on Ubuntu. I had issues with the wireless USB drive (had to write some line of something somewhere or else it wouldn't get enough power). I now have issues with a CD-ROM drive on my dad's old pc (used to be windows media center). Maybe they support more hardware, but they apparently don't support the common hardware thats out there. Unless someone is building their PC, its probably built for Windows and from what I can tell, getting all the hardware to work isn't as simple as it is on Windows.
The amount of hardware that works out of the box isn't near what it is on Windows. For the average user, if it doesn't work by plugging it in, then its not compatible because they don't have the knowledge to get it to work. Its not that their lazy, its just they don't know how to do it.
From the amount of people who keep on saying "its not Linux's fault" as their main reason... yes, I find that *third* paragraph somewhat justified, albeit a little bit exaggerated. I've been writing on a few threads and not just yours and from what I've seen, its not a big stretch. Plus, to say that hardware doesn't work as easily on Linux as Windows being an obstruction to the success of Linux is by no means a stretch either. Seeing as how a lot of people have agreed with me on the topic of driver support, I'm not the only one who views it as a problem. Linux experts who don't have a problem aren't the people you should be listening to. If someone who hasn't used Linux is having a problem, then *thats* the problem you need to solve. Its almost as if a decent portion of Linux users/developers just cater solutions to themselves and not to people who are new to the OS. Its almost as if they really don't care its not simple enough for the average user to use and yes, that would imply elitism.
Windows devices have one driver available, generally speaking. One hopes that that driver is for the version of windows you currently have. If not, you're generally SOL.
Well, not really. There are the occasional major breaks in some subsystems, yes, but... well, when XP came out, vast majority of existing 2K drivers worked out of the box, and later on that applied to 2K3, too. Vista broke video, audio and wireless, but for other stuff (such as all those USB devices) you can often get away with an XP driver (or even 2K).
Linux systems may not have drivers immediately for new hardware, but once a driver is written, it generally stays around for a long time.
That one is true. Linux definitely supports old hardware better. However, the hypothetical situation in the original post in this thread was, "you buy a doodad". Not "you have a doodad for 8 years sitting in a box in the attic". I hope you will agree that for the new stuff you can buy in your typical hardware shop, chances are much higher that XP or Vista will have drivers (and Vista, in particular, will have drivers out of the box), rather than Linux.
Hate to fall in to the stereotype, but when someone says "Help! KDE is throwing too many options at me!" I say "Gnome". Right-click your files, click "send to". Besides entering the mail recipient, right there you have the option to "send packed in" and choose the compression type.
Even if you weren't aware that "send to" had compression options, the context menu has "Create archive" with a simple dialog, and the encryption options are hidden under a "advanced options" section. Same functionality, simple presentation.
Your "problem" is a matter of choice of DE (or file manager). If you want to say "well most average users don't know how to choose" then you see why consumer-oriented distros like Ubuntu default to Gnome.
No. I'm saying that Linux has more than enough resources, they are just poorly utilized by doing the same thing 500 different ways.
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I'm primarily a political blogger, so I know that smart dissent alway, always, makes the things you love better. Like democracy and operating systems. Here's a sample of my Linux criticism, which was thoroughly ignored: What Linux Lacks.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
But there is plenty of room for people who get off their lazy negative asses and do something.
Want to make Linux better? Then make it better and release your code.
It is as simple as that.
Put up or shut up.
Thank you for that meaningless anecdote. If you were to buy a computer (any computer) and put Windows on it (yourself, that is), you'd have a hell of a lot more than just one something that doesn't work.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I stick it into MyWeirdOS and it works okay, and I can use it just fine.
Great.
But then you come and claim I'm stupid for using MyWeirdOS and I should switch to YourSuperiorOS which is so much greater.
No I didn't. (But silently, I thought it, because you are.)
Then I try switching to YourSuperiorOS and it doesn't work. Then I ask, what to do about it and you tell me to discard my (working) TV card and buy a different one.
No I didn't. I told you to do your damn homework before making an electronics purchase. Not my problem if you don't.
So I just go back to MyWeirdOS and continue using it there.
Cool.
It's not -my- problem any more. I'm mostly satisfied with what I have and I don't give a shit about anyone claiming YourSuperiorOS is better. I consider them liars and ignore them.
Fine.
It is -your- problem that I don't trust you and consider you a liar
No it's not.
that you want me to use your OS
No I don't. What possible benefit would I derive from that?
and I refuse to do so, that you try to convince others and I tell them my little story about the TV card and they don't follow you.
Actually, if you use this tone of voice with them, they'll probably think you're an over-defensive prick and ignore you. At least, that's where I'm at.
I don't care that LittleGuyPCI CEO is allergic to YourSuperiorOS and you just can't get the required specs. It's not my problem - I have MyWeirdOS and just _don't care_. Neither do I care that it's not your fault.
Okay.
But YOU care
No, really I don't.
that I give you a bad name because I say your OS sucks whenever asked about it. It is YOUR problem.
No you don't. You sound like a jerkoff. It's totally your problem.
Maybe, just maybe, the problem is in your universally claiming YourSuperiorOS is ultimately and unconditionally superior to MyWeirdOS while in fact it may be better in certain situations, but when it comes to a LittleGuyPCI hardware, it sucks a big time?
Users don't care whose fault it is that something doesn't work.
"If X+Y works and X+Z doesn't, Y is better than Z."
They don't care about Z's excuses that it's X and Y's conspiracy.
After coming to the end of this absolutely insipid stream of keyboard vomit, I have come to the conclusion that you either:
A. Are a troll
OR
B. Have Stockholm syndrome regarding your computer.
Either way, I don't really think I can help you here, but hopefully at least some other people can see your post and think to themselves "god damn, I don't ever want to be that guy."
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Video cards and wireless stuff are probably one of the most common peripherals for the average user.
Yes, and in five years we've gone from "plug and pray" to "shit works with vanishingly few exceptions." Video cards = dealt with, except for Nvidia. Completely. Wireless cards = Damn near dealt with except for a few Broadcom chipsets (am I missing anything? I may be, I don't claim to be infallible here). I'm not going to claim 100% compatibility with everything under the sun, but I'll say 95%, and the other 5% is Real Soon Now.
We can do a battle of the anecdotes if you like, but for every one item you can say doesn't work out of the box with Linux, I can give you five of the same kind of peripheral that won't work at all on Vista no matter how much you pull your hair out over it. And the trends are even more telling. Linux supports more hardware every day, while every time MSFT changes the driver model in Windows, they lose hardware that used to work. Honestly, 1998 called and wants its talking point back.
For the average user, if it doesn't work by plugging it in, then its not compatible because they don't have the knowledge to get it to work. Its not that their lazy, its just they don't know how to do it.
Really? Because I'm not aware of anything more complex than a USB thumb drive that works that way with Windows. That's just ridiculous on its face.
If someone who hasn't used Linux is having a problem, then *thats* the problem you need to solve. Its almost as if a decent portion of Linux users/developers just cater solutions to themselves and not to people who are new to the OS. Its almost as if they really don't care its not simple enough for the average user to use and yes, that would imply elitism.
Yeah, I'm aware of that. Actually I sell and support Linux desktops and laptops for home users. To try to hang the word "elitist" on me is just beyond laughable. I mean, Christ. I work with Suzie Soccer Mom, Holly Hairstylist, and Frankie Flight Attendant (names changed, occupations real).
I hear the range, believe me. I work almost universally with people who are new to Linux. I get a lot of interface comments, a lot of "how to" stuff. Hardware compatibility is nowhere near the top five things I hear. Not even close. I mean, maybe I'm just absurdly lucky every day and everyone else is having these horrible problems except me and all my customers and all my friends, but I really just don't think that's true.
So I guess you can keep calling me an elitist, and I'll keep working on real problems that my paying customers bring me. Like how to print from IE running in Crossover Office (anyone?)...
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
My mum is running OS X 10.4 on a iMac G3. I'm writing this in OS X 10.4 on my PowerBook G4. Definitely no longer shiny ...
BTW - I have tried to get Ubuntu PPC onto them but have not had much joy :-)
I have installed MS-DOS and Windows 3 and Windows 98 and Windows XP many times and rarely, if ever, encountered something that did not work.
No OS supports every bit of hardware. Take the latest Vista release as your baseline here. Many folks upgraded their hardware to move to Vista.
A good point--if over generalized--until "Sometimes people actually want to get something accomplished and not just play with their OS." I don't tend to spend time playing with my OS, but then I use Gnome. KDE can sometimes be option centric--and some like it that way.
No it doesn't work when you stick it into your Windows box--like he said. If you think every piece of hardware out there works with Windows out there then you don't have enough experience yet.
No, he's making the problem out to be one of users not checking the hardware compatibility list--something you need to do to upgrade to Vista, and to move to Linux.
No, again, you're missing the point. Nobody is asserting that you need to only buy hardware spec'd for Linux. The point he's making is that if you want to run Linux, you need to confirm your hardware works with it. Your analogy doesn't work here either. The one I used earlier might work better--if you own a set of wheels and go buy a car without first checking to see that your wheels will work, do you blame the car manufacturer, the dealer, or yourself? We aren't talking about cars though so that one is imperfect. People are use to the idea that things will just work. While it would be nice if the hardware manufacturers would make drivers for everything, we know they won't. Is that Linux's fault? No. Is it their problem? Yes. Is it the users fault? Yes, they should have checked first just like they should if they are moving to Vista.
I don't think most Linux guys do #3, more like #2. Its the Windows folks that tend to do #3, then they run back to Windows.
So let me get this straight. Plain vanilla install of (let's say) Windows XP, plug in a USB printer, a USB camera, a PCI wireless card, and a PCI TV tuner. You want to try to tell me that all those work with no further interaction on your part? No discs, no driver hunts, nothing. Plug and go. If that's what you're trying to tell me, I call bullshit.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Let me be more precise for you. Go to a computer store and buy a computer. Install the operating system. Does it support all the devices that are ALREADY BUILD IN to the box you bought? Windows - yes. Linux - no. Not talking about add-on hardware, cameras, turners, etc. I'm talking about the vanilla hardware off the shelf that the store sold you in the first place.
Latest example: I picked out a Dell computer because Dell was supposed to be good with Linux. But it has Broadcom wireless. Worked in the pre-inistalled Windows instantly. The driver that comes with Linux (named "b42"?) doesn't work. The 'cut-and-paste" driver doesn't work. A source code driver I downloaded from the Broadcom web site doesn't work either.
Another example: A friend bought a computer and I installed Windows 98 and LinuxTLE (derived from Red Hat) on it. A few years later I bought it from him and installed Ubuntu. LinuxTLE had sound; Ubuntu has no sound. I don't know what sound card I've got, I don't know what Ubuntu uses for hardware detection, I don't know what is wrong but I have no sound.
External hardware, like scanners and cameras? Argh! Both Windows and Linux need a driver. The Windows driver comes on a CD with the unit. You have to search the Internet for a Linux driver, and often there is no working driver at all yet. Linux functions on the belief that we can reverse-engineer the new HP 4127 and make a driver for it, but by the time our driver is working HP comes out with the 4128 and we have the same problem all over agin.
Many of the computers I set up are dual-boot, Windows and Linux. Invariably, there is some hardware that works under Windows but not under Linux. Linux advocates can argue who is to blame, but I hate telling my friend "Well, to use your scanner, you have to reboot into Windows." Yes, that actually happened, and SANE is anything but "easy". Ask anyone with a dual boot computer and they'll tell you of the same pain.
No it doesn't work when you stick it into your Windows box--like he said. If you think every piece of hardware out there works with Windows out there then you don't have enough experience yet.
I have plenty of experience with non-working hardware with both Windows and Linux, thanks for asking. In practice, though, the chances that off-the-shelf hardware bought from a typical place (Best Buy etc) not working in XP SP2 or Vista are next to none. With some older stuff you might have problems, sure. Either way, the chances of it not working are slim. With Linux, well... I'm sure you know the story (or you don't have enough experience yet, heh).
So the whole situation is very much hypothetical. It's not what your average guy is going to think, simply because, most likely, he's not going to be in that situation, ever.
OSS on Linux often did NOT work. Try playing sound with the original Quake 3 on Linux with a driver that didn't support mmap. Free drivers for hardware often didn't seem to exist or were very fiddly to get going.
For some reason which I have yet to understand, they picked option 2 and ALSA was born.
And that is why your comment was poor criticism and comes off as a rant. Good criticism looks up the reasons WHY people did stuff and then gives feedback on those rather than just guessing. You could have answered back against each of the points mentioned in Cleaning up the Linux Desktop Audio Mess Linux Symposium paper rather than just saying "don't know".
Starting with FreeBSD 4, the kernel did mixing in software if the sound card didn't support it.
Doing audio software mixing in the kernel has been frowned upon in the Linux land for years (to do it really well you want to use floating point). I could be wrong but I believe that Microsoft have moved most of audio mixing out of the kernel with Vista so I do not think this view is as extreme as it used to be.
It may be the old OSS 3 version, that stayed in the kernel for a long time but wasn't really maintained after ALSA became new and exciting.
When you have two implementations people can choose which to maintain. I hear that support for devfs was lower after udev went in...
a lot of systems started shipping with userspace sound daemons
Userspace mixing daemons were happening long before ALSA was shipped by default. esound was definitely shipped back in 1999. Userspace daemons also add support for things like network audio...
There is real, detailed critism of ALSA's flaws on an OSS developer's blog. This is far more useful than what you've posted here.
Now don't get me wrong - there are definite issues with Linux audio and these issues have driven some people away from Linux entirely. However those issues are not the ones you are talking about (my hope is that things are slowly improving too). Most users don't care about program portability (OSX and Windows have different audio APIs after all) - they just want working sound on their system. I don't see OSS being the solution to that...
My conclusion is you don't cruise any general computer-themed fora where computer-illiterate and intermediate people go seek answers to their problems (take Yahoo Answers computers&internet division).
They are full of rabid Linux fans who will offer Linux as a solution to every single problem and when you point out their solution won't work in a particular case, they use your arguments against my choice of hardware.
I did my homework by picking the Microsoft bluetooth mouse for $0.25 from the sale. It's a generic bluetooth mouse.
The bluez-applet guys didn't do their homework by 1) not adding its built-in PIN to their database, 2) requiring me to enter a PIN they choose ON A DEVICE WITHOUT A KEYBOARD, 3) outright REFUSING to add a feature to enter your own PIN when adding a new device. The patch providing the interface to enter the PIN was submitted to the right bugzilla entry. They refused to include it in the trunk, "because if users had a chance to enter non-random PIN, they will" and "only sucky devices don't allow you to enter the PIN". (actual quotes by the devs from the bug entry page. And this is the official package included in the flagship distro, Ubuntu.
Their solution: use some obscure tools to detect what ID and PIN your mouse requires and submit it as a separate bug. Will get included in the database with the next release, and with good luck your device will work in some 4 months.
My solution: the mouse works out of the box with Windows.
So does the Bluetooth GPS (same problem, same answer) and switching WiFi off to save batteries (according to developers, it should work), and the camera (took me 4 hours to make it run under Linux) and Mute button (*shrug*) and Hibernate (works, but takes longer than normal startup), and the GPRS phone (the SIR-only IRDA chipset won't enter FIR mode required by the software) and the multi-touch in the touchpad (the drivers are under development), and, and...
And the first answer to people asking for help with any XP problem with that device on the fora is "get Ubuntu".
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Who are the "they" you are talking about ...
The management?
The sales force?
There are only developers .... and in the case of things like TV cards they are not paid, they are doing it purely to get a working system for themselves, and if someone else benefits, then good ...
Mr Joe Average is not who a do-it-yourself PVR system is aimed at, no-one sells a Linux PC PVR, no-one maintains them, they are not simple to setup or maintain,
If you are talking about mainstream Video or soundcards then you have a point, but most of these for basic use are well supported, 3D acceleration and multi-monitor support is very hardware specific and is the kind of thing that often does not work on Windows even with the manufacturers own drivers ....
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