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Should Being Competitive With Windows Matter For Linux?
An anonymous reader writes "Is Linux being held back by distributions bent on competing with Microsoft Windows? This article argues that it's a real possibility. Quoting: '... what was apparent early on during my Linux adoption was my motivation for making the switch in the first place — no longer wanting to use Windows. This is where I think the confusion begins for most new Linux adopters. As we make the switch, we must fight the inherent urge to automatically begin comparing the new desktop experience to our previous experiences with Windows. It's a completely different set of circumstances, folks. ... The fact that one platform can support a specific device while the other platform cannot (and so on) doesn't really solve the problem of getting said device working. You can see where this dysfunction of thought can become a big problem, fast."
Linux has a 90% share in supercomputers, a 50% share in servers (+/- 10%), and a pretty good share of cell phones and other mobiles, if you include Android and other semi-proprietary systems. The only place to expand into it the desktop, where the market share is at most 5%. So, why not?
can be anything we want it to be. It is, after all, open source and can be modified to suit many different purposes. Should Linux compete directly with Windows? That's a stupid question. Linux should do what the user wants and if that happens to put it on a collision course with Windows then so be it.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Linux must compete with Windows if there is ever going to be a "year of Linux on the desktop."
That would force manufacturers to release more compatible products, perhaps even contributing drivers to the kernel. It would spur the release of more commercial software, and gather more interest in the open source software that already exists as well as fostering new growth there.
Computers would be cheaper, as there wouldn't be a Windows tax, and additionally there would be more form factors available. How about ARM laptops with 30-40 hour battery life? Oh, sorry, that's not really happening now because manufacturers are afraid their customers will be confused, and they are afraid of losing their partnering bribes - I mean "incentives" with Microsoft.
Linux on the desktop, from the store, for average people, with first-party support, is extremely desirable for the future of computing. One thing that would be nice is to see some Linux games. Oh sure, you can run Wine or one of the commercial variants of Wine, but most people are just going to stick with Windows.
Also if you want to compete EFFECTIVELY it does mean trying to do the things that Windows can do.
"The things Windows can do" are things that pretty much every OS+UI been able to do for damn near twenty years. There's nothing magical there, and yes, obviously any desktop OS needs to be able to do those things. The problem is that a lot of people working on Linux distros and software seem to have the idea that "competing effectively" means copying, rather than trying to find a better way to do things.
Look, nobody will ever be as good (or bad) at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. Try to make your UI look like Windows, or your word processor look like Word, and you're not going to fool anyone. Most users aren't going to be impressed at what a great job you've done reverse-engineering Microsoft's crappy standards. They're just going to say, "Why should I go with a knockoff when the original comes free* with my computer?" Chasing anyone's tail, in any industry, is usually a losing proposition. Chasing the tail of a lame, half-blind, diarrhetic horse just means you don't get anywhere very fast and end up covered in shit.
*Yeah, I know. From a marketing perspective, the "Windows tax" makes no difference at all to the vast majority of computer buyers. Deal with it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
While I am more techy than most of the people I worky with (Hence I am sitting here reading this at work) most of the folks around me look at PCs simply as a tool. Can't teach them new tricks? Bollocks. A lot of my time is spent working with business teams who are looking to improve their way of doing business and teaching them about how different programs can be used to get the information they want.
Want to find your current sales trends in a way that you haven't been able to before? Okay, well, we have the data in this thing called Datawarehouse. Our reporting team will be able to provide you a set of reports, but they take a long time to develop and check. If you want to do some quick nasty analysis to fend off a crisis, there is a program called TOAD that will let you directly query your data. Look difficult? Lets go through how it works and how you write a SQL query.
Result: In the last Two years, I have introduced around 100 users who are NOT tech savvy at all to the wonders of SQL queries. They are now in various stages of competence, but they are using new things.
My (belated) point here is that while something like Toad (or now replace with Linux) isn't something that they can just pick up and run with, if people see a benefit to it, they WILL make the effort to learn how to use it.
In my mind, Linux really needs to advertise the benefits it has to the ordinary person so that they are enticed to make the effort to learn how to use it. Having said that, the easier it makes this learning process, the less advertising it has to do.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
The registry isn't bad because it's stored in binary form, or because it's heirarchical, or because it supports transactions, or because it has ACLs. These are good (or at least acceptable) things.
The registry is bad because it's global and forces a lot of configuration to be global as well. For example, COM components are registered globally, so only one DLL can be associatded with a class ID at a time. That's why you can only have one version of Internet Explorer installed on the same machine. Yes, users have their own registry subtress, but not every key can be configured under the user-specific heirarchy. Even a user-specific key can only have one value at a time for a given user. Unix systems, on the other hand, use environment variables to hold (or point to) configuration information, which results in a lot more flexibility.
Because registry values are global, application developers only consider the case of running one program at a time. If you want, say, two copies of Outlook, each with different settings, you'll need two separate users. A lot of programs don't even support multiple concurrent instances, which is maddening.
Another maddening side effect of the registry being global is that it's not possible to have the equivalent of NFS-mounted home directories under Windows. Say you have a domain user foo\bar on machines A and B. It's natural to want them to have the same %USERPROFILE% (read $HOME) on a fileserver somewhere, and on Unix, that works just fine. But under Windows, when the user logs into machine A, the system will lock ntuser.dat (the file containing the registry), which prevents the user logging in under machine B. Application-specific configuration files that are locked only during actual changes don't have this problem.
The global nature of the registry also makes it difficult to maintain application configuration: if you want to isolate the configuration information used by a program, you're essentially reduced to looking at procmon output and seeing what registry keys it touches. While in principle programs should limit themselves to storing information under HKLU\Software\Blah\..., in practice, they scatter stuff all over the registry, especially when they register COM stuff. You can't keep just, say, Word's configuration under version control.
When people say they hate the registry, what they mean is that they hate that Windows is not very well-modularized. Isolating one application's registry configuration is like removing one egg from an omelet.
A better model would have been to have application-specific registries, searched according to a PATH-like environment variable. In this scheme, when the system needed to, say, look up a COM class ID, it would just search each registry in sequence until it found the right one. Applications would simply store their configuration and registration information in their own registry, making management easy.
But like most Windows brain damage, this scheme wouldn't have worked on a 386SX with 4MB of RAM in 1995, which means it can't possibly be changed in 2010. As we all know, design decisions are irrevecorable and eternal (and I'm only half-joking).
3) all settings files SHOULD be hidden from normal users, be it the registry files, config files or whatever other settings files, if a NORMAL user has need of these to be exposed then the developers have FAILED.
Wrong, or at least I hope to the powers that be that this is wrong.
It is FAR EASIER to open a config file (with comments if it's complicated) and change what I need than to dig through a maze of tabs and menus looking for the magic option I want.
"This is exactly what's wrong."
No, it's exactly what's right. Linux is not ever going to have a "one-true distro", no matter how much you demand it.
If that means that 'ordinary' people aren't going to use it then I can't say it bothers me, not in the slightest.
Hell, 'normal' people aren't even going to install a new OS on their computer, ever. In a lot of ways that makes this discussion completely irrelevant as the people who need to be persuaded are manufacturers and distributors, not users. If the likes of Dell started to offer something like Ubuntu as a Windows alternative across a decent proportion of its range (instead of offering only a few, generally pretty poor machines) then that would help adoption I suppose.
But as I say, it's kind of irrelevant. Desktop linux is awesome for my needs and somehow development has struggled on and improved for 15 or so years.
So what if it's not the year of the linux desktop?
WTF is this? It seems to spit out an endless tirade of incomprehensible and meaningless shit. For instance:
0 10 FontSmoothing {Type, Text, SPIActionGet, SPIActionSet...}
It's a registry entry called "FontSmoothing", with 0 sub-entries and 10 keys (Type, Text, SPIActionGet, etc).
If you want more info about what PowerShell is returning you pipe the output to get-member, and it'll tell you what properties and methods are available. For example you could add and alter the set of keys returned, or add another where clause to limit your selection to a set of keys you're interested in.
Because it's structured and has a limited number of types you don't need to worry about the various locations or the structure of config files, and can alter and manipulate the returned output.
How is this in any way navigating "the registry like a filesystem?"
Because you navigate the filesystem in a similar way when using powershell, using ls on a registry entry like you would use it on a directory. It really shouldn't be too hard to see the similarity.
I can ls -R /etc | xargs cat and get a completely different pile of incomprehensible shit out of a Linux box, but at least it resembles English.
But neither seem to have any particular use.
If you can't think of a use for it okay, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful. /etc/Microsoft | ( where read f; do grep -q "Explorer" $f && echo $f; done ))
(By the way that PowerShell is more equivalent to find
Feh. If you were making a point, I've missed it. Sorry.
You said the registry was hidden on the hard drive and not accessible to normal users. My point was that it isn't hidden and is accessible. HTH
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