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The True Challenges of Desktop Linux
olau writes "Hot on the heels on the opinion piece on how Mac OS X killed Linux on the desktop is a more levelheaded analysis by another GNOME old-timer Christian Schaller who doesn't think Mac OS X killed anything. In fact, in spite of the hype surrounding Mac OS X, it seems to barely have made a dent in the overall market, he argues. Instead he points to a much longer list of thorny issues that Linux historically has faced as a contender to Microsoft's double-monopoly on the OS and the Office suite."
So the solution there is to ship BIG EXPANSIVE libraries with the OS, and keep on top of them so new stuff is supported by those libraries ASAP. You don't have 75 copies of zlib.dll, you have one-- and it's owned and updated by the OS.
Take Microsoft's .net for example. The library covers pretty much everything you can imagine wanting to do with a computer, and it's constantly updated as new file formats/etc arrive. But since there's only ONE .net, the library is still one holistic thing that can be updated when security problems arise without breaking anything.
That's not to say that .net is the perfect solution to all problems, but it's definitely worth examining how other vendors solve the problems in Linux.
For what it's worth, I come from Mac Classic, a platform that never had DLLs in the first place (but did have a huge expansive built-in library). Frankly, I've never been convinced that shared libraries were a good idea, even when HD space was expensive. But that's just me.
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Yes the binary should still run, and the SAME binary should run across several distros and several versions of those distros. Even in the current messed environment it is possible if you are very careful, use the oldest compiler you can find so that all of your users have newer versions of libc and libstdc++ and build and bundle all the rest of the libraries yourself including the GUI libraries, and be careful on the X11 options on configure since you can't count on xfixes. This is why commercial development has little patience for Linux. From: Linux user since 0.92 kernel and Principal developer of a commercial desktop Linux statistical visualization product. product is still sold, and thriving on Windows and Mac, even an iPad version, but now discontinued on Linux! Sadly, Without ABI stability and at least compatibility libraries, Linux will not be more than a niche on the desktop.
I think both the hardcore and "user-friendly" Linux versions can coexist fine. I have used the former and the latter, but I settled on Debian when I got my 64-bit computer (a cheapazoid dell AMD refurb...)
The old farts like myself who cut their teeth on Commodore 64's and Atari 800's are still looking for something to tinker with (there are exceptions, of course), and Linux fills that need nicely. I can remember installing Slackware from floppies while in college, because I wandered into the computer lab and started dinking around with HPUX.. Back then there wasn't much of a WWW... Of course the hacker in me grew substantially when I found I could use a free OS on my PC. Sure it was a beast to get my ET4000 card recognized by X, (I never got it fully working), but having my own shell prompt on my lowly PC rekindled my love of tinkering. Not since I got my first Atari 800XL for Christmas (with a datasette) had I felt like using a computer was fun again...
That is not to say I want to force my love of tinkering on anyone else... heck, I remember trying to free enough RAM in DOS to run certain games... that was the "not fun" side of tinkering, and I can see why people are reluctant to return to those lawless days of yesteryear. :)
Linux can thrive and succeed without 95% of the marketshare. Sure there are some high profile things the commercial OS vendors will always keep close to their chest... but for everything else, there's always an alternative. Linux represents that, but cannot gain traction because those who have an idea about going to Linux remember the stories the "old farts" liked to tell about the hell it was getting the OS to work....
Would I like to kick Microsoft to the curb? Most assuredly. Would I like to see Apple again become a niche player? Without a doubt... but where Linux is going is exciting enough, and well it should make others take notice. (and your sig is so appropriate... mine was 2004 - 2011, though. ;) heheheh.)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
This is exactly what happened with me.
I'd been using Debian and its various derivatives since Woody was the unstable distribution, and I had always been happy with it (so I thought)
Then, in April it was time to buy myself a new laptop, and I bought a 13" MacBook Pro on a whim, knowing that I could install Debian if I wanted to with no issues, but I figured I would try OSX out to see what the deal is.
5 months later, Debian has been relegated to running in a VM Ware Fusion instance that takes up 8GB of disk space, and gets booted once a month or so, and I am really wishing I had just bought a Mac back in '99 when I first started pissing around with Debian.
I wish I was a neutron bomb, for once I could go off...
No his conclusion makes sense for precisely this reason. If OS X increased by more than Linux's share, than the increase cannot be explained by Linux users switching to OS X. Thus there are other reasons besides Linux that users switch to OS X.
Two big problems with that reasoning:
...both of which are incorrect. Had OS X not existed, there is every possibility that at least some current OS X users would be Linux users (assuming in part that they want to run a UNIX-like OS). I'd fall into that category -- I switched to OS X 10.3 from OS/2 WARP v4.5, in significant part because OS X was UNIX with an excellent user interface, on really nice hardware (particularly for portable systems). If OS X didn't exist, I would have turned to desktop Linux. Many OS/2 users made the same jump (I chatted with David Barnes two years ago, and he was using a Mac as well), and while I can't speak for all of them, many had no desire to fall into the Windows ecosystem, and would probably have become Linux users if not for OS X.
All that said, I'm also a Linux user -- I have two headless Debian systems on my network running various services, with Xquartz installed on my Macs for when I want to run graphical Linux applications.
The overall point being, it's possible that if OS X didn't exit, many more of the new computer users in the last decade, and those that switched (particularly from now-legacy non-Windows platforms) may have chose Linux instead of OS X. I don't think its so much about people moving away from Linux as it is more people choosing one over the other in the first place.
(One of my man claims to fame is having RMS himself tell me I'm not into OSS enough because I use a Mac -- even though I've led several OSS projects, and contributed to a dozen more. Oh well, can't please everyone I suppose).
Yaz