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Linux Turns 25, Is Bigger and More Professional Than Ever (arstechnica.com)
The Linux operating system kernel is 25 years old this month, ArsTechnica writes. It was August 25, 1991 when Linus Torvalds posted his famous message announcing the project, claiming that Linux was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu." From the article: But now, Linux is far bigger and more professional than Torvalds could have imagined. Linux powers huge portions of the Internet's infrastructure, corporate data centers, websites, stock exchanges, the world's most widely used smartphone operating system, and nearly all of the world's fastest supercomputers. The successes easily outweigh Linux's failure to unseat Microsoft and Apple on PCs, but Linux has still managed to get on tens of millions of desktops and laptops and Linux software even runs on Windows.Do you use any Linux-based operating system? Share your experience with it. What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?
Do you use any Linux-based operating system?
No, that's why I'm here on this linux loving website shit posting about microsoft since the late 90s
Of course it is "More Professional Than Ever". Its a corporate led project now, not a hobbyist led project anymore. Most of the development is corporate or corporate sponsored, either way corporations guide Linux's development.
>> Do you use any Linux-based operating system? Share your experience with it. What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?
I used to run Linux, but now I mainly run systemd instead. ...but seriously wtf type of question is that.
>> I'm afraid that is 64 tasks max (and one is used as swapper), no matter :-)
>> how small they should be. Fragmentation is evil - this is how it was
>> handled. As the current opinion seems to be that 64 Mb is more than
>> enough, but 64 tasks might be a little crowded, I'll probably change the
>> limits be easily changed (to 32Mb/128 tasks for example) with just a
>> recompilation of the kernel. I don't want to be on the machine when
>> someone is spawning >64 processes, though
If only he knew...
See subject: Kudos to "Mr. T." & crew - what was that old cigarette ad catchphrase again? "You've come a LONG WAY baby"...
* Very nice (hell, even I like it) & I must give credit where it's due - Linux PROVES you can get people from the world over to WORK TOGETHER creating something good! A real "socio-technical phenomenon"...
APK
P.S.=> IF I didn't have a valid Win7 license? I'd be on it like "white on rice"... apk
It's GNU software that runs on Windows.. There's not even a bit of Linux because it is a clean room implementation.
Do you use any Linux-based operating system? Share your experience with it. What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?
No more - yet.
I would love to see Linux work with every musical interface.
See, If I buy something musical - like a USB to quarter inch cable or ...really ANYTHING that has to do with a musical instrument, Mac WILL work - plug and play.
I do NOT want to hunt down drivers or figure our why my Intel sound card doesn't work or what driver is a shitty work around.
I WANT IT TO WORK!
So, I pay out the ass for MAC Oh-Sex!
And if I were more patient, maybe willing to dig into code, I wouldn't be getting Oh-Sex up the ass. BUT, I want to create and not solve technical problems.
Booting kernel .09x from a floppy because IDE wasn't working (yet); learned about it from IRC because we had to run an eggdrop bot to defend our channel.
What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?
Still waiting for the year of the desktop. A viable alternative to osx (and ms) for multimedia work, specifically, professional level audio engineering work.
Still the same old cobbled together DOS wannabe
And today BBC reports that a King penguin was made a Brigadier in Edinburgh :)
If it is so professional, what do I replace Quickbooks Enterprise with?
That is pretty much the last thing holding the office computer back. Using Office 2003 so I assume Open Office or whatever will do the trick there.
What does this word mean in regard to the Linux kernel? Or it should be applied to Linux/GNU?
Sorry, this article is some marketing BS. I've no idea how it found its way to /.
If I may, and even if I mayn't, I'm going to rant about the same thing I always rant about in these stories: usability. Desktop Linux is a great operating system for those who have put in the many hours needed to understand its quirks. It's a great operating system for people who never so much as install a new sound driver. For the remaining 80% of users it's a usability nightmare. The wide range of distro's running the Gnome and KDE mean many common interactions differ between computers. And the Linux/Unix ideology of each program doing one thing (and doing it well) means which programs a user will have is unpredictable.
This, in turn, means it's all but impossible to provide a simple, straightforward instruction to a user for how to do something with her machine. Even something that should be dead simple. As soon as a user has to modify a config file or open a command prompt that's a huge roadblock. And no I'm not saying "be like Windows". That implication is a cop-out.It's not about doing things the way Windows does them, it's about making it "just work", and when it doesn't offering highly intuitive graphical interfaces for changing the way it works.
The Linux development community has made huge strides in this direction, but more is needed. Write drivers that interface with Gnome and KDE environments and provide GUI's for every setting. If a driver doesn't gave a Gnome and KDE GUI that covers 99.99% of use cases it's not finished. Make it so a user never, ever has to open a command prompt. Stick to the top three or fewer interfaces, and make them rock solid. No more installing interfaces to install interfaces to install decompressers to compile drivers. Do this and you shall see the year of Linux on the desktop.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Those are some nasty split ends.
Yes, Linus is in control of the Glorious Kernel of Non-GNU-Vaporware. Verily.
That kernel, as impressive as it is; as necessary as it is... won't power a shitty blog about your mom's quilting, without which the corporate-backed initiatives running atop it were around.
And corporate control is here. Potheadering wouldn't have successfully foisted the clusterfuck that is SystemD on us all without corporate adoption. But I digress: corporations are behind the heavy lifting going on in Linux. Which makes sense, because corporations are who use Linux. Yes, yes, you run Linux on your shitbox and your grandma e-mails it up with Gnomebuntu 3.0 Brushed Rounded Corners Bonanza, but y'all ain't shit as a market. (And spare me the "But, but, Android is Linux when we conveniently need to say Linux has end user marketshare!" tripe.)
The year of the Linux desktop people.
I remember when Linus posted it. I downloaded it and played with it a bit.
When Slackware 0.99a came out I gave it another try. It was not long before I was converting my Minix boxes at the house over to Linux.
In 1995 I switched from Windows 3.11 to Slackware and never looked back. To this day I run linux on all my systems at home save a small laptop that runs Windows XP though it is just to manage the spectrophotometer which does not have a linux driver.
Linux has come a long way and I am always amazed at how much of the world runs linux from Cell Phones, to routers, to supercomputers.
With the exception of a few Windows machines so we can submit grants and stuff, it's all Linux based, including all the computational rack servers that crunch all the numbers and all the web servers.
It's not due to OS cost, it's due to stability. And the fact we can use both modern machines and old machines seamlessly.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
See subject: That's its base "underpinnings" as D. Cutler its designer used his experience from DEC's VMS...
APK
I first ran Linux back in the mid-90's though it's been a while since I did much with it (maybe like 5 years). Back when I started it was 2 generations ahead of Windows at least, destroyed it in terms of performance and stability, and was just a lot more fun to use. Fast forward to today and any lead has pretty much evaporated. Recently when I got too annoyed at how slow Windows 10 was running on a cheap laptop I picked up (4 gigs of RAM, AMD a4-6210 and a SSD), I decided to replace it with Linux and was honestly pretty underwhelmed. Performance was about the same, and this was a Linux Mint distro running XFCE with bells and whistles turned off. It was still sluggish to the point that it was annoying. The user experience was pretty much identical to what I remember from 10 years ago. Honestly, if I installed a 10-year-old distro it would probably scream. I'm not a programmer so not sure what could be done at this point; even Torvalds has admitted the kernel is bloated, and as a user it seems like the graphics system is just an increasing number of layers, managers, and toolkits piled on top of each other.
er, Linux is just the kernel.
No, Linux is an overloaded name that can refer to the kernel or the operating system as a whole. And it is used in both ways by many Linux advocates and enthusiasts. Context usually makes it quite clear which is being used.
In this discussion's context, Linux is corporate directed whether you are referring to the operating system or the kernel.
The GNU utilities (not corporate) and other open source wares ...
You also misunderstand the nature of corporate directed. If the developers of a GPL project are funded by a corporation then that corporation will have a lot to say about the direction the code heads in. That is inherently part of the FSF world view, want a feature, pay for it to be developed. That is one manifestation of corporate directed.
We gave up on Windows shortly after Windows 2000. I migrated the entire family to Linux fifteen years ago, and we never looked back. My daughter wrote her master's thesis on Open Office on a Linux system (I remember it's being a KDE desktop). I enjoy the idea of not paying money every time I need to do something different.
One caveat, however. Normal people need someone with computer experience to maintain Linux for them. My family had me, and my son. At this point, that's a requirement, not an option.
Either that or Win xp running like a mad dog with only three legs on my 12 year old laptop. It is getting harder to run a non pae Linux system but at least the option is still there with a modded debian or slackware current install. Here is the kicker, it still runs good old google earth 6 with decent graphic speed and will handle most of the net with ease even though it is only running 1.5 gig of ram. The 9 cell battery still gets over 4 hours and even intensive net video and graphics run decently with html5 video thanks to Linux. Linux has been great for keeping great hardware out of the garbage bin and even interfaces nicely with my older usb2 pro audio gear, which is one hell of a lot more than I can say about using windows usb audio drivers that were bjorked by windows 7 and 10 so called upgrades on my desktop.
At the risk of starting a flame war I think if Linux is going to get traction on the desktop it needs more thinking like the Linux Mint. I think both Windows and Ubuntu made the mistake of following trendy ideas at the expense of the user. When my elderly parents we faced with moving from XP to Windows 8 I moved them to Mint and they have been happy Linux users for years now.
The most useful thing for average users is making the GUI config tools easy to use by a lay person, and doing it without breaking the traditional config files people like myself are used to working with. In this respect I think Mint is suitable for large percentage of average users but the focus needs to be on the small but significant number of cases where it is not possible to get a system up and running properly without opening a command line window.
Been using Linux as my OS of choice on home computers for a while now. The desktop experience has come a long way to achieving what I would consider "expectation parity" with a few exceptions.
The biggest thing I hope to see change is Apple start publishing iTunes for Linux. That's not because I use it, but because many people who otherwise have no reasonable need to use Windows would be able to switch to Linux.
In a similar vein, I hope to see WINE get to the point that pretty much any random Windows based application just works so that migrating people is SUPER easy.
Lastly, and I'm sure this will ruffle some feathers, I hope Canonical gets convergence working properly across form factors so that for someone that wishes, they could turn their phone into their single computing device and not give up having access to a standard desktop in the process. If ever Linux were going to "win the desktop", this might be the best bet.
I need Solidworks, AutoCAD, and Excel.
I prefer Linux based OS. I use it for all my servers, but until wine can run above software it will not work for me and many others.
I think it was around 1992, I was browsing ftp.txt files at multiple ftp sites and kept running into this "linux" thing. I was a CS student, so I looked into it more and found out it was a UNIX OS for PCs. I thought cool and thought I'd try it. 40 diskettes later downloaded from the student computer lab and I was installing it onto my computer at home. I hardly knew anything about partitions on a hard drive at the time and easily wiped out my Windows 3.1 partition. When I finally got it to boot up and got a 2400 baud SLIP connection going back to school, I couldn't believe it. I would start Netscape, go wash the dishes and come back in time to see the page loaded. (It wasn't even porn! That took a LOT longer!) Since then I've had Linux installed on all of my personal machines. Since 1999, I've had Linux installed on all of my work machines and around 2008 I got rid of my last Windows machine and have run Linux exclusively.
Linux has helped me build several products and has provided countless hours of learning. Praise be to Linus and GNU and all of the other people that helped make this possible.
Instead of whining about it you could disable the memory overcommit by adding "vm.overcommit_memory=2" to /etc/sysctl.conf and run "sysctl -p" (so that the setting takes immediate effect so you don't have to reboot).
When will Windows get rid of the registry? And what is it about this GUI obsession with you millennials? A good terminal (like bash) lets you do stuff faster and easier than any GUI. It's also damn easier to give the advice to "open terminal, copy past these lines" than it is to have to create multiple screen shots of how to do the same thing in a GUI and then hope and pray that the end user is using the same language and version of OS as you do.
Right around then, I couldn't get a reasonably priced Amiga any more. Commodore had pretty much killed it, and third parties were charging a fortune for their hardware. The only way out was commodity PC clone hardware. What to run on it, though? Linux to the rescue! Running it in 4MB of RAM was a bit tight, but it worked well enough, and with an additional 16MB, I could even run X without swapping all the time. Due to my hobbies, I've had many of the different architectures Linux was ported to, and Linux always worked much better than the OS it came with. My only gripe was that there were few games, and I dual-booted for a while to get DOS and WIndows games. Dosemu pretty much took care of DOS games (and dosbox after that), and Wine at least ran a few Windows games. Now that I don't support Windows users for a living any more, I don't need to run it at all. 100% Linux. Games that don't work with Wine just get set aside until they do (even if that's forever). I can't really think of anything more I want out of Linux, other than continuing to just work (how others have so much difficulty I don't understand). The only thing the "year of the Linux Desktop" will bring for me is more crappy Steam-like Linux ports that don't follow free desktop guidelines and often don't work on Mesa at all, or if they do, they're slow as molasses, thus adding a new class of games I have to just put aside until they're fixed.
he successes easily outweigh Linux's failure to unseat Microsoft and Apple on PCs
Haha, says who?.
I ditched Windows back in 1998 and installed RedHat 5.1. It was awesome! Then I upgraded. Wow, what a nightmare. Dependency hell. I struggled with it for a few years, but hung in there because I just loved it and had no interest in going back to Windows. Macs make my brain hurt.
Then along came Mandrake which took away some of the pain. That was great as well, really liked KDE. Upgrades were still painful, but much better.
Then I started hearing a lot about Ubuntu so I made the leap to Kubuntu 6.06. I went through about 8 in-place upgrades over time (minorly painful) until I finally things got unstable enough that I did a fresh install. Things were much better... but I kept having issues with KDE wigging out on me and pegging my cpu.
So I installed XFCE on top of Kubuntu. XFCE spoke to me - I realized all the UI flash didn't matter to me. I would flip back to KDE, but the problem kept happening and I was happy with XFCE. Eventually I heard about Mint around 2011, and had to try Mint XFCE - I have been there since. I have decided to not do rolling installs anymore, but I am configured pretty well to do full installs. I just installed over my Mint 17 XFCE release and was up and running on Mint XFCE 18 in about an hour. (my / partition is 55 GB and only uses about 12, and I have a separate partition for home). This was the smoothest linux system update I have ever had - even no issues with the Nvidia proprietary drivers!
Installs aside, my Linux system does everything I want it to do. Seeing all the various applications on it grow and blossom, and really cool things like bootable distros to embedded linux to mini systems to android. It has really been great to see it all flourish.
At work I use Windows 10, and I get by. But it brings me no joy. At home I run Linux, and it brings me joy. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I use Linux Mint exclusively on my laptop, soon to be on all of my PCs.
For 90% of home users almost any Linux distro will serve them just fine. If they just need email, browsing, and online shopping, Linux will do everything they want.
For professional shops it's a bit different since there are lots of applications that will never be ported to Linux, but as more and more stuff moves to the web I expect that will change over time. Graphics-heavy stuff will probably stay as local desktop programs for a long time, but I'd bet that 80% of the stuff that requires a desktop application will eventually become available in some form on the web. Some stuff, probably never (AutoCad, video and sound editing apps, etc).
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I am a big fan of Linux in technical terms, but not a big fan in terms of UX (basically, the social end of computing, where collaboration across large teams is basically required for a high quality product).
Android is illustrative of what Linux *can* be, but on the desktop has never managed to be because of the obvious differences between the social (i.e. people and hierarchy) infrastructure behind Android vs. behind the Linux desktop.
I used Linux from 1993 through 2010. Early on I used the same .twmrc files with TWM that I used on my HPUX and SunOS boxes at CS school. At the time, the Linux desktop was *light years* ahead of the Windows desktop. 16-bit color, high resolutions, fast, lots of very powerful applications from the Unix world and experimental desktop projects like InterViews that seemed very promising. People with MS-DOS or GEM or Windows 1/2.x computers were envious.
Later on I used FVWM. Then I switched to KDE in the KDE Beta 3 era. But then (mid-late '90s), Linux on the desktop had already been outrun by Windows 95 and Mac OS. The level of integration amongst services and components wasn't that of a coherent system like it was for Mac OS and Windows; the Linux "computing is a network" philosophy—very good for things like business and scientific computing—was obvious in comparison.
When KDE 4 was released, I tried to use it for a while but it got in my way. I had to rebuild my entire desktop over and over again as objects were lost, lost their properties, etc. After about two weeks on KDE 4 during which I mostly nursed KDE along rather than doing my actual work, I switched to GNOME 2.x. I see that as something of a golden age for desktop Linux—basic parity with what was going on in the Mac and Windows worlds if you used a polished distribution like Fedora. Install was different, equally demanding of skills, but the actual install and setup process for the desktop OS on a bare machine involved approximately the same amount of work as was true for Windows, and the result was basic feature and experience parity.
Then, the bottom fell out. I suspect that a lot of the need for the Linux desktop with experience parity to Windows was met by an increasingly revived Mac OS, and users flocked there. Myself included, in the end.
GNOME 3 came out and KDE 4 was finally becoming usable and there was something of a battle, but both were behind the curve relative to the stability and seamlessness of OS X, and OS X had end-user application developers already. They screamed and moaned during the transition from legacy Mac OS, but most of them hung on and redeveloped their applications for OS X, and there were a bunch of new application developers to boot.
On top of that, the major applications of the business and academic worlds made their way out for OS X as it became a viable platform. You now had a seamless desktop OS that offered all the big brands in user applications, plus stability, plus easy access to a *nix environment and command line if you wanted it.
I was busy fighting Linux during that "instability era" just as KDE4/GNOME3 happened and duked it out. Things were changing very quickly in many facets of the Linux base installs, in hardware, etc. and every update seemed to break my Thinkpad T60 which at the time ran on Fedora. I was spending a lot of time fixing dotfiles and scripts and trying to solve dependency problems, etc. Meanwhile, lots of new things that were starting to become commonplace needs (cloud services, mobile devices, etc.) didn't yet work well with Linux without lots of command line hacking and compiling of alpha-quality stuff from source.
A couple of fellow academics kept telling me to try Mac OS. Finally I did, I installed a hackintosh partition on my T60. By mid-2010, I realized that I was using my OS X boot, along with the GNU tools environment from MacPorts, far more than I was using the Linux partition, and that there were Mac applications that I was *dying* to start using on a daily basis, but ha
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Used to run linux, started with Slackware on a 486. Loads of diskettes i downloaded. Printed big, fat how tos to get it installed and started.
Now haven't really run linux for couple of years. Job requires MS-windows and i haven't upgraded my machine in something like 8 years. I do have some linux distros on virtual machine, but rarely run them anymore.
What i want is this forcing of systemD down people's throats to stop. This systemD mess is everything open source community is not supposed to be, i don't care how amazing some fanboys claim it is. All this crappy soap opera BS within Debian is just one proof. If this is the direction, i don't think i'll get a new personal machine. Poettering does not seem to be able to finish one thing, when he already has to throw another thing in to make the snowball bigger. Sad really.
I've been waiting for wayland to be what V1.0 used to mean. And i don't mean just the protocol, i mean the whole "ecosystem". Right now, don't really know how far it is, even though i visit phoronix daily. I'm starting to lose interest.
I would like more cooperation, so there wouldn't be so many completely alpha stage software, that never get to V1.0. That does apply to all software, not just Linux and software that runs on Linux, and i guess it's as possible as world peace. People will do what they feel like. Not hat having options is a bad thing. I just would like a bit better balance towards cooperation.
Such is the way of the world, i wish there was a way to go and explore new worlds.
Linux is just a hack.
For everyday tasks you don't need more than a live OS. You get more flexibility, privacy, security. I'm really puzzled as to why live systems don't receive more attention. I personally have dozens, run everyday in random order.
Go live!
I'll reply, just because you've used the lovely evolved word "mayn't". :-)
First, let's just get out of the way that "Linux" is the kernel,and your post has almost nothing to do with the kernel. That's OK, a bit of semantic flexibility can cope with that. Now onto your real topic.
Sure, graphical Linux distro UIs are an utter disaster. The problem is pretty simple to understand --- both Gnome and KDE desktops are "do as I say or fuck off" GUIs --- neither of them accomodates user's requirements which are different for every single user. This might work for the enslaved hordes of Microsoft users, but it absolutely cannot work for Linux users who have so many choices available.
Total configurability has to rest with end users in the FOSS space. The latest generation of Gnome and KDE developers is probably just too young to understand this, since they continually try to force their own preferences onto end users. It's a hilarious misunderstanding of the concept of "UI", since the first letter is "U" and not "D". The user knows best what is best for them, the developers do not. There are no exceptions to this, at least in the absence of extensive and costly user training.
This isn't a difficult concept to grasp, the idea that users know what they prefer. You'd think that developers would understand this and create completely user-configurable UIs, but it seems that their egos are too awesome for that. The devs know best, and "the users would agree if only they understood what's best for them". In other words, if they had a brain transplant. Developers can be really stupid, and when it comes to UIs, they almost always are. (No, "themes" do not address this, they're superficial eye candy at best.)
And so, I have to agree with you that Linux GUI usability has always been terrible, and there is no sign that it will ever be anything but terrible because there is not a single well-known Unix desktop team that is focused on user configurability.
It's the height of developer incompetence, but unfortunately that's where we are today.
(PS. I use nothing but Linux, but I use no desktops despite having tried them all. So far, not a single one has provided anything of value. I do still remain hopeful, but so far there is no sign whatsoever that something deeply configurable will ever appear. FOSS developers care only about their own preferences.)
Note that commercial providers are even worse, and provide what can only be described as user prisons.
What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?
A mainline real-time scheduler. Even if it has to disable major functionality.
That is all.
The height of Linux usability and parity was Red Hat 6 through Red Hat 9. Those were the pinnace of Linux operating systems in terms of comparability to and competitiveness with other contemporary systems.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I switched to Kubuntu in April on my main laptop. I am running 16.04 and it works great. I have not found anything I cannot do. I switched after I realized that Microsoft had renamed and re-enabled the telemetry service with a forced automatic update. You can put up with that kind of control from Redmond if you like but I will have none of it.
I keep a VMWare Player VM of Windows 7 around just in case but have not fired it up in a good while.
I am also a gamer and I have about 140 games in my steam account that work on Linux and for those that don't I stream them from my Windows 7 media center PC. I have not gotten rid of MS entirely but at least finally there are real transition solutions available.
The thing I would like to see is the tech class to wake up and throw off the yoke of Redmond and go ahead and switch at this point. A truly open OS with real competition between distros is the only solution to corporations trying to take over your computing experience for their benefit. I think if my fellow techies realized that we could start a real step change on the desktop. That would result in better support for Linux overall (drivers and apps) . The Linux Desktop OS is ready as near as I can tell. Just the people who aren't.
When will Windows get rid of the registry?
Windows has 'the registry'...which for all its hate and faults is, from an objective standpoint, about as difficult to work with as .conf files.
And what is it about this GUI obsession with you millennials?
The GUI changes the paradigm from 'fill in the blank' to 'multiple choice'. I can find what I want to do and figure it out pretty simply, between programs, even ones I haven't used before. The CLI is great when you know all the switches, but I personally can never remember if it's chmod 644 -R /dev/null, or chmod -R 644 /dev/null. CLIs don't scale down well - something like 'creating a mailbox in Exchange' requires a massively long command that takes far longer to type than to click through the GUI wizard, so while making 100 mailboxes is faster in a CLI because it can be scripted or copy/pasted, making 1 mailbox without copy/pasting will always be quicker in a GUI...and there are endless examples of this sort of thing.
A good terminal (like bash) lets you do stuff faster and easier than any GUI.
So...photo editing then? Or audio editing? Did you type this comment in Lynx, or Chrome/Firefox/Whatever? PC games? Again, it's only "faster and easier" if you already know the commands. If you don't know the commands, add in all the time it takes to discover the commands, read the man page to figure out what order the arguments go in, and then input it while substituting your own data properly. Also, how do commands deal with spaces and special characters? The command line absolutely has its place, but eschewing the GUI wholesale is just as ignorant as eschewing the CLI in its proper context.
It's also damn easier to give the advice to "open terminal, copy past these lines" than it is to have to create multiple screen shots of how to do the same thing in a GUI and then hope and pray that the end user is using the same language and version of OS as you do.
Yes. And in those cases where that is properly done, it most definitely is preferable. However, anything other than a perfect set of copy/paste lines gets very complicated, very quickly. I tried five times to get Rocket.Chat installed in a Linux VM, before I gave up and asked my friend to help. He did, and the server is up now, but when the copy/paste directions are incorrect, change between versions, make assumptions that aren't there, or are otherwise ineffective, now any advantage to a CLI over a GUI is completely gone.
emacs. the os without systemd.
I am an old Unix user. Started on a PDP-11/40 in 1976.
My first Linux was 0.12 on a 386sx. I wanted to play around with PC drivers and found DOS and Win 3.1 opaque and lacking. I wrote a fairly nice Adaptec SCSI driver as a play project on the 386sx.
After the Suns, SGIs, AIX and HP-UX boxes at work, continuing on Linux at home was just natural.
I have played a bit with Windows and can use it if needed. I'm not a bigot, I just like to pick the best tool for the job. I keep a VM with Windows around if I need to play with something. But for most of what I like to play with, Linux as a desktop has always suited me well.
I currently have Fedora 24 on the desktop and a mix of versions on various Rasberry/Beaglebone type systems for projects.
Every now and then I get nostalgic for TOPS-10 and Multics.
Damn kids all over my lawn...
Probably not the only one, but it does seem to have some .. umm.. useful features there too.
Our last system WAS Unix based.....until the specialty company got bought out by a regional company that got bought out by a multinational company that dropped it in favor of windows software. At ten times the cost of Quickbooks :O
Ok, find me a 'real' accounting system. QBE is under $200/month for 3 users, multiple warehouses, and multiple pricing strategies ;p
At least in the desktop.
It is pretty "UNIX LIKE" in some ways (I used Vax VMS in academia) & isn't that much different in how it's 'architected/structured' really (imo, the ONLY real difference vs. NT-based OS is global memmgt in *NIX (classic nix that is( vs. per process in NT))
APK
P.S.=> Anyhow/anyways - nice talking to you... apk
I think a lot of people use Linux based Operating Systems and don't know it.
Android is, at least sorta Linux.
A lot of your set top boxes and routers are running Linux. There's a lot of embedded stuff running Linux too like your Nest thermostat and possibly that new refrigerator you bought.
Chances are those websites you visit everyday are running Linux too.
This is the year that Linux finally makes it to the desktop. Next year it will be this year too.
Biggest obstacle against switching to Linux for me its inability to run Windows software.
I have decades of DOS/Windows applications/games and
Windows OS versions from MS getting more and more backward incompatible.
I know Linux has WINE but it does not seem enough for me.
It needs to be really perfected or another way must be found (a free VM?).
I think if Linux could provide high quality Windows compatibility (especially for both old and new apps/games)
then not just people like me but lots of companies that has their own special apps would switch easily
(because otherwise they risk their apps becoming incompatible with next version of Windows).
Yes - (www.imagemagick.org) - batch processing instead of doing the same thing over and over to many images.
It runs on several platforms.
I've used it a lot in situations such as where someone has scanned hundreds of text documents at maximum resolution and people are complaining that they take a long time to load.
If you were to bother to read my years of ranting against Microsoft and their complete neglect of developers you will be surprised by my next line. Windows 10 is pretty damn good, and Visual Studio kicks everyone else's asses. I have seen Windows 10 running well on machines that aren't a whole lot better than a raspberry pi, and Visual Studio has stopped being a vehicle to get me to force my customers into the arms of Microsoft by forcing MSSQL and sharepoint type crap down their throats.
.net though.
It is like someone at MS woke up and said, "Hey maybe we should listen to our customers and stop focusing entirely on all this enterprise crap. Also maybe the developers out there are influencers vs a blip on the percentage radar. That said, I am still going to develop for linux as my primary server environment, but I can now do that from Visual Source safe. I can use git, I can use github, I can use gdb, and python.
I fully intend on using linux on robots and just about anywhere embedded, but my desktop is looking like I may very well return to Windows.
Most developers that I know are all saying roughly the same thing; developers who have usually apple and sometimes linux desktops.
I, for one, did not see this coming.
I still would rather eat shit than use
Doesn't work so well for the photographer whose workflow uses Photoshop and/or Lightroom to process photos. There really is no Linux equivalent, although Darktable is making progress in that area.
I had this exact conversation with family and friends in the '90s. The answer was always "nothing."
Q: What do you see?
A: Nothing.
Q: I mean, what's on the screen?
A: Nothing.
Q: There is nothing at all on the screen?
A: No.
Q: So the screen is entirely blank. No power?
A: Pretty much.
Q: Pretty much? Is there something on it or isn't there?
A: There's nothing on it.
I go over... And sometimes there would be words ("Operating system not found" or similar), sometimes even a complete desktop but hard-locked or similarly hung.
Me: That's not nothing (pointing).
Them: I don't see anything.
Me: Don't you see words? and/or Don't you see windows?
Them: Not any that mean anything.
Me: If they didn't mean anything, I wouldn't have asked you about them. If you'd told me, I wouldn't have had to drive all this way.
Them: What was I supposed to tell you?
Me: I asked for the words on the screen. Next time, read me the words on the screen!
Them: Okay. Sorry.
Next time...
Q: What does the screen say?
A: Nothing...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
to the kinds of development that UX needs.
In the commercial world, there is a hierarchy whose basic job is to say "no" to everyone's pet idea. To refuse to adopt an initiative proposed by someone, and instead to allocate their resources, against their will, to the *single* direction that the team has been ordered to take. Good or bad. Because even if bad, a single bad direction properly executed by a sizable team with enough labor to complete it well is better than a thousand bad directions each executed by a single individual or a small handful of individuals who lack the resources to complete it, yet chuck it out there alongside all of the other 999 incomplete bad directions.
But the whole *point* of OSS *is exactly* that if you don't like what everyone else is doing, you can do your own thing. That is the basic philosophy. And that's why Linux UX never improves in the free and open space. Because there is nobody with the authority so say, "No, the product will *not* include that, and you *will* dedicate all of your labor to what it has been decided *will* be included."
So the bazaar happens. But the problem with the bazaar as opposed to the cathedral is that the bazaar is only a single story high. You can't build seriously tall stuff without an organized, managed collective of labor. Surge, you get lots of interesting stuff. But very little of it, if any of it, is epic. It's all the size that one single bazaar shopkeeper can build, to man their own little shop.
The Linux kernel avoided this problem because of the cult of personality (not meant in a bad way, but in the technical sense) surrounding Linus. People defer to him. He decides what's in and out, and he does a reasonable amount of labor allocation even if in an interesting, socially backhanded way that's not common. But it works—he is "in charge" enough in everyone's minds that there ends up being one kernel, with leadership.
Nobody similar has emerged in Linux userspace, and it would seem that Linus-like people are a rare enough phenomenon that it's unlikely that one will emerge at any point before the question is irrelevant. The pent-up demand just isn't there now for good Linux UX, like it was for a sound kernel and high-capability OS that didn't cost a fortune, as it was during the late '80s/early '90s boom. The social mechanics just aren't there to generate it.
The Linux desktop as a really sound piece of tech and UX engineering... will never happen. That era has passed, and the problems have been solved—by other platforms. And Android is a very good counterexample. There *was* enough emerging demand for a mobile operating system that wasn't iOS but that offered the same capabilities, and voila—Android. When there is enough demand, there is space for one shopkeeper at the bazaar to emerge as a champion for the needs of others, and to accumulate sufficient influence by acclamation that a cathedral structure can emerge organically.
The bazaar is merely an incubator of ideas. The cathedrals are the epic and actually useful accomplishments. It takes demand and allegiance-pledging at the bazaar from many attendees to lead in the end to a cathedral. This means that the bazaar has to be big, and that the shopkeeper in question has to have an idea that many, many are not just interested in, but willing to work toward—enough to sacrifice their own autonomy and submit to leadership. This just doesn't exist for desktop Linux any longer. It got close during the height of Windows dominance, but there was never quite enough demand to make it happen organically. And now the time has passed. The desktop Linux people are running little shops at the bazaar that don't get a lot of foot traffic, and nobody is seeking them out. They are the kings of very tiny, forgotten kingdoms without enough labor resources or wealth to even maintain their castles any longer—and as a result, there is nothing but infighting, strange hacks to maintain castles on the cheap, and lots of started-but-never-to-be-finished f
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I started using Linux in my first year of computer science. I was 19 then, now I'm 41 and have been using linux the entire time, a major part of that as my sole desktop. It's funny to see people's faces at interviews when I say I have been using linux for "over 20 years". I honestly think most of them don't believe me.
I'm using Linux for about 11 years already. Back in those days you had to recompile the kernel to get wifi working and I don't remember how many times I broke X when playing around as root. I quickly learned to do that in a VM and not on my daily pc :)
Setting up Linux was difficult but when it was set up it ran without any problems (unless you wrecked it as root like I did). In comparison : Win XP crashed by just looking at it.
In all those years I only used Windows for my education and later on VM's to test websites in IE/Edge. For the rest Linux.
RedHat, Cent-OS,Suse,Ubuntu, Debian. I don't care. As long as it is Linux :)
And I love it!
[This post was written with WIndows 10]
The first time I found Linux (the OS) was when I was trying to figure out what to do with an old Mac I bought from a university for $10 in 1996. It was a Mac Classic, I believe. Found Debian and began looking over the docs and learning about Linux. I gave up on that project, but a couple of years later installed Debian (from floppies, of course) on a P100 laptop, with 24MB of RAM. Played with that until I broke it. Was told about Slashdot in 1999 and became a daily reader from that time. Installed Linux on various machines for playing around until I decided to say goodbye to Windows NT, in 2004, and move over to Linux. I had a PC with a very difficult video card at the time, running a BNC cable to a 21" HP workstation monitor I pulled out of a dumpster when a local shop threw them out. Getting Linux installed (I tried several times) was not easy, but I got Slackware going on it. Ran that for 2 years, until I retired that old Abit board based, 2 Celeron CPU box and went to laptops. Ubuntu 6.06 was new at the time and I put that on. Been running a flavor of Ubuntu ever since. Even my current workstation at work has been running Kubuntu 12.04 since it came out, and Ubuntu 10.04 before that. So I could have contributed to the KDE thread, as well, since I both use it and like it. Home machines mostly run Xubuntu right now.
And when I set up servers, it's Red Hat/CentOS/Oracle/Ubuntu, depending on what I need to do.
What does "In Microsoft, you can very rapidly need to drop to do things via powershell commandlets or registry edits to modify some hopelessly obscure thing." mean?
"In Microsoft"? LOL. "need to drop to do things". WTF?
Linux is more professional than ever, while Linus is less.
Instead of whining about it you could disable the memory overcommit by adding "vm.overcommit_memory=2" to /etc/sysctl.conf and run "sysctl -p" (so that the setting takes immediate effect so you don't have to reboot).
Hmm ... registry much?
The CLI is great when you know all the switches, but I personally can never remember if it's chmod 644 -R /dev/null, or chmod -R 644 /dev/null.
There is a system to it. It is always: command [switches] [arguments] [target]
“GNU” Linux, I didn’t spend 6 years in evil medical school to called “Mister” Linux.
Besides ImageMagick you also have DarkTable and RawTheraPee which are perfectly replacing Adobe products for me -up to and including adjustment curves or denoising. Honestly, even if you have a macintosh or a PC you should try them... as of course they are multiplatform too.
Herve S.
ImageMagick definitely has its place; it is invaluable as a backend to Piwigo, Coppermine, (presumably) Pixlr, and plenty of others. No hate against it at all. However, the benefit to using it on a CLI, by your own admission, is based upon its capacity to perform batch actions like resizing. Would you do one-off image processing using a CLI rather than using GIMP or Photoshop? What about things that aren't easily automated, like color correction? There are some things that still require human input, and the process/export/evaluate/repeat concept doesn't save anyone any time.
By contrast: http://www.faststone.org/FSRes.... GUI tool that will do virtually all of the same batch processing as ImageMagick, giving users a simple to use GUI that does not take nearly as long to use or operate.
As long as Windows 10 keeps going down the shit hole path, yes, there will be "The year of the Linux".
Yes, there is nothing wrong with using the word "Linux" to represent all 300+ Distributions, why?, because there are 300+ FUCKING distributions. Plus, "Linux" is a pretty cool name. Unlike, "Windows" which is so generic the only thing it got going for it is the Logo.
Linus Torvalds is also problematic for Linux. This guy has to come to his senses and realize that AMD and Nvidia can't opensource their drivers do to their hardware and drivers containing other pieces of technology that is patented by others. Maybe this could change in 10 to 20 years down the road when those patents expire.
There has to be an ABI between the kernel and drivers so we can stop playing politics with closed sourced proprietary drivers. It seems to me that Torvalds just loves to fickle around with the kernel just for the purpose of breaking proprietary drivers. As long as this continues, Linux won't go anywhere, we will continue with all these Graphical, audio, network issues.
Kernel might be great but we still have issues in the land of user space. We truly need to stop the dll hell or what we like to call dependency hell. This isn't the 1990's anymore. We have 100 GB to 8 TB of disk drives so packing all dependencies into snaps package won't eat up your hard drive. If gimp and blender people can do it for Windows(msi, exe) then they can surely do it for Linux.
A decade has run by without significant usability improvement in the Linux Desktop. MY ol' RedHat-6 was self-installing, self-configuring, self-managing and self-updating. Hardare/sofware/midware all got done. Discovering their success RedHat kicked-me-off RedHat ( all of us ) and returned my maintenance fee. Canonical tripped over evolution stability though I've used it ever since. Gnome-2 remains best-of-the-worst. For 10-yr byteboy coodrz have buttfuckd server-land and squints-ville while treating usrland desktop as typhoid-Mary; will noone address this wasteland ?
Grow up and ditch the Gnomes that are dominating the RedHat & Debian world. They are built based on the philosophy of "This is the one true way things should be done and everyone should do things the one true way". Which is okay if you have to manage hundreds or thousands of servers where there are a limited number of tasks; but fucking sucks for general use machine where one might want to perform nearly any computing task.
I left that world more than 3 years ago and I've been very happy with my UX.
Are you kidding me?!?! Did they really just ask "Do you use any Linux-based operating system?" It seems that our fairly new corporate overlords have no understanding of the /. community back-story.
Granted there are more Microsoftians around these days and, sure, WinBlows doesn't blow like it used to but I think the Dice newbs should be forced to go back and re-read the entire site archive, Ludovico style, starting with Chips&Dips.
Peace of mind isn't at all superficial to technical work, it's the whole thing.
Do you use any Linux-based operating system? Share your experience with it.
FBI killed Ian Murdock of Debian. Debian is compromised now. You can use 2.6.x kernels, but there are better options. Not saying 2.6.x Debian was bad, it is not. systemd sucks system dicks.
Other devices besides desktops used and use Debian because of the slow release cycle and stress on stability.
This story is just like this one though: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/08/05/0329246/popular-bittorrent-search-engine-site-torrentzeu-mysteriously-disappears
And also this poll: https://slashdot.org/poll/2999
Read the comments on those two links. Yes, murder took place by a US government agency over this. Gee, what torrent sites do YOU use today friends? :-) nah, fuck you.
Meanwhile a lot of torrent sites have been taken down by the DVD police aka FBI. You fucking twats do something productive. Treason is not productive.
Die, die, die my darling
Don't utter a single word
Die, die, die my darling
Just shut your pretty eyes
I'll be seeing you again
Yeah, I'll be seeing you in hell
Tell Slashdot nothing useful. They are FBI. Since Slashdot has always been about the comments and not even the summaries
Slashdot is Dead.
Debian derivatives like Ubuntu also can not be trusted any more.
Debian also is pushing TOR big time, this is a TROjan horse.
Linux is 50 year old technology wrapped in a (hugely bloated) 25 year old package. Time for something better (no, not from Microsoft or Apple).
But you're confusing two things:
and
Given (1), you would be right. But I was proposing (2), which plays to the best strengths of the bazaar.
A good terminal (like bash) lets you do stuff faster and easier than any GUI.
Cool, I just shot 10 images in succession while panning. Can you please stitch them together to make a panorama? Did I mention they were RAW images? You need to read the raw, stitch them, add 10% contrast, take exposure down about .75 of a stop, add some micro contrast, adjust some curves, export in aRGB for printing and sRGB for the web. When you're done, I've got the 4K video I'd like you to edit. It consists of 25 clips, you need to...
Here is a clue for you: The average person can do basically none of the work they regularly do on a computer from the command line, and if you could cobble together stuff to do some of the above, it would be insanely difficult compared to firing up Lightroom or Capture one.
Yes - (www.imagemagick.org)
No. It doesn't even come close to working for what users do. Try not to be a moron. Remember, it's better to sit quietly in the corner having everybody think you're a retard than to post in public and remove any lingering doubt.
If the images are from the same source then you work out the settings on the first and then apply them to all the rest. If not, hard work.
Why do exactly the same thing a thousand times when a CLI can do it for you?
Why jump on a thread just to insult? The above poster didn't seem to be aware of something I have used a lot so I gave an example without insulting the above poster.
You should take your own advice about removing doubt - try adding some content instead of pointless anger.
"convert image.tiff image.jpg" does not take very long to use or operate. Throw in a scale, rotate or whatever the user wants, which is usually only a single operation, and it's not much slower. I've got a lot of people here that use it on absurdly large compressed TIFF files (300dpi scans 10 feet by 3 feet) that their desktop machines cannot handle with GUI software, and they don't need either the fine detail or the entire images.
Someone who claims that you can use ImageMagick for photo editing is a moron, that's just reality, not my opinion. Stating a fact is not insulting.
You can and I have. What would be closer to moronic is pretending that it is not possible without even knowing.
So what is up next - calling me a liar because I have used it to do batch processing of images on many occasions?
closer to moronic is pretending that it is not possible without even knowing
I do photography. I do software development. I use ImageMagick in a few places to alter photographs. Photo editing is not and never was, something you can do with ImageMagick. Photo editing is not making global changes to images or crop a bunch of them in the same way. Photo editing is what you do in tools like Lightroom, Photoshop (or Elements) and GiMP. It is not something you do in ImageMagick. "without even knowing". I know that ImageMagick is not photo editing software. Attempting to present it as such is moronic by definition. It's like me suggesting Neil Armstrong should have taken his bicycle to go to the moon in 1969. Moronic. By definition. So, no, it's not my opinion he's a moron, he is by definition.
calling me a liar because I have used it to do batch processing of images on many occasions
ImageMagick is very good for this. It's not photo editing though.
Yeah because just that I believe that most IT stuff can be done faster using a CLI than with a GUI then I'm soo damn stupid that I think that the same applies to 100% of all work including photo editing...
This would be the equivalent of me accusing you to indicate that you would prefer to enter text in a word processor with only the mouse. Now this is so stupid that no one unless they are insane would claim that and still you want to claim the same regarding photo editing. Please use your brain.
Yeah because just that I believe that most IT stuff can be done faster using a CLI than with a GUI
A tiny tip to clue you in. Just a little bit. 99.999% of the worlds population never uses their computer for "most IT stuff". Do you know what the word "mainstream" means? I use Unix variations for development, and grep. awk and all of that is great. It's not "mainstream" though. Not by a mile.
I find out that Samba isn't working on the new install.
I have to figure out WTF systemd is doing and no solutions others have found are working for me.
I use it to sync folders from my phone to my computer over wireless. *sigh*
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Of course not but do check the parent post that started this all. The "IT stuff" was a reference to fix things as the parent post thought that "Linux will NEVER be taken seriously by anyone other than you bunch of greasy nerds if you need to use the Terminal all the time whenever the slightest issue come up". It was never a point in trying to say that web surfing, photo editing and so on should be done via the terminal.
Image editing is image editing even if it's a mass crop or resolution change done on a batch from the command line or a GUI application that can do batch processing.
So you've got a cute little personal definition - fine - but you don't get to call others morons just because they don't know your cute personal "that's not a knife, THIS is a knife" definition.
personal definition
Yes, the way every single person in the entire world (statistically) does it is my "personal definition".
I dispute that very strongly especially since the example I gave edits images whether you like it or not. Your very strong reaction was very odd - why do that?
since the example I gave edits images whether you like it or not
Sigh, your definition is add odds with the standard nomenclature of the entire English-speaking population of the world. In the development community there are many that would agree with you, but that is a special case. If a user would like to remove a light-pole from an image, life the shadows of the vacation image of the kids etc, he can NOT use the methods you describe. In any way. Stop being facetious.
Your very strong reaction was very odd
Because you are acting like a Linux fanboy by being intentionally obtuse.
Ah - that's your problem - blind platform hate.
Surely you can find something more interesting to do?
No, blind fanboy hate. I use Linux for development every day, and it is great. OSX is better for a lot of things and Windows is better for a lot of other things. What I am not is a whore tied to one platform despising other platforms based on a religious affection to an operating system. I know which OS is good for what, and Linux is the absolutely worst of the main stream OSs for every day usage for regular people. Windows and OSX both beats it by many, many miles.
So why the extreme reaction to a very innocuous factual answer that you know from your own experience is correct?
It was a simple question about doing things on the command line and I gave a real and practical answer of batch image processing.
If you don't hate the platform why the irrational reaction?