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"What is Linux Missing?"
three55ml writes "This is an editorial I wrote noting a few points about what Linux has to do before it moves totally mainstream. It talks about both the small and the large issues currently slowing the widespread use of Linux."
Seems to me that the one thing Linux needs is some user space application that the world couldn't live without. One that would run only on Linux, freeBSD, and ect... Like... well... pokemon games?
This is a serious issue that needs to be resolved, as it will seriously impact what Linux becomes -- will it remain an OS for the "l33t" only, or will the Linux community accept and promote the lowering of the Linux learning curve? In a perfect world, the majority of the computer-using population would have the time, patience and will to learn these computing skills; In reality, the majority of computer users are people who just want to do a few simple things: write papers, e-mail, cruise the internet, and do their taxes. They want their computer to be like a toaster... simple -- they just don't have the time to figure this stuff out, their lives do not revolve around the computer the way ours do... If you want Linux to be for the masses, sacrifices must be made.
The only bit of resistance I EVER run into is that
Linux won't run users' favorite apps. For example
a small business owner the other day who depends
on Print Master, or an accountant who needs his
accounting software, or a kid who wants his
favorite game.
Judge Jackson was correct in pointing out that
it is the "applications barrier to entry" that
Microsoft protects at all costs, and it is the
single thing that keeps Windows going...
The only way to make Linux more successful to the
average end user is to convince application
vendors, e.g. ID, that they can make a profit by a
Linux port... when Linux reaches critical mass in
applications, the road to World Domination will be
paved.
Mark
Making Ethernet Adapters Work with Linux
Using Linux with a Cable Modem
DHCP problems? Try using dhcpcd instead of pump.
Use IPWatch to monitor your IP address
This is one of the main problems Linux has. What does this have to do with anything? Linux snobbery wil not help it move into the "mainstream". Newbie users and people of all levels do want to use Linux... but sheesh if they ask for help or explain why they like about Windows. The response they often get is comments like above. And yes, I am one of the "IT tie-strangled business majors". I seem to believe that Computers help us run our business and solve business problems. Windows, MacOS and Linux alike.
Step 1: Make them master their VCR's blinking 12:00 first. Before that, they are not ready for Unix.
I don't know if we can say this is the reason for consumer loyalty. If you took the worst user interface ever, one so bad that nobody would ever copy its conventions, and got enough people using it, they would use it forever because it's hard to switch and learn something new. I don't think Apple has a bad interface, but it's clear to me that it was not designed for multitasking. One thing that X and Windows interface designers did right was to put menus on every window. It's disorienting and non-intuitive for the entire interface to change when you click on something else. Once you're used to this, it seems natural (and perhaps makes any other way seem unnatural), but it does seem that multitasking was definitely an afterthought with the Mac OS.
If someone would maintain a piece of program in Windows that looks at the hardware of a PC and say whether the various pieces are supported by Linux or not, it would help a lot with migration, since people who want to have a quick look could be deterred thinking they might not get anywhere because of lack of driver support.
Those are some other API's that do sound, input, and networking. They (with the exception of crystal-space) don't have a 3d visual component (like directx has direct3d), but they don't need one with opengl and mesa already available. They aren't really standard, so if you want a game you are distributing to definitly work, you would have to distribute the libraries with it (like with windows), or just program directly to the native linux API's for sound, input, and networking. The nice thing about those API's is that they are all work with at least windows and linux. What is wrong with them?
I think that the current printer drivers (Ghostscript) don't work any more. I've bought a brand new Epson stylus Color 850. The printer output generated with Windows is perfect, but a print out with Linux GS 5.50 sucked. The colors aren't correct and the speed isn't opimal.
Before Linux is going "Mainstream", the driver problems must be resolved.
IMHO,
M.Aartsen
maartsen@wildcard.demon.nl
We, as a community, have no control over hardware producers willingness to support the OS with either commercial drivers, or open specs to driver developers within the community, other than as customers. The only way that we will arrive at a situation of having Linux supported is by asking, every time we go into a computer store, "Does this work with Linux? Is this app available on Linux? Can you order me this game for Linux?" Once we get the stores to recognise a demand, then we may get proper support and recognition.
A problem I see with the community is our willingness, all too often, to accept that things are the way they are. We do our research before buying hardware, so that we know beforehand if support exists. If we buy a piece of kit that doesn't work, we reprimand ourselves, not the producer. We don't make a fuss.
If you ask me, the way into the mainstream (and it's by no means a given that that's where we want to go) is through financiers pockets, combined with millions of requests to helplines, e-mails to support@supplier.com and bemused queries as to why our local tech store isn't stocking Linux commercial software, or why hardware in the store doesn't have a little tux sticker on the box.
For too long we have suffered in silence. Now it is time to ask for help.
i guess this is just another driver thing. those makeing personal printers make windose drivers (and mac drivers if your lucky) and linux just does it like the rest of unix, postscript. unfortuneatly, postscript is unheardof in commercial software land. if adobe was not greedy about postscript it probably would have become the standard it was supposed to be.
(1) This is expensive. all ive seen are laser printers.
(2) Sco, i dont care what your lawers think, linux is a unix.
I have gotten "Pajama Sam" working successfully with Wine under Linux. I suspect a number of other programs would work as well, I just haven't had the time to test them.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
- New, cheap computers with Linux installed. Setting up X is horrible, and that's just the way it is. Setting up Windows isn't that easy either. So we'll avoid it just like Windows does. The great thing is that Linux computers could be really cheap. We need an eMachine, not a VA Linux.
- Printing needs to be fixed. Printing under Un*x just isn't very good. Ideally, a whole new system could be set up, complete with nice libraries. Maybe CUPS would be a good alternative. I don't see any real salvation for lprd.
- Applications aren't that important. Lots of people never need anything more than the MS Works that comes with their computers -- StarOffice clearly matches that, and hopefully with a little polish the Free alternatives (KOffice, AbiWord, the GNOME efforts, etc.) will be there soon too. Polish is more important than features at this point.
- Mindshare (uck... I feel dirty for using that word). Anyway, people have friends who know Windows, and that provides an important support structure for people. This makes for a chicken and egg problem, but the Internet has already shown us the solution. Linux has a great Internet support structure, but for Internet newbies this can seem a little intimidating. Making something a little more friendly would be helpful.
- Games. Linux doesn't have lots of good games. People like games, parents buy computers with the notion that while the computer might not be for games, the kids would really like to play them. And some people just buy a computer to get games. LokiSoft is really the best short-term model for this. Commercial companies will dominate this for a long time, and that's just fine IMHO.
- A few things need to be hidden. Like all those libraries. Debian's Apt provides a good start for this. People shouldn't need to think about what libraries they have to have installed, it should just happen.
Applications aren't that important. People like to buy a computer that can do something before they get more software. Linux distributions already typically include far, far more functionality than a normal new Windows install. This is something Linux advocates should be pushing. Shrinkwrapped retail boxes aren't where Linux will shine, and it doesn't need to.Linux is definitely worse from a simplicity stand-point and I think the people who consider it a non-techie desktop replacement are getting way ahead of themselves. I use linux on servers and my desktop, but I'm also not going to be scared about using installing the latest Netscape (or compiling it for that matter). The reason why I consider Linux a win over Windows is that, although it may not be as simple, it's much more predictable. I've never had a Linux system where an application magically corrupts itself to the point where you need a fresh reinstall of the operating system.
What I've been eyeing as a potential desktop OS replacement is BeOS. It's got a very slick and polished GUI and, unlike Linux, the user never needs to go near a command prompt if they don't want to; if they do, they'll find a well equipped command prompt with all the usual Unix software (lots of ported OpenSource stuff). They just aren't forced to use it. It's got very solid multitasking and handles a heavy load much better than Windows (it's a tossup between BeOS and Linux on my machine as far as scalability goes) with very well developed multimedia support, too.
The best part, however, is the speed. Installing it took something like 15 minutes, which consisted of telling it which partition to use and most of the time was spent copying files off of the CD. A 5 second reboot later, everything was up and running - no plug and pray, no hardware configuration dialogs. The only config I had to do was providing my IP address to the network driver. Everything else was auto-detected without more than a second's delay.
The bottom line: BeOS is fast, extremely stable and it's got a very easy GUI. My mother could install this and use it without training even though it's also got enough neat technology that I find it interesting as well.
(A few weeks ago, I summarized my experiences installing stuff on my new PC.)
The root issue is why the modern installers are making both a user and root account on installation.
John
John_Chalisque
Most everything else is important, but game software needs to be taken serious to get Linux onto the average Joe desktops.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Consider for a moment that people keep finding it necessary to create new UIs; this is evidence that the elements needed to establish such a standard have not "settled down" yet.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I think that out of the box, linux distros (my experience is with redhat here) should be a little more paranoid.
Distributions like Mandrake are coming a long way,but most linux distro's assume you know something when you're starting this. I'll tend to agree with Samuel L. Jackson on this one- When you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you and umption.
Linux on the desktop.
Personally, I do not see any compelling reason to have Linux conquer the desktop, but that's ok: it's just a personal opinion.
If you want to improve whatever you think needs improving for Linux to be a mainstream thing, than sure, go ahead. By all means. That is, after all, the way things work in this community.
What I don't like, though, is the impression of pressure (and the associated hype) to put Linux on the desktop, now, fast, because if it doesn't get there we're doomed to fail or somesuch thing.
No, it's not that I'm bothered. It's not like as if somebody is actually going to force me to do something I do not want to do.
In all probability it's just an allergic reaction to exage/over-rated luser expectations. Linux is ok, and it will not fail because our Linux systems are not capable to install and maintain them all by themselves. Or because lusers can't deal with the fact that intelligence is a requirement.
Relax, people, those who care will act, but at their own pace, and things will work out. But there's no stringent need, and we are not losing.
No offence intended, dear luser!
Cya,
Slay
---
---
NT is silly in the way that it doesn't work, and it's sick in the way that it does work. In a way.
When you need to repair your car, do you go back to the dealer you bought it from? To one specific garage, three streets down on the left from the supermarket, every time? Do you go there to check your oil level? Add gas? Clean the windows? Top up the anti-freeze?
When you are cooking, do you call the shop you bought the food from, for the recipe? If the cake is falling, do you call the people who made the flour for a fix?
If your house is burning down, do you call the real estate agents or the fire brigade?
The fact is, the ONLY facet of society people call a single source for EVERY single problem is in computing. It's simply not natural for people to do this. People naturally call the people most likely to be able to help, not a sales clerk.
So why not break the habit, and do what WORKS, in computing, as well as everywhere else?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Hah!
Now if only Debian would have a faster release cycle for stable software instead of having us wait over a year past the time that other vendors release code.
I can see it now : in Feb '00 the 2.4 kernel is out. By March '00 major vendors have started to release products which include the 2.4 kernel. By May '00, the releases will have stabilized. Meanwhile, in Jan '00, Debian announces with great fanfare that a code freeze for their release with the 2.2 kernel. And by March '00 (probably) they will have released Potato.
Or am I being too optimistic?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
The biggest reason I support the variety of Linux distributions is that it means Linux can go mainstream and still be elitist. I run what it essentially a home-brew box these days. The last time I had a distribution was in '96, and I didn't even have it set up right then. I've fixed problems by getting new versions of programs and upgrading stuff as I felt the need for it.
I like the fact that RedHat is making it easy to install Linux and easy to get the programs you want. I also like it that Linus and the kernel hackers aren't working on this, and aren't interested in making Linux easier. There's a cutting edge of people doing cool stuff, and a trailing edge of people making the whole system usable, and the former don't take orders from the latter.
This is really important. There is not a single entity which is Linux, so there can be a Mainstream Linux and a Elitist Linux with no trouble. Even if there is the simplest interface to Linux which hides half of the cool features, I don't have to use it. There's nothing wrong with the possible existence of a Linux distribution that doesn't run any special services and is a single-user machine; sure, I'd find it annoyingly mundane, but I'd just not use it.
I'd actually like there to be a non-server-class Linux distribution. I think that would increase the amount that Linux would compete for the desktop, and I think that you'd see more hardware and software support which even the elitists can use.
There are two dhcp clients available for Linux. I've had some problems with dhcpcd, but pump works fine. It's included with RH6.1, and there are Debian packages.
OTOH, it sucks for professionals like me to have to fly in good solutions under the radar of a management that insists on branding and illusions of legal recourse.
Linux is in danger of suffering from its own success. It's so well-designed and scalable that it really does work equally well on the desktop and in the datacenter, and does so without relying on licensing costs to differentiate where it's meant to be used.
Good free software, it seems, can be a mixed blessing. Fortunately, the really important bits (the kernel and surrounding GNU utils) are remaining untainted and showing steady progress. The most popular distributions, however, are increasingly bloated, insecure, and end-user targeted. More than Linux leaving the power-user segment, I fear the departure of the power users from the Linux camp.
If you have to support the person's machine remotely I would choose Linux. Set it up with a nice windows manager and only the programs she will need to run. Also configure it with mgetty so you can dial in if problems arise.
Judging from what you've said it looks like you've never been through DLL Hell.
There may be a lot of things that are easy in Windows but software installation management is definitely not one of them. Jaded Windows users may be impressed by one-click self-extracting installs and Install-Shield uninstalls, but that's only because they've never seen a real package manager like RPM or dpkg in action.
I will concede that software installation in Windows is easy if you can show me in Windows how to:
- List the files that Word97 installed on the system,
- Tell me which programs require ctl3d32.dll or any other particular dll,
- Show me what programs on my system will break if I upgrade to Office2000.
These are all utterly fundamental chores for a system administrator. You cannot argue that Windows software management is easy until the day comes when Windows can do these tasks just like RPM and dpkg can today.Linux is a kernel. Windows has a kernel. A Kernel is that piece of software which sits on top of the hardware and provides services which user apps take advantage of. You cannot run two kernels at once without a hardware emulation program like VMware.
For starters, how about bootable linux cds?
Have you tried to boot a redhat CD? Caldera? These are bootable. Granted, they boot to an installation program. You can make a boot disk which mounts a live CD filesystem. Slackware, among others has this.
the ability to launch a trimmed down Linux kernel as an app running alongside the other MSWin apps.
Dude, Linux is not a application. Do you not understand what an OS is? Let windows lusers wallow in their crapulance. They obviously don't need linux, so spare yourself a little grief.
One architecture (not too complex?) might be a virtual network card for MSWin that redirects to the Linux TCP/IP stack (the way VMWare does).
VMware is available for NT, so folks can boot linux in a window. Of course, this is like building a castle on swamp land ("But the FORTH castle stood...").
Samba's author keeps pointing out all the ways that MS's implementations have bugs... well, how come they just work, and I have to keep squinting at smb.conf?)
Samba on windo~1 is just a goofy idea. SMB is crappy protocol. I've seen *huge* problems with network browsing. Just cut the cord, son. It only hurts for a minute.
But perhaps they/you need to reinspect that notion: I want a platform or platforms that offer me APIs and services.
API's are for programmers. You could offer a *nix API to win32 (that's what cyngus offers), but you're still building applications on wet sand.
other people here are suggesting a "standard GUI".
Bash is pretty standard across not only linux, but *BSD. As for X, that's just a damned silly notion. :-)
WYSIWYG word processor that can read and create .DOC mail attachments,
StarOffice. Have a blast.
a mail client that works with MS Exchange Server,
Now here is pay dirt. The *only* reason I can't 86 NT at work is because of that bastard Outlook and Exchange. I need access to the stoopid public folders. The day a stable compatible (but not a CLONE! Sweet christ I hate Outlook), is the day I cut the cord. Con much gusto!
All and all, it appears that you have all the things you wanted, MattMann. For additional "trial" Linux distros, try the Linux Router Project. Linux on one floppy!
Good luck with the crusade. You'll need it.
The only (somewhat) fair to compare linux and win32 is to have the same machine configurations side by side and see how the linux software (kernel and apps) runs compared to win32 (kernel and apps). Running linux with win32 is pointless since the win32 kernel is still running. Now, if you just wanted to show off bash or X, I can see how a linux window would be useful. The performance and stability will blow chunks.
:-)
So much for dead threads.
I apologize if I missed your point. Like I said,
I don't waste much engery converting window users any more. While I think that some efforts to make X more friendly, like KDE, are great, most folks really don't care. Their tasks are not dependent on stability, or even usability. This is just a sad sad fact. Most people only need computers for a very small set of tasks. It's the learning curve they fear. Linux will *always* have a learning curve. If it didn't, most geeks would hate it.
What provider do you have? @home? I've been running linux w/@home's cable modems for over a year now....DHCP has never been a problem....
Palin...
Took them a wile to set up my windows box also...they have this big ass check list they have to run down. They also try to tweek some other things.
I have to return some videotapes...
Actually there is plenty wrong with the Apple interface. Take a look at this article by Gentner and Nielsen called The Anti-Mac Interface. We just seem to be stuck in the WIMP paradigm...
The real cool thing about Linux is that everyone can experiment with the UI and perhaps discover something much better.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Have you tried emailing the author? His/her name is probably in the README file.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I'm a bob at a company doing outsourced technical support for Philips, Memorex, Dysan, Gravis, Kensington, Fujitsu-Siemens and others worldwide. I happen to be one of the few there who knows something about Linux. And though officially Linux is not supported by any of the above-mentioned companies, many agents will come to me when a customer has a Linux question - because they'd like to help the customer, and they know I might have the answer to the question. One thing I really hate to do, and many with me, is to say "Sorry sir, that's not supported" while I do know the answer, or know the answer isn't far. Yeah, technically it may be wrong to unofficially support Linux in the margin. But all those companies pay per call. The customer has called anyway, so why not HELP them? That's what helpdesks are for, right?
:)
Actually, I hear so many people pure on tech support, but I actually kind of like it. I do 8 projects in 3 languages (Dutch, English and German), and sometimes I even get to practice my (rather limited) French skills when the French agents happen to be out. I like the work, I like helping people, I like the co-workers, I like the variation from call to call. That's the advantage of working at a large world-wide outsource-center as opposed to a small local callcenter. I guess
Or, I could ofcourse be crazy. Definitely a viable theory...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
sigh.
information is free.
the only question is:
Scott Draves
I have to disagree with you about spreadsheets.
First let me say that I'm fond of awk, perl, and such for the right purposes. As are (custom-written) C/C++ programs.
Spreadsheets are very good at turning around estimation that requires playing with the data and the algorithm (but not too too much of either.) A reasonable number of engineering estimation tasks and accounting tasks fall into these categories.
For example, I'd sum a few numbers with awk (or more likely bc -l), but a lot of my financial planning is done on a spreadsheet. Back five years ago when I was doing serious number crunching, I used C/C++ and hand-coded the inner loop in i860 assembler (letting me throw 15 petaflops or so on neural network training calculations.) The right tool for the right job.
Using a spreadsheet doesn't make one an idiot. Instead, not having one on Linux keeps me from spending time on Linux, and investing in Linux. I end up having to spend more time in front of my Windows NT desktop and less in front of my Linux one, and that means when I do something new that might be useful to a community, it's more likely to be a Windows one than a Linux one.
That makes me sad -- not stupid.
--Joe
Too much is not enough.I'm a nature photographer.
You're forgetting that with the nature of the community, most projects start to scratch someone's itch. If I don't like one of the ICQ clients (or mail clients, or whatever) available, I can write my own.
Actually, I think there's an interesting point here. Yes, you can write your own, but, if there are 20 open-source ICQs out there, you could also modify an existing one as well, actually producing something that was on the whole better.
That doesn't happen in part because a lot of open-source software gets written again from scratch. There are a number of reasons for this, ego, not wanting to bother reading someone elses code, and perhaps the most often, just an honest desire to learn how "a program like that might work." There's nothing wrong with any of these reasons.
I am not saying that variety is bad. What I am saying is that it is sometimes coming in part at the cost of more fully-developed applicatons, fully-tested, fully-documented applications. I'd rather have 7 good "foo" applications to choose from -- rather than 20 half-baked ones.
--Joe
Too much is not enough.
I'm a nature photographer.
You are correct, I misspoke (and realized it after I posted.) 15 peta-floating-point instructions, NOT 15-peta-floats/second. Enormous difference, mea maxima culpa. --Joe
I'm a nature photographer.
I agree 100%. I first used Linux back in 1995, and every so often I go back and forth between Windows and Linux. Unfortunately my job requires me to program on Windows machines, so that is where I spend most of my time on. Last night, I wanted to see where Linux is at, so I went and installed Mandrake 6.1. Linux has improved a lot in the last few years, however, I don't want KDE, Gnome, and Enlightenment installed. I spent more time fiddling with my desktop, than I did with the applications. The first thing I said, was Linux needs a standard GUI. Windows boots up into that greenish-blueish screen, and people don't like to deal with new things when they're not familar with it. Give me a standard screen, and when I get comfortable again, let me customize it.
Not to defend Windows, but these guys were morons then. Assuming your network card is already installed, it takes 1 minute + reboot to install a DHCP connection on Windows.
Well, since I _program_ on a Windows machine, it is a technical job. However, I don't have a problem developing software for Windows. Right now, that's where the market is.
GUI's simply make sense. They make people a lot more productive. It's faster to click something, then to type an entire command line with arguments.
Hmmm..
gcc program.c -o program
or
F7 or Press the compile button with your mouse
Sure you can alias the "gcc" command line to something short, but it's still a lot faster with a GUI.
Don't knock what you don't understand.
Smartass, I develop software for a living. I've been using makefiles since I started developing software.
My point was that hitting a function key like F7 in Developer Studio is far easier/quicker than typing on the command line.
You don't have function keys bound so specifically in real programs. You'll mess up your clean shell.
I just noticed this. Ever even use Developer Studio?
They don't seem to matter binding F7 with compile, and even F5 with compile+run. Don't give me this crap about, "Well that's Microsoft", because this is one product by them, that works very well.
I worked at a company where all our development was on Linux. You know what? I still enjoy developing in DevStudio more.
Whats your definition of a real program. To me, it is a piece of software that gets the job done.
If you want to bind function keys in your shell, do it. That doesn't make it a fake program.
> My mother is an architect who spends 12 hours a day building houses in California for folks of all income ranges, from the extremely rich to housing for folks
/usr /var /tmp /lib /bin /sbin /home and /etc. If I listed these off to an experienced computer user without Unix knowledge, I doubt that they could guess with any accuracy what files, command and libraries would go where and why, even though there are excellent reasons for distributing files and directories as they have been.
>on welfare. Are you suggesting that she should drop her job (losing a ton of money in the process) because you and I as computer programmers are too
>damned lazy to do our job?
>I'm constantly amazed at the attitude of the software development industry: "I'm too lazy to make it easy to use, so I'm demanding that
>the rest of the world learn something that I only spent a few years of high school and college learning."
No, I don't think he was suggesting that your mother should become a full time computer expert. I also do not think he was suggesting that all people should become as proficient with computers as I am, as he is , or as you are.
The fundamental problem is that computers are very complicated systems. The exact level of complication (and usability, for that matter) depends on who the system is designed an implemented. Many of the people contributing to this thread seem to think that making Linux as "Windows like" as possible is the proper way of shielding users without sufficient knowledge of the details from the complication and the implementation. Unfortunately Windows, both NT and Win9x, have done what seem to be a poor job of system implementation, resulting in system instability, repeated reboots, BSODs, etc. Microsoft has also done such a good job of shielding users from the complication of the system that even experienced sysadmins have difficulty finding the appropriate configuration information.
On Linux systems, there is a general trend in the other direction - not only are users not shielded from anything, it is put right out in front of them in a way Windows systems never do. Many contributors to this thread have argued this side - that we should make systems as configurable as possible, regardless of the complication presented to the users. In addition, users frequently have to deal with Unix conventions that seem natural once you know them, but are incredibly cryptic and arcane if you don't. For example, the top level directory names include
Linux makes all these thinsg visible and accesible to the users, which requires more knowledge on their part. Windows hides most of this stuff, making the system less stable, less administrable and less configurable. Its not lazy programmers, its programmers who ask more of a user, in order to give them more options in the long run.
If it were up to me to decide the way the software world worked, I would throw away the entire Unix directory structure and the entire command structure. Essentially all of "userland" would be re-organized and redesigned as an integrated system. Many directories and commands and software systems that work with them exist in their current form because of quirks in obscure systems lost in the mists of time. The Kernel could remained unchanged - the APIs could stay the same, but the user programs would be rearranged. If we could decide that we don't care to be 100% compatible with old systems, we could design a system taht would be much easier to understand and work with, and one that would be easier to wrap layers around to hide the complicated details from newbies without frustrating experts. Most of the details of how a modern Unix works could even be retained with very little modification - the way shared libraries work, the way daemons work, the user ID and accounting systems, and so on. It just seems to me that the way systems are organized right now makes it exceedingly difficult for people to learn some simple tasks that they need to do everyday work. Its not that programmers are "too damned lazy to do their job" its that the organization of current Unix systems make their job very very difficult to do without dumbing down systems to an unacceptable level.
Underneath the gloss, Windows is an extremely difficult OS to use.
/usr/X11R6 folder (don't ask), I was able to download the latest XFree86 and install it, all from the command line.
On Linux, I have never (okay, never after I stopped using rpm) had an install of one piece of software break another piece of software. I have never had a shared library conflict (again, never after I stopped using rpm). I have never had to troubleshoot my init scripts. I have multiple versions of programs and shared libraries coexisting happily. I have *never* had to reinstall the OS. If I did reinstall Linux, getting my apps back would *not* require reinstalling them. If I want to perform an action that requires root access, I don't have to log all the way out of X and log back in - I just type 'su' or click on the KDE Root File Manager desktop icon, and type in my password. And I don't need a GUI to administer Linux - when I broke X by, um, accidentally deleting the
I could go on and on, but the point is this - Linux is well on its way to being just as easy to use on the surface as Windows is, and Windows - well, Windows is never going to be as easy to maintain as Linux is right now.
It would be good to have a simple language independent method of using components in Linux. There are others component architectures, like CORBA (too complex & orb's oftin aren't compatible), JavaBeans (too restrictive of a license, and considering Sun's recent shenanigans with setting up a standard, I don't think it's a good bet Java will be arond for a long time). There is a version of COM under development for Linux called GCOM( www.armored.net/gcom/summary, it's basicly COM with all of the Microsoft-ism's stripped out. The site is worth checking out. I just found out about it--I haven't had a chance to try anything with GCOM, but I really like the idea and I think it would be a great addition to Linux.
"Eye halve a spelling chequer, It came with my pea sea, It plainly marques four my revue, Miss steaks eye kin knot sea"
You can say that again. It would be nice if they could just be stable! Redhat 6.1 is unusable under Gnome. It crashes more often and in more ways than windows ever did. I've not tried KDE yet, perhaps that's more mature.
geesh
i can't believe people are still calling Gnome and KDE "window managers"
man...
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
Actually I've been using Solaris and HP-UX at work over the last two and a half years. (Would these also require a [censored] prefix? ;-)
My problems with Solaris and HP-UX are more with how they are administered at my place of work than with the OSs themselves. At this place, system configurations are vastly different across platforms. For instance, the Suns in one lab will have a certain tool set, while those in another lab will have different tools. Sure, I can ftp files around from one machine and toolset to another, but at least with Linux I can have everything I need right here.
As regards the X86 compatible Unices, I've run Red Hat from v4.1, a few versions of SuSE, a couple of versions of FreeBSD, Slackware, Debian, TurboLinux, and Solaris 2.6. Each has its strengths.
Finally, as regards RMS, the FSF, et al, I don't know if it is proper to call it GNU/Linux or Linux. I do know this. I'm using software that I didn't have to write and didn't have to buy. The software is good and reliable, and alot of it is GNU software. Fwiw, I never forget its source.
Graham
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
I couldn't care less about the average user. I care about using my computer.
Word processing. If I want to perform word processing, guess what. There's vi and emacs. They process words just fine. I don't give a damn about some fancy piece of bloatware like Microsoft Word that turns my plain text words into some binary gludge that will be unreadable two releases from now. Ugh.
Spreadsheets. Ah, the joys of awk. In much less time than it takes to import a plain text file into Microsoft Excel, assuming the 65,536 line limit isn't blown and Windows hasn't crashed, I can have a long column of numbers summed. Pick a column, any column. I pick it with awk, and pipe it into an awk program that totals a set of inputs. Voila, my answer appears.
Desktop friendly. Geez, I'm a mathematician, and I get paid to analyze megabytes of data. GNU/Linux is my desktop os of choice. What can't I do with all of the GNU tools available to me? If the basic tools won't do everything, there's awk. And if that's not enough, there's always C. I still have so much to learn.
I started using GNU/Linux two and a half years ago in response to the unreliability and instability of Windows 95. Now I understand the extreme limitations of the Windows platform, and the superior capabilities of the Unix world.
GNU/Linux is a tribute to the best and brightest in the world from the best and brightest in the world. If the average user wants GNU/Linux, fine. Let him learn how to use his computer.
Graham
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
that's not what linux is about. It's about choice at the expense of being easy to use. There will never be one GUI, there will never be one distro...but at least nobody wants to fork the kernel so that everything runs no matter what distro. That's what linux is about. That's where its power lies but it also means it's a weakness for attracting new users.
---
Long reboot? I've always had exactly the opposite experience. Currently, I boot a fully-loaded Linux with graphics in about 30 seconds, and it takes maybe 2-3 minutes for Windows 95. Older Linuxes and hardware setups always showed similar results. The fast boot is one thing I always LIKED about Linux.
While KDE and Gnome and the likes are not perfect, they definitely give the mainstream user a comfortable, usable GUI.
Installation procedures have been improving a lot too, just look at Caldera or Corel. Besides, there are tons of books such as Easy Linux that start with explaining drag-and-drop, so even the new computer users can probably learn Linux without a lot of obstacles.
What Linux continues to need though, is all the latest applications and drivers. The diversity of reasons not to use Linux I hear has shrinked to "I cannot run FavProg97" or "my DVD/webcam/whatever isn't supported".
There are many viable alternatives and workarounds for this problem, but to go mainstream Linux should no longer require workarounds. Native support, mainstream.
My mother thinks the computer at work is running WordPerfect. Since the has no interest in the OS and mostly types papers and letters on the computer, she cares about WordPerfect. I set up a Linux machine at home with KDE and WordPerfect and she continued exclaiming: "yes I run this at work too!", even when I showed some screensavers.
Linux was ready for my mother because it supported our hardware and ran the programs she wants to use in a solid, clean interface (KDE). Linux will be ready for mainstream use as soon as it supports most or all hardware and programs.
I get all my Linux apps over the Net free. Why would I want to go to CompUSA and buy StarOffice when I can download it for free in a minute or so. New users need to be educated on how to use Linux and OpenSource not make Linux more Windows like. Microsofts formula is a blueprint for disaster not success.
-- Ted tsikora@powerusersbbs.com
I'm always being asked to "set up a computer for my nana". I'd prefer it to be Linux, and I suspect it wouldn't be all that hard.
However, I'm woefully ignorant of what's working well on Linux: how's Applix, Frame, Star Office and the like? What's a good image converter? Who has a bozotalk-to-ms-word filer so I can recover the user's old files?
And what am I missing? What else do we have that's usable right now, so I really can set up a Linux box for nana?
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
And the correct question to ask is, why people who only need to read E-mails and surf the web need to pay $100 every now and then for each of their computers just to run an operating system which cost nothing to make a copy for running on their computers?
How else do you expect development to get paid for? Should companies that develop software charge the first customer the entire development cost, or should they amortize it over many consumers? Because that's what it is when commercial software companies charge a price for their software.
As for not wanting you to copy it, that's because they would naturally get less sales, and would hence have to charge more per copy they do sell in order to make a profit.
A lot of free software zealots don't seem to get this. I know what you're going to say, you're going to say "a lot of people that copy it wouldn't have bought it in the first place". Maybe true, but many of them would have. I would have bought an official copy of Red Hat Linux if that was the only way I could get Linux. Of course it isn't, so I have several free Linux CD's (RH 6.0, Mandrake 6.0, Redhat 4.0, and really old Slackware and Debian's I don't even remember the numbers of)
I hate Windows too, but the reason I use Linux is not for political reasons, it's for technical reasons. I think free software is great, mind you. I use lots of free software, and I've made numerous contributions to various free software projects. I've even got more than one project of my own that I've been planning on releasing under an open license (probably GPL or Artistic), once they get into a usable state.
But the belief that all software should be "free" is as absurd as saying "all beverages should be Cola". I believe that if someone does some work, they should be entitled to whatever compensation they desire if someone else desires to benefit from that work. The fact that it doesn't cost the developer any more to make an additional copy is inconsequential. If you want to use that software, the developer of that software is entitled to get whatever price they ask. If you aren't willing to pay, you don't get to use the software. (There are additional complications when you get into monopolies, because they you aren't really asking to use the product, your essentially being forced to use it.)
Think of it this way: suppose you were going to hire someone to shovel your driveway while you're away at work. Suppose one guy told you he would use a teaspoon, and it'll take him all day, in sub-zero temperatures, to clean the driveway. Another guy says he'll use his snow plow, and it'll take him 3 minutes. Both will get the job done while you're at work, and the quality of the work will be identical. What price would you be willing to pay each guy?
Should the price depend on how hard it was to do the job? No, of course not. The price should be based how useful the job is to you, ie: the utility. Both guys are giving you the same end result, so you should be willing to pay each the same amount. The fact that it's very easy for the second guy to clear your driveway doesn't mean he should be paid less.
In the same way, why should software developers not get paid for another copy of their software? Sure, it costs them very little to make one more copy, or even nothing if your make the copy yourself, but you're benefitting from their work. If they want to give that work away for free, that's fine, but you don't have the right to demand that they allow you to make copies, just as you have no right to "borrow" the guy's snow plow while he's on his lunch break to clear your own driveway.
Besides, end users will probably still end up paying $60-$100 even if they were using Linux. The difference is, with Linux the distributor gets all of the money, and the developers get none. It's so ironic that people point out Red Hat as an "Open Source success story" when: 1. Red Hat is losing money. (yes, I know their stock is doing well, but so is Yahoo's) 2. Red Hat doesn't develop the vast majority of the software in their distribution.
Yes, people "in the know" will go and either download Linux, or buy it from cheapbytes, or burn their own copy of a friend's CD, but for "end users", Linux will seem to have basically the same price as Windows. The whole supposed "freedom" issue is virtually irrelevant for end-users. They have no use for source code. They already make copies of Windows, despite what the law says.
The reason Linux would be good for end users is for technical reasons, not political ones. Personally, I think an OS is a lot more "user friendly" if it doesn't blue-screen, destroying the document the user was working on. Performance and reliability are both things that end-users can benefit from, and they are both areas where Linux is superior to Windows. Linux is also quickly becoming much better in terms of having a usable GUI environment. In many ways, GNOME is better than the Win9X/NT GUI (though it's still got a few rough edges to clean up).
I do, actually, think that software should come with source code. But again, for technical, not political reasons. There are many technical reasons why it's good to have source. But having the source available doesn't imply that people should be allowed to make copies for others. Also, forcing companies to release source isn't the answer. Included source is a feature. Mandating that all software should include source is like mandating that all software should include a pretty splash screen. Some users might like it, but it's useless for the vast majority. I'm one of those people who would like source, and I bet you would too. But most users don't care.
I am in basically the same situation as you, and suggest that you try BeOS. Yes I know that there is very limited hardware and software, but otherwise it is as easy/easier than windows.
what happens to the hole when the cheese is gone? -Brecht
For the dummies or impatient: To translate: 1. Go to shell 2. type this command: tr a-mn-zA-MN-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M pick through the secret message to reveal the answer.
-- If you met me, you probably wouldn't remember me. I'm pretty hard to remember.
Well, Windows won't let you delete c:\windows... but we knew what you meant :^)
Programmers need to be more careful what they release, and let let their s/w kill people's systems.
Err, uh, release? A year ago gnome was beta and E still is... what's your point?
You need a TT font server like xfstt!
Many posts here are bashing the concept of a UI standard or even catering to the average user.
Make newbies welcome, or face the fact they won't be coming back.
You seem to be missing the point that many of us don't care if linux takes over the desktop or the world or whatever. We don't care if Joe Blow has to live with a really crappy OS because he has no interest in learning a better crappy OS.
We want a POSIX system that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and we want the source code. We want to build a foundation for Freedom that no one can ever take away from us.
If someone wants to paste a "user friendly" environment over it then go right ahead... just don't expect us to give a shit
"Maybe something like a self-configuring intelligent menu could be useful to all of us. "
You just identified the sort of thing that I expected from Windows 9x, and the main reason I
was disappointed to see the UI as "nothing new".
To be new, it must do more than look different and rearrange the same concepts; that is merely "postmodern", not new.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I set up a friend's MediaOne cable modem recently. I made the firewall a RedHat 6.1 machine, and pumpd works fine. If you're using Redhat, try it by hand. pump -i eth0 and watch your syslog. I use pump when I freelance at a couple of companies that use dhcp.
Linux users should just be happy with what they have. All I hear is how Windows sucks but then I see where some linux supporters want to make it more like Windows. The command line will never be mainstream and I really don't see any software store stocking linux applications. It's not gonna happen. Windows 95 had USB support well before any stores began selling USB products. Now several years later linux still doesn't truly support USB. Now a geek might be able to get his or her box to support USB, but the average user would not. Quit kidding yourselves. Silly rabbit, linux is for geeks.
This is what you get from using linux. I wouldn't be shocked to learn that linux users have cranks on the front of their cars. They seem to like doing things the hard way. Why anoyone would use pico or vi instead of VC++ 6.0 is beyond me. These guys think that if they install something on linux that they are freaking programmers. Thats all that linux is about. You linux freaks keep on pretending that your geniuses because you can use a command line. Give me a break. I guess if you have NO social life, girlfriend or athletic ability, then you may have no other option other than patting yourself on the back everytime you compile someone else code. Big fucking deal. It's lame. Linux is lame. And all of you are lame. Life is to short to do everything the hard way.
P.S. There is life outside of your home. Come join it.
First, make sure your network card is detected. You can use modprobe, but I have PCI NE2000 support compiled right into my kernel, and in my opinion, that's the way to go.
In
# Connecting RoadRunner Services (replace ethX with your ethernet device.)
dhcpcd ethX
RoadRunner no longer requires a Login, so it's very easy to get it working in Linux. Once you add the dhcpcd line, you should be all set.
Also note, this is for Time Warner RoadRunner. Your cable service may require a login, in which case you would have to use the OS that the login program was written for, or get the Linux equivilant if it exists. I know several RoadRunner login programs were written for Linux before Time Warner eliminated the login, so you may have some luck.
(NOTE: I'm not responsible if you screw up your system, people. This is just how I got my connection working, and working quite well I may add.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Thinking more about CD-R backup, it seems it wouldn't be hard to adapt KDat to burn CD-R disks by frontending existing burning tools. I figure the resulting tool would work as follows:
The lad hasn't said anything new, but it's stuff that needs to be said again and agin until we get it right.
I'd like to take the complaint over font handling a step further. I agree that TrueType support should be part of the standard fontserver. Mandrake already does this, replacing xfs with xfstt, and unless there are license conflicts, other distros should follow suit.
But further hobbling things is the horror of installing and managing fonts under Linux, and under Unix in general.
More fonts, Postscript and TrueType alike, with their accompanying config file additions, should be packaged as relocatable noarch RPMs.
There should also be simple command-line tools and GNOME and KDE frontends for installing and inspecting not just these font RPMs, but also for one-step, jargonless, click-and-drool installation of arbitray Windows and (binhexed) Macintosh fonts and font bundles. Such tools should transparently perform all of the steps necessary to install such fonts under *nix, perhaps even creating the aforementioned font RPMs as an interim stage. Added bonus points if the same fonts were automatically made available to TeX, not because I think TeX is going to supplant word processors, but because it should be pushed hard as a Free Software answer to the Crystal Reports layout engine.
Well, I guess it is informative in a way. I mean, I certainly didn't know that about Geri Halliwell's hair.
There are several such tools available under Windows. I usually use Partition Magic to non-destructively resize partitions prior to setting up a dual-boot system.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Damn straight. I'm with you because until they show repeatedly that they can COMPETE they get no $$ from me. Stopping competition by paying customers to use MSFT products ( IE, WinCE, etc ), licensing a product with no intention of following the license agreement ( Java, Spyglass, etc ), and forcing applications on OEMs ( IE, MediaPlayer, etc ) is just plain bad for users, developers, and business customers and partners. I wouldn't do the castration bit but I've quit a couple of jobs because it would mean developing for a version of MSFT Windows. Locutus
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Dear Dumbass@windows.com,
Start a business with your little brain and if you are lucky enough to get a really good idea then sell that idea to your customers. Microsoft will come on down to your neck of the woods and pay you a bag of peanuts for your idea. If you don't think that is enough then refuse the peanuts. Microsoft will then go out to all your customers and pay them to dump your product and use theirs. Theirs will ship any month now.
If Dumbass isn't smart enough to attract the attention of Microsoft then Dumbass isn't likely to get a penny from them. If you ever get a set-top-box from AT&T which has WinCE on it then you have experienced Microsoft paying a customer ( AT&T ) to use its products.
Why I waste my time explaining simple concepts to Dumbass's I will never know. Maybe I hope they polish off the little pointed head some day and stop proclaiming servitude to Bill G. and his minions.....
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
One problem is the basic design of the printing model -- you basically just dump postscript files to a spooler, or possibly dump them to a post script filter, then to a spooler. The problem is that the finer features like choosing paper trays and possibly stapling documents have no place in this primitive printing model. CUPS does a lot to address this, but the applications are usually developed for the lowest common denominator.
Another problem ( partly related ) is font management. So, you've installed fonts into the X server. Well, that's nice, but using them from your applications is still a very nontrivial task. The reason for this is that most applications that need to print install their own minituare font system which properly handles display *and* printing of fonts. because the bitmapped fonts that show up when you use xlsfonts are not printable. Under linux , the true type fonts aren't printable either unless you have one of the newer post script printers.
What linux distributions need to do is
(a) move towards a better printing system,
(b) find a way to render true type fonts to a printer, maybe code some kind of printing layer
(c) possibly supply some kind of API much like the one Star Office uses to handle the problems of WYSIWYG printing.
(d) Ship some decent fonts. It looks like Corel is making some steps anyway ( they're shipping 200 bitstream fonts )
is the superior intelligence that is required to set it up, gaining esoteric knowledge on the way that puts one in the exclusive club and 'leet class of snobs that can look down our noses at the 'stoopid windoze lusers' that had to pay for it, haha! That is, you meet someone with the badge of honor of having installed Linux and you know this person is someone of depth you can trust, and not another self styled "expurt" poser who just popped in a CD and hit return a bunch of times and tries to claim they actually accomplished something. But that's democritization I guess.
Raw unix isn't for everyone, it's user friendly but picky about it's friends, etc etc.
But seriously, what they'll be talking about after all these IPO's is market penetrataion which means custom tailoring the system to the markets existing level of expertise or a tolerable learning curve to expand the user base. It'll probably be up to the developers paid by RHAT and VA to do all the boring 'user friendly' extensions necessary to make Linux accessible to the average person in the mall; a lot of the developers who 'do it for fun' and share their code get their kicks in other ways, usually pushing the technology in front of them and probably couldn't care less about coding in proactive help and dancing paper clips - it's hard enough just to get release notes typed up! Of course some developers may get a charge just out of eroding the mighty snake god's empire enough to help with the friendifying extensions sometimes requires cunning trickery.
Maybe if Video card mfgrs distribute a linux CD already configured for their card. Or rhat sponsors a hardware testing/certification program so vendors can put a "Linux OK!" sticker on their box and an easy to find rpm just has to be loaded to use it.
Boojum
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
strike "extensions sometimes requires cunning trickery" and sub "extensions."
Missing paragraph - Windows isn't always a dream itself, they've got their share of tech support calls and upgrades that require an expert and cunning trickery to get runnings.
One of my hosed boxes at work has a win95 display properties windows that is 50 screens wide - sure takes a long time to get to the "OK" button, heee.
Boojum
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Greyfox,
I actually like your idea of using X protocol to drive printers from inside a graphical Linux shell.
The reason why I'm still pushing for a standard interface for Linux is simple: it makes it much easier for printer manufacturers to write actual printer drivers.
Hey, at least being on the inside of printer driver development, at least you can eventually get Linux to support UPDF when that standard is finalized. It'll sure save printer manufacturers a lot of headaches writing Linux printer drivers, that's to be sure.
With the explosive proliferation of high-quality inkjet color printers from Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Epson, and Lexmark, the impetus is there to correct one of Linux's major shortcomings.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
What Linux really needs right now is a standard Application Programming Interface (API) for EVERYTHING.
Imagining everyone agreeing to a single standard for both text mode and graphical interface mode. That way, we can optimize the operating system for MUCH improved ease of installation and use, not to mention better hardware support and much improved printing capabilities.
Because Microsoft uses the WIN32 API (which has been improved a lot of the years), it can do a very good job of optimizing the operating system to support system hardware, and MS was able to develop a very good printing system (which works with just about every printer out there). I mean, look at the output from the 1000 dpi-plus color inkjet printers--most of the output is generated by Windows-based computers, unless it's one of the newer models with USB connections, then you can use a newer-generation Macintosh to generate the stunning output. Sadly, that type of output is quite yet available to Linux users.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Ok,
Linux is an operating system for technically skilled users, who believes in openess and that information should in general be free. Linux was created for the computer literate and was not intended for the "average user". But as a consequence of the growing popularity of the Open Source movement and Linux, it has come to a head that for the movement to continue, some concessions need to be made for the "average user". This include GUIs, consumer software, drivers for consumer hardware, and simpler installation.
I contend that these things will be implemented as a matter of course. As linux becomes more popular and more commercialized the GUIs and simplisticty will follow suit. The GNOME and KDE environments are examples of projects to make Linux more "user friendly". GNOME and KDE are trying to replicate the ideas of a common gui environment that made other OSs so popular.
But I also contend that Linux users need to do more than go Mainstream. The reason that "power users" stick with command line interfaces is that the keyboard is far more expressive than the mouse in most cases. While implementing the points in the article will slowly bring in new users, and also increase the productivity of the "power user" slightly, for Linux to truly be a success, Linux developers need to go beyond mainstream. Linux needs the so called "killer app". This so called "killer app" does not even have to be an application. It can be a new form of UI. Something that will bring together the GUIs of the "average user" and the CLIs of the "power user". Lets face it folks, the current notion of windows and widgets is not the answer.
The main point is that Linux has to stop playing catch up ASAP and start innovating. Quit playing games and bickering with a certain OS vendor. Hurry up and finish porting all that software that you think you need, and start developing software that is not a rehash of an old idea, and that might truly revolutionize the industry.
Man
We don't need more applications... We need better applications. Instead of saying, "I want to write my own web browser," why not contribute to Mozilla instead? Instead of writing "Yet Another MP3 Player," contribute code to one of the more established ones.
You're missing the point on how Open Source software development produces better software. If you think in terms of evolution or "software Darwinism", then the variety of 30 competing projects is a good thing. Instant Messaging on Linux is still a new niche where a lot of experimentation is going on. Eventually, things will settle down and a few successful clients will emerge. If projects like Jabber are any indication, then the end result is going to be software that is better than commercial alternatives...a common theme with OS software.
You do highlight an important challenge: developing reputation managers for Open Source. Something like Epinions.com, but geared to our community. Something to help you seperate the wheat from the chaff.
When using freshmeat, I usually have to scan several entries. By looking at their various summaries, Web pages, and frequently by trying out a few packages, I filter out the projects that don't seem to be very well supported. This usually works, but it is time consuming, and doesn't take advantage of the fact that someone else with similar interests as mine probably just did the same thing a week ago. Collaborative Filtering, which is just a form of reputation management, would come in real handy. In fact, I'd be suprised if FreshMeat wasn't already working on this.
I don't think there needs to be a standard user interface per se, but there is a need for standards on user interface behavior.
I agree. The Web blew the then current notion of consistent UI out of the water. Of course, having some level of consistency is important, even with Web sites. But the fact that now Apple, once the torch bearer of consistent UI standards, is distributing the non-standard QuickTime UI, makes it pretty clear that some variability is acceptable.
It's great that there are 30 ICQ clones, this way everyone can choose which one to use. In Windows there is just one ICQ client. Freedom of choice is why I use linux, I can pick everything I want.
Er, no you can't; you can only pick what is there and that's the whole point. You can't pick a video player to play the latest Sorenson-encoded QuickTime movie trailer, and you can't pick a finance package to do your tax return. There might be though if those with the talent and free time to code stuff didn't waste their time re-inventing the wheel. I mean, 30 versions of the same program, that's just plain silly.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think you've been tricked
That's a nice way of putting it.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Consider, what does Linux do for the average user that Windows does not?
I think I can answer that with a degree of authority as I'm one of those people who uses linux and Windows about 50/50 at home. The answer is stability.
I run Windows 98SE and when I finally got it installed with a few apps(after a dozen abortive attempts) I thought: wow, how slick.
But by the time I'd installed a few more applications and, more to the point, all the recommended updates from windowsupdate.com, the system had become so flaky and unstable that it was regularly sending my blood pressure through the roof.
For example, one of the most recent recommended updates for IE5 made the special IE5 icon disappear completely from the desktop (there's no way to make it come back except by reinstalling... and that means re-downloading half of the updates again).
For another example, ACPI support just plain doesn't work; having reinstalled from scratch with plain old APM I find that doesn't work either; the machine frequently goes to sleep and will not wake up unless I hit the reset button despite my having standby mode completely disabled!
For another, the system frequently hangs partway through the shutdown sequence, with one of those kernel32.dll errors. You click on OK and it comes back again straight away. And you can't get the task menu up with Ctrl-Alt-Del as long as it's there, which is to say: ad infinitum. So again the only recourse is to hit the reset button.
Oh, and often enough rundll hangs on shutdown instead.
Don't imagine this is anything like a substantial summary. It's only the tip of the iceberg.
The fact is, IME Win98SE is a mess. Period. It may have the gloss when it's working, but the frequency with which it stops working completely destroys the experience for me. Often enough as a result I just switch over to Linux for several days at a time because I'm so damn disillusioned with using Windows.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Get thee behind me Satan!
Seriously, you shouldn't write me off as an anti-Microsoft bigot. I've bought two versions of Windows in the last two years even though I already run Linux. When Microsoft comes out with a new OS I'm ready to part with the GBP70.00 to GBP140.00 it costs here, even though they've bitten me in the past. So to imply unreasoning bias is a bit uncalled for.
The thing is, every time I go through this I end up bitterly disappointed. My experiences with Win98SE have been appalling and despite hours downloading patches from Windowsupdate.com things are getting no better. The most expensive failures I've encountered on Win95 and Win98SE have been those which corrupt the registry basly enough to require a reformat and reinstallation of the OS and all applications and patches. This takes days of my time, and happens so frequently that it has cost me thousands of pounds in lost time this year alone.
Now, about the other matter.
With regard to your assertion that a registry would work better if written by someone else, try to understand this simple concept: a centralised registry is unworkable in the real world. It is therefore a bad idea, period.
It creates a single point of failure for the whole system. Remember a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If you have an entity upon which the whole system depends, and which is written to by every program on the system (and thus vulnerable to bugs and other mishaps ocurring in every program in the system), then that entity will inevitably get corrupted and the system will be unrecoverable. As with windows, you might get it to work with some manual fixes but you probably won't be able to find all the damage and the system will never be quite right again.
A registry might look cool from a theoretical architectural point of view. But this type of model hardly ever takes into account the fact that software contains bugs and that hardware sometimes fails. It would work if these things never happened. But they do, all the time, and until we see infallible hardware and guaranteed bug-free code a centralised registry will always be a liability.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
good GPL drivers from EVERYONE, and a system for them (this is mostly the fault of MS, and patents, causing drivers/specs to be proprietary in the 80s and on)
;)
office suite based on GTK, using gecko
truetype would rock, but is not necessary for world domination (or is it? someone enlighten me then
it has mostly eveything else.
-- d'arcy poirot
Right on. It's importatnt to note that Microsoft has "Human Interface Guidelines" too, althought they originated at IBM in the 1980s.
On the other hand, there was a thread on the Gnome developers mailing list where they pretty much dissed the idea of having any UI standards for Gnome apps, even for little things like the placement of the Help menu. Perhaps it's too early or things are in flux, but on the surface this seems like a real bad idea.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
VisualBasic (and friends) has been hugely influential in the move to purge Mac and Unix users from the desktop in major corporations.
However, the classic VB-style client-server front end is old news, even according to Microsoft propaganda. Get Wine working for those legacy VB apps, and work on good web or java interfaces for new client-server apps. The key product here is Mozilla, not another RAD system.
But if you insist, Borland Delphi is coming to Linux, and (as it's proponents argue) it does everything VB does, only better.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Yes, it would be shameful if Sun spiffed up Solaris' interface to make it more popular with users. They might actually (gasp) gain market share that way.
Basically, Sun only wants to sell expensive and esoteric server hardware. That makes them about as relevant to this discussion as IBM's S/390 division.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Oops! I'm not a Java programmer, and I didn't mean to start a flamewar about this.
My point was simply that traditional RAD client-server development isn't a good approach for the smaller and not-heavily used applications that corporations usually run to VB for. Maybe Java doesn't fit the bill as a RAD tool, but in terms of deployment and supportability (sic), it beats VB hands down. Feel free to substitute what ever other tool fits the bill.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Correct, Microsoft has been using app vendors to distribute service packs (updated DLLs) for them for years. The world would be a much happier place if apps just required "at least Windows 95 Service Pack 16" instead of automagically upgradeing/downgrading your OS for you. Perhaps Windows 2000 will take this route.
However, this would only work because Microsoft is the single vendor for system DLLs. Just look at how slashdot goes ballistic whenever a commercial package is only supported under "RedHat 6.1" and how even experienced Gnome users seem to have trouble getting the right library versions.
The Linux Standards Base could be a solution, but for now I don't see anything coming from them, and if it does it could either be obsolete or so minimal that it won't see much vendor support. Basically, I don't see a solution until much of the Linux OS core stabilizes -- glibc will need to stop breaking backward compatibility at some point, and perhaps the KDE and Gnome APIs will stablize too. The solution is to wait until things stabilize to the point that most programs will run on an average box without requiring a bunch of library upgrades. (For example will require RedHat 6.0, but will run without problem on RedHat 8.0.)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Unfortuantely, printing is one of those things in Linux which was inherited directly from the Unix world. Nobody engineered Linux printing, it just sorta came with the package, along with the good luck that someone reverse engineered PostScript.
And the UNIX model of printing was always $20000 workstations running $10000 software printing to $7000 printers, so PostScript was obviously acceptable. After all, who was to know 15 years ago that Adobe intention was to price PostScript out of the hands of the average PC user. It probably seemed like a good general purpose solution at the time.
I would imagine that sooner or later, someone will extend X so that it provides GDI- and QuickDraw-like printing abilities in it's rendering engine, and then reverese engineer some common drivers. It won't be industrial strength like traditional Unix printing, but it will be good enough for single user workstations and small networks and lowend printers. (Note that I don't expect any particular innovation from the X Consortium -- it's too dominated by Big UNIX companies that aren't really interested in your inkjet printer.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
#ifdef SARCASIM
True, and windows needs one too.
#endif
please, tell me why. why does it need a standard GUI? do you get easily confused? if you make a statement please qualify that statement...
What the hell is a standard GUI? twm has been around for over 20 years.... I'd bet that's more of a standard GUI than anything else on the planet... and Linux ships with that, so I'd say that Linux does have a standard GUI.
at that point, my ATM's need a standard GUI, my car dashboard needs one, and my yes... Microwave ovens do too!
I am easily confused if you change how it looks! please do my work for me. make my life effortless so that I may just drool and watch old tom and jerry re-runs... But I cant... my tv's remote control doesnt have a standard UI... so I'm confused again.....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is exactly why Harlan Ellison uses a mechanical typewriter.
the casual home user wants a appliance, one that dont break, one that will do this or that, and will get them their email/ daily soap listings.
Linux is not for them and never will be. (Except in embedded form as a commercial product.)
Linux as redhat,debian or the great slackware will not become a home product except for geeks. and that is what it should be.
It's a Development enviornment... it has too much power for the bungling.
give the masses a toaster that can get their email and Utopia will materalize.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The article is pretty close to the point on many facets. I agree that Linux software needs to be "mainstreamed" I saw a copy of corel wordperfect 8 for linux at my local Best Buy (I bought it too even though I have the free version). but the biggest thing is not just software...
Hardware... almost everything on the shelves is Linux compatable except for the cheap junk.(Win products) but is there a linux sticker anywhere? no way! We hear of these companies saying they support linux, but they refuse to put a works with linux sticker on the box (Creative Labs... get that sticker on every box you dummies!)
But then linux isn't made for the general computer user. windows9x is great for the clueless... it's great for the un-knowing... it's geared for the person that has very little in their heads or very little desire/time to do more than push a button. Linux didnt become popular because it was effortless, it became popular with us because it is hard. ls -al is dang difficult to the windows user. they cannot understand keyboard commands (before you win-lovers start flaming... I support windows95/NT for 120 users at my office... they cannot understand anything that is more difficult than a doorknob. yes there are a few that have a clue but it is very few) Unix has been around for eon's longer than wondows/dos even was a fleeting idea. Unix was "shunned" for being complex. Dos came around... it too was "shunned" for being complex! Only the geeks had 8088 or a 80286 (-rich geeks) computer at home, and everyone else said "oh god no! no pc for me! I cant even set my new-fangled clock on the VCR!"
well now it's 1999... and these same sheep cant set their VCR clock, but they think they need a computer!
I dont want them using linux. Actually, the best thing for linux is to stay "fringe" or in the "power user" domain.. it will become de-facto in business (It's replaced most of my servers) because it can be made to easily run what the sales dept., accounting, etc... needs and will keep the "I know something about computers" people from screwing it up! A linux box properly configured for business is 100% bullitproof, idiot proof, and makes an admin's job almost trivial.
So please linux, dont go mainstream... stay in the realm of power hobbiests, and business users.
Leave the fodder of the "home user" to Microsoft.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't understand all these arguments for more applications. If anything, Linux has too many applications! For example:
Doing a search for a Linux ICQ client on Freshmeat produces (get ready) 30 matches! That's right, there are 30 seperate ICQ clients for Linux. They are all open-source, and many have all the usefull features, but people, DO WE REALLY NEED 30 OF THEM?
The linux kernel programming community is a pretty loosely knit bazaar--a lot of programmers, but at least they have a single focus. There aren't 30 versions of the kernel!
Although the application programming community also has alot of programmers, they are all duplicating each other's work!
We don't need more applications... We need better applications. Instead of saying, "I want to write my own web browser," why not contribute to Mozilla instead? Instead of writing "Yet Another MP3 Player," contribute code to one of the more established ones.
________________________________
Linux does not exist in it's current capacity because a panel of market-heads decided it should blaze a trail to the desktop. Linux is an OS that a lot of us made for ourselves to suit our own ends. It is a matter of coincidence, not dertermination that Linux has reached a certain amount of success.
We should continue working on what we want to work on. Nobody wants to turn Linux into an OS they don't want to use. How long will we go down this path to the "desktop market" until Linux is reduced to something we wouldn't want to touch with a 10 foot pole?
I say we should make an OS for us, by us, and screw everybody else who doesn't like it. Freedom is the underlying principle of free software, and I don't neede a major distro company (with commercial interests) telling me what Linux is or should be. Let "Desktop Linux" be the first in a series of major forks from the tree...I'll keep my geeky distro.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
FYI spelling is not a strong point among many types of creative professionals. You remind me of the judge in Ally McBeal who checks the oral higene of councel. You are indeed manifesting sloppyness in your own thinking and critical faculties, by making spelling and neatness the basis of your most important decisions. Please listen (this is a communication skill) when I say that there are different styles of thought and cognition, and your judgement about the 'right' way only betrays to others your inability to see other viewpoints, ie. other ways of seeing. If you can't see other's ways, then YOU can't communicate.
Yes, Windows is a mess, and that's my main problem with it. Its a mess for the reasons you give.
Linux is consistent, as you say, and with hunting and investigating, it's secrets can be discovered. But could we not make something that made the process of discovery faster? At the moment discovering the complexity is hard, so maybe we could work on making it 'easy' to find out what you need to know?
I have not come across that problem. I recently moved into the southwest Michigan area, and was surprised when I had several independant people ask me to help install Linux for them.
One of them, as you would expect, is not only a computer hobbiest, but a CS major. The other two however hardly even fall into the "tool" catagory. I had to sadly turn down one request, because after seeing how much she knew about computers, and what she used them for, I knew that there was no way her+Linux were a compatible couple. She only wanted it because she had heard about that new trendy thingy that is different from Windows.
I find an increasingly large number of people who have heard of Linux, and are interested in trying it, who would typically be viewed as 'iMac' individuals.
Must be a local phenom?
V
... now I have no problem with
:)
the current system, "Search Engines" (hehe), but the average person would like a place he can go online to just
browse what's available and say "Ooh that looks nice, I think I'll get that..." rather than knowing beforehand what he
needs.
Take a look at Linuxberg and tell me what you think. It follows the basic layout of the venerable TUCOWS...because it is a subsiderary of Tucows. One can point their browser to this page with the eager hopes of finding a word processor for X, and need only navigate simple catagorized lists.
The fun difference for these new Linux users will be that 99.9999% of the software is completely free, no strings, and doesn't have a little "Buy Now!!" tag next to it.
V
Compiling the source may not be the best idea with larger programs(or groups of them) like kde or gnome. An installation should be short.
Unix is a huge pile of software that's evolved under the direction of a large number of people. Getting it to work involves getting lots of different layers of software to work together, and this is both a strength and a weakness. For example, Unix users get to choose between window managers, and having chosen, they have a lot of choice about how to configure their window managers. That's a whole class of software that doesn't even exist as far as the typical Windows user is concerned.
And the problem is, if anything getting worse, with more layers being added to the system... Pretend you're a naive user, and then consider Gnome. Everyone's talking about it, but what the hell is it? It's not a window manager. It's not an application. It's not a C library. Do you need it? How are you supposed to know?
You might hope that it would be the job of the distribution packagers to work out these issues, but as far as I can tell, they haven't been that much help. And there's a limit to how much they *can* help, because one of the virtues of the Unix world is the amount of choice it offers the user. Freedom is what it's about, and freedom can be confusing.
I would like to add to the article that free open-sourced software is still unlikely to be accepted by managers.
Managers tend to have this feeling of 'If it's free, it can't be good, will not have proper support and I can't sue anyone if the software fails.'
The Brain.
The easiest way to sum it up is that they outline a set of accounting and security practices that are what the government considers the bare minimum for installing in many facilities without an exemption.
C2 is the first, and least restrictive certification. It is in reference to the red and orange books, which I'd have to look up the actual reference numbers of. Most commercial workstation vendors have had this for some time now. NT now has it. It is granted after a very entensive code review by a branch of the NSA.
FIPs is actually a set of a few hundred Federal security standards. There are some for password security, encryption, system control, etc...
That was true until a few weeks ago. I got the notice that NT4 with SP6, and 2000 were now certified for both orange and red book. So you can now add the NIC back in. I know there were probably exceptions made, and problems overlooked, but they have the certification, which is a problem for linux, because that can now be used by the NT camp.
While most of you may not think highly of the US government, they are one of the biggest customers or IT, and a huge director of where things go. An example is how much they can cram a bad standard before they reconsider it (GOSSIP anyone?).
I've gotten Linux into a lot of government shops and applications, but its always an uphill battle because it isn't C2, or FIPs, or POSIX (early on for that one). Now with NT being C2 and FIPs (I don't remember the actual FIPS, maybe 140 or 180) certified this arguement has only gotten stronger. Put on top os this of not supporting ATM (yes I know it sucks for LAN apps, but tell the government that) in most distributions and pre built hardware and a large hurdle exists to get into the government and their contractors shops.
Maybe RedHat or VA should use some of their newfound richs towards certification. C2 would be a good start and clear most of the problems.
This article, while not the best written one I've ever read, hits the nail right on the head. The whole "glossy box factor" is missing from Linux. Everything I'd want to say has already been said, either in the original article or by followup posts, but it would be nice to make sure some of the developer lists out there get to see this thread, and perhaps draw some ideas from it. There is no central body we can complain to; Linux has no central governing body, just its entire user body. One of the best things to do would be instead of having 30 different versions of the same thing, get all 30 authors together to make one, ass-kicking version. Sounds like a plan to me.
This is, in fact, a very common misconception.. I thought so too, at first. But the truth is, Linux is harder to learn than Windows. The learning curve is much steeper. Once it's over, it's much easier to use than Windows. I think those of us who are about 20 years old (as I am) are going to live in a society where computers play an increasingly important role. It might seem silly right now to spend several weeks getting into a new OS, but it will pay off a thousand times later on.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
Just type in 'netconfig'. It asks you for your host and domain names, then asks if you want to use DHCP. It'll mangle your config scripts for you.
I'll give it a shot...
:)
I've been messing with this crap for a week and I'm very close...which makes it all the more annoying.
I've tried 3 different Ethernet cards, my box sees all of them, I can config static IP's for all of them, not a single one of them will activate and retrieve a DHCP address from the cable modem. I'm not done trying yet though
that works? Having a cable modem is nice, having to run it in windows is not!
Well... errors, because of their unexpected nature, are hard to handle well.
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- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Congrats for not thinking things through a bit, and for ragging on me for my grammar rather than thinking about what I was saying.
Actually, virii, viruses, whatever, can exist in Linux/Unix. If you think they won't (or don't) mainly because most people don't run as root (I think this is what you're getting at -- if not, please enlighten me), well you've got another think coming. This for 2 reasons:
1. Linux does have holes in its security. Linux' security is better than Windows', don't get me wrong. But you know (or at least I hope you do) as well as I that there are bugs in the code. Sure they can be fixed... sure, they do, in fact, get fixed. But how many average users (read: not hackers) are going to bother downloading them and patching the holes in their system? Not many, I'll wager. But virus writers will exploit these holes.
2. How many will even bother creating an account to run under, rather than just using root? I have a feeling that we will see a lot of people (assumning Linux gains popularity) running as root simply because that was the default after install... never bothering to create a user account for themselves.
Viruses certainly can exist in Linux. And there's a good chance that they will exist, and actually bite a few clueless users.
You accused me of believing "MS FUD at its finest." Please don't be a fool and believe "Linux FUD at its finest." Don't get me wrong... I am not an MS-apologist by any means. I don't like the OS at all. I run Linux almost 100%, and am perfectly happy with it. But that doesn't mean I am blind to its (few) shortcomings.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
You are right on those counts above, I agree. But. My entire argument above was built on the hypothesis that Linux would become more popular, and you would of necessity start seeing a less-elite set of people using it (by less-elite, I mean users who are not programmers, who are not "power users" (whatever that term means these days), who are, for the most part, computer-illiterate). If you reject that hypothesis; if you decide that that's not going to happen, then that's fine, but don't enter into the discussion, since it was based on that eventuality as a starting point (several messages up).
:-)
Now that the only people here are the ones who realize that we are talking about such a world, you should realize that your reasons 3, 4, 5 and 6 become null and void. Your "Joe Sixpack" user does not necessarily adhere to those properties you have attributed to him.
Point 1 no longer applies, because again, I am basing this argument on the presumption that Linux (the single kernel Linux, and the associated API) become dominant to the point that virus writers will target it specifically. Point 2, as I have already mentioned, is weak at best, because a lot of users will probably just use whatever is most convenient and not set up any supplementary users. As your sibling post (John, IIRC) pointed out, more and more distros are starting to create a separate user account as default. However, that doesn't necessarily patch any holes in the security system (which do exist), and that "Joe Sixpack User" won't bother to fix. Just look at how many NT users are still running at Service Pack 2 or 3 or something (and the only reason they're even running that is because MS Office won't run otherwise).
The existence of viruses is a function of the competency of the users, not the capability of the underlying Operating System.
I mean, hell, if it comes to it, we're probably going to eventually start seeing "Word Macro"-type viruses that exist not at the kernel level, but at a higher one, that can still do a lot of damage, even if they don't have access to the underlying OS at all (or should that be a KOffice Macro Virus?
Oh, and finally... I'm sure it is "viruses". But that's not the point. What word I use, or whether my grammar is correct, is totally irrelevant, as long as the message gets through loud and clear. Which in this case, it did. You understood what I was saying, so who cares whether I say "viruses" or "virii?" That's what I was getting at. I apologize if it's a pet peeve of yours, or something, but really... it's not a big deal. I always pay attention to what people are saying, rather than whether their spelling and grammar is spot-on.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Gah. It seems pretty obvious at this point that neither one of us is going to convince the other, so I'm willing to just drop it for now.
All I'll say is that we shall see... one of us will turn out to be right, and the other wrong, and at that point... well.
Anyway... it was an interesting argument while it lasted, but I really don't see much point in continuing it at this juncture.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
I agree that dual boot is a necessity for most people, but it's a lot easier to get a Linux install right if it's standalone. In the past couple of years, I'd say half of the problems I've had with Linux have stemmed from the fact that it shared a drive with Windows. Not that I've had an excessive number of problems, but they tended to be the sort that a novice wouldn't be able to deal with.
I install a lot of packages this way on Solaris at work and on Linux at home. When it works it's great, but I find that it's only problem-free about 70% of the time. Quite often I need to update a shared library, hand-edit a Makefile, or tweak a line or two of C code. Not too hard for a sysadmin, but far more complicated than using an InstallShield wizard.
One big problem is that the rapid changes in the various components of the OS aren't coordinated in any real way. There's something to be said for the concept of service pack levels, even if Windows doesn't stick to it. If the underlying components can become a little more predictable (and I'm hoping that the LSB can manage this), then source distributions could be installed through a reliable, friendly interface.
Almost forgot: one other advantage of binaries is that they're a lot quicker to install. Especially on old, slow machines.
There's certainly something to be said for that (thus my support for the LSB). Still, it only helps on the binary front. Source packages aren't usually focused on Solaris or BSD any more than they are on Red Hat or SuSE. Such is the price of flexibility. We're not going to see foolproof source installs unless everyone settles on one tightly-controlled *nix. That probably won't be happening in this lifetime.
Hey, cool, so it is. Never new that.
DirectX? We need more development of opengl / mesa, no use adding an extra api.
As for VB, have you tried tcl?
Since when is tcl a shell?
Well Maybe you should try BeOS, then if you want simplicity and ease of use. Every app is either free or a hella lot cheaper than its windows counter part and you can do neat things with it(play an mp3 backwards) along with get you school work done word processors and built it GUI C/C++ compiler.
just give it a look and tell me what you think . http://www.be.com or for some news headlines www.benews.com for software www.bebits.com
your pal,
johnnycal
yah, I brake it all.....
See the GNOME install project. Doesn't handle errors well, but installs most things fine.
GIP is here: gip.darkorb.net.
atc, abuse, xtrek, Q3A, Civ CTP, UT... oops, that's 6.
Levine
long live the command line
My philosophy is that you shouldn't ever link to the magazine's homepage (it will be linked from the article) because it's just another opportunity for confusion. And the highlighted text should be unambiguous-- go with "editorial" so I know where I'm going when I click.
(For all I knew, the 'totally mainstream' link might have been to a Corel download page or something.)
It's not me who does the hiring, speedy. If it was me doing the hiring, we'd have a crack team of Linux professionals to do everything from load the paper in the copier to make the financial decisions. But that doesn't quite make sense to the big guys with the dough. Why should we hire computer engineers for secretaries? That's why the Good Lord created network admins.
What's your damage, Heather?
Even if I could, I wouldn't. She's a fox. :-D But to answer your question, she graduated from film school.
What's your damage, Heather?
As a network admin, you'd have to be crazy to foist Linux on a group of unsuspecting secretaries for exactly the same reasons you discuss.
People at work don't have the time to learn awk. They don't have the time to grapple the finer points of command lines. As a network admin, I can vouch for the fact that most users don't even have the time to go into "Tools, Options" in Microsoft Office when they're trying to get their work done. They race around, looking for a button that says, "Analyze All My Data And Print The Good Stuff In Arial 12, Landscape." If it's not that easy, then they don't have the time to use it. Of course you don't care about the average user, because not only are you brighter than one, but you're also not tasked with helping them on their computers.
Those of us who actually have to deal with the average user wish, beg, pray for a super-usable version of Linux and applications to match. I'm right there with you, man - I *know* how stable Linux is, I know how powerful it is, I know how flexible it is. But you and I have taken literally years to play around with Unix & Linux, and I can't ask that from a secretary when her next sentence to me is, "I don't know why I'm learning this anyway. I'm looking for another job over at Company Y where they pay another fifty cents an hour."
I care about using my computer, too. But I also care about using my VCR, and I was really happy when VCR Plus came out. I'm not stupid, but wow, it's great to just push five numbers and hit GO, and know that it's definitely going to tape Futurama in its entirety. Sure, I know how to program it, but I don't even have to think when I use VCR Plus. It just works, bam, done.
Is vi as fast as VCR Plus? Sure. But it ain't easy for a secretary to walk in and create a two-column report with a bar graph in vi. It can be done in a matter of seconds with Word without ever having to read a single word of text.
I'm not slamming the usability of Linux - I'm just saying that yes, it is good enough for you as a mathematician familiar with awk and vi, but it's not good enough yet for the secretaries. And there's a lot more secretaries than mathematicians.
What's your damage, Heather?
Forgive me if sometimes it is difficult to tell between someone's technical judgement and anti-Windows bias.
/var, perhaps /etc, or maybe that file is superseded in ~.
I would like you to separate the concept of a registry from its implementation on Windows 9x. What is "wrong" with the concept? The idea of the registry is a good idea, I think. One place to change settings throughout the system instead of the zillions of unsimilar configuration formats in a files that are usually in
The implementation is another thing. Microsoft made an operating system that is less than stable. That doesn't mean all operating systems are unstable. IIRC, the GNOME people are developing a registry program called GConf but it seems to be entirely unlike the Windows implementation. Instead of a binary database, GCong will be based on XML. [This is all AFAIK]
The truth is, users *want* one place to change settings throughout the system. Microsoft has achieved this (even though it leads to problems with security (easy to access registry on any Windows 9x system and unlockout the control panel, etc.) and most of the information is undecipherable to humans). Registries are a good idea if done right.
Not everything Microsoft comes up with is a bad idea.
I agree fully. It is like that internet thing - if every site only had a standard interface, it would just take off. But right now each and every one has a different look and feel -nobody can use it. The net is even worse than programs written for X, at least in X one has ten or so different ui's all very similar, none to hard to figure out. But the net? Every site is different - you can not tell most links from images or underlined words. If _they_ would just fix it, it would be the next big thing.
You'll be disappointed...sorry.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I've been hearing this for awhile- that linux is difficult to install, fix, or use somehow. I unfourtuneately still do support, and the majority of my users could not install windows if their life depended on it -and it never does. The soulution to this problem is to have linux installed on machines at the factory -a problem that is being fixed, slowly. As for linux being difficult to fix, or easy for an idiot to break, most of my users are unable to fix even the most basic problems in windows, and by installing outdated or incompatible software can make one not work very quickly. They are not mechanics either, but I suspect that most of them drive cars, sometimes with the oil light on, but they drive them. So don't waste your time on graphical installers, we have them. More graphical apps for the people who don't want to learn a command line is the path to universal acceptance, if that's what you are after.
_this is not a signature_
Hmmm... the HP LaserJet 5N and (I think) the HP Color Jet 1600C are both postscript based. I'm not entirely sure though.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Yeah, I think the Linux community must get in gear to demand drivers for there printers.
The same method worked with the graphic card manufacurs.
I think a other approach is the best option. The postscript method can't handle the options the modern printers have to offer.
The problem isn't anything to do with drivers at all - it's to do with the fact that 99% of Linux apps print by spooling out Postscript code DIRECTLY to a file, and then forcing you to go through Ghostscript to print it out - which frankly, is ludicrous.
Windows has good printing technology which makes all this a none-issue. Rendering to the screen is IDENTICAL to rendering to the printer for 99% of all jobs. It makes it easy - which is surely the whole idea?
Of course, then you *would* need printer drivers. Catch-22 I guess.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The idea that the Windows printing model is a "good one" is simply preposterous, because a significant aspect of it is the fact that these printers are not printers at all. They're winprinters. This is not a printer, any more than a "winmodem" is a modem. It's not. A winmodem is a glorified phone jack that connects to the OS.
Bzzzt! Sorry - thanks for playing.
Who mentioned WinPrinters? You did. I didn't.
I'm talking about the mechanism which means that to print, you can re-use your graphics code. You don't have to touch Postscript - your printer driver sits one level *up* from that under Windows.
It goes something like this:
Create Device Context (Printer in this case)
Draw to Printer Device Context
Finish.
That's it - no "how do I write something which generates the correct postscript to do X, Y and Z?" - the GDI subsystem and the printer drivers handle all of the nasty stuff so that the printer gets the data in a format which it can understand.
Winprinters... well, I wouldn't buy one, that's for sure. But given that some of them a while back cost $50, and were being bundled with NEC machines, I can't really knock them - if it were a choice of winprinter or no printer at all (and the printer was effectively "free" in this bundle), I'd take the winprinter. And I did do so.
However, if I'm in the market for buying a printer, I'd buy one that could be used on any machine, just for future-proofing. (Same reason I only buy external modems if I can help it - although that criterion is going now that ADSL is picking up).
Anyway, to sum up - don't go off half-cocked shouting and screaming about something when in fact you're not talking about the same thing at all. It makes you look stupid.
Not only that, but I noticed that for all your flame, you didn't have the guts to stand behind a real alias - you posted as an anonymous coward. Tsk tsk. Try getting the cahones to stand behind your beliefs - or don't post them.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
IMNSHO, there are enough distros out there that focus on KDE. And quite honestly, you'll have to pry my cold, dead fingers off my computer to remove Gnome from it. :)
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
I understand what you're saying, there is more to DirectX than just the 3D drivers. It also includes Sound, Network, & Controller support, as well as others, and these also matter to games developers.
/., he said one of the big reasons they used WinNT was for things like audio creation.
This is one of the niceties of developing in DirectX. Everything is all in one place, with a (mostly) unified format. Sure, there may be better single-task solutions (eg, sound, OpenGL), but here I get a common API for all.
Linux has been concentrated on the 3D aspect for a while. And hopefully, the next release of XFree will handle a lot of those issues. But in John Carmack's recent interview on
Add this to the list of things that need to be added.
--sugarman--
What is the proper measure of whether something is easy?: is it its (lack of) complexity, or is it its (presence of) consistency? I argue the latter.
Windows is perceived as easy, because it is perceived as not terribly complex, which it isn't if all you do is run minesweeper and sol.exe. But, if you get under the hood, or even if you do any mucking around in the passenger seat, you'll find it terribly inconsistent. From the UI to the interminable crashes, Windows just doesn't behave the way it is supposed to (or ought to).
Linux, on the other hand, is perceived as complex, and frankly it is: there are many options presented to the user, and having to choose among many options is something that requires prescience or at least forethought. Linux, however, is also incredibly consistent: things don't crash when they're not supposed to (I'll leave it to the reader as an exercise to figure out when it is ever the proper time for something to crash). Programs, when they do exist, do their thing and nothing more. To me, that is much easier than is windows -- if I spend some time investigating an issue under Linux, I'm certain to be rewarded with some insight to bring to the table in the future if the circumstances arise again. Under Windows, I just have to hope that whatever happened before won't happen again, and if it does, that some magical combination of reformats and reinstalls will keep it at bay for a while.
I tend to correlate ease with the absence of frustration more than the absence of complexity. Unfortunately, others don't seem to think that way.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Edutainment drives the home computer market. Right now I can go down to the public library and check out any of hundreds of cdrom educational titles for my children for windows or mac os. In fact most Mac/Windows debates I hear from home users is the availability of children's software.
Two things are holding Linux back from mainstream acceptance, the first is the overwhelming availability of non-Linux software. Until you can get the latest 'American Girls' cd or whatever to run on Linux, most home users will have little or no reason to load Linux.
The second thing Linux really needs is more pre-loads. Until manufacturers such as Dell and Compaq offer Linux as the default with the windows flavor of the month as cost added extra, Linux will never be mainstream. Saving $100 to $150 bucks by forgoing windows would entice many people to try linux.
Right now PHP and, to a smaller extent Zope, are leading the way to dbms access. And it's not just for the Web, either. PHP is more than able to be a standard application scripting langauge capable of performing the duties of a number of previously entrenched languages/tools. You'd be downright shocked by the number of SysAdmins who are changing their perl scripts over to PHP.
For Internet B2B applications, PHP is very hard to beat.
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
I found that the X method of installing just didn't offer what it takes to make a knowledagable install right off. I finally resorted to placing the RH6.1 cd in a drive on another computer, mounting it on the annon. ftp area and doing a 'ftp install' instead. It worked great right off and all that was needed was to build and compile a 'real' kernel to obtain a firstrate system.
/dev/modem ! I would pay upto $10 for such a CD if i found myself in a pinch or 'happened to be' in a computer store.
I would be pleased to see a Linux that anyone can install, but to have a first rate system, you must be able to have manual control of the process, download the most recent kernel and build it properly. I would sincerely hope the next RH release would be easier to do a proper install and yet allow a 'newbie' to get an 'out of box experience'. The offering of the ISO image is a great move, unfortunately i still needed to to a 'ftp install'.
It is probably assumed that anyone who seriously wants Linux, *BSD or other Unix has some sort of a network connection. This being the case, there is virtually unlimited software to compile and use. I am also in agreement to having more CDs available in computer shops, at carefully controlled prices, for those that think the Internet has something to do with
1. More companies like Loki porting closed software, especially "emphemera" like games and tax software. .Xdefaults and then recompile/xrdb it to change the default emacs font.
2. Richard Stallman needs to explain to my wife why she must edit
3. Where is the GUI tape/CDR backup program?
4. The sign of bad a bad Windows helpdesk is "reinstall Windows". The sign of bad Linux help is "recompile the kernel". Either make more things available in binary form for mainstream distributions or (shudder) make kernel recompilation graphical and bulletproof. Until a small cult believes having a stock kernel is a virtue this isn't going to get fixed.
I cannot believe that you have nothing better to do with your christmas eve that complain about someone puting an apostrophe (sp?) in the word "i'm." And for god's sake, look at how many grammer mistakes you made.
First of all, it's good you're a student.
That should be : First of all, it's good that you're a student.
This way you have a change of taking some English comp classes so you learn how to spell
That should be : This way you have a chance of taking some English comp classes so that you can learn how to spell.
And also, I know many people in "IT" jobs that are very intelligent individuals. And most of the most intelligent people that I know aren't in CS at all. They are biochem, physics, or aerospace engineering majors. The level of math and science courses they have to take in their junior year would make a CS grad student cry.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
KDE (or actually QT) is not GPLed. Whats the point of the GPL when your standard interface is non free ? Even a BSDised toolkit or the GTK would be better than QT.
Offtopic, but i *hate* KDE/QT and GNOME/GTK. I actually like AfterStep (which redhat ships with)..desktops are a matter of individual taste -- there is no standard.
the most standard ui is no wm at all. just raw X. try running XDM without a wm and see how nice or not so nice it looks. I actually use it for a secure logged in shell on some servers -- no headaches of people opening up a terminal, just pop a status screen X application on the front for them to use and leave it that way.
For clarification, the browser mentioned is Opera, which was just released (in beta). I haven't tried it yet, but I'm sure the beta is far better than Netscape 4. However, we're coming up on having three viable browsers: Opera, Mozilla, and Konqueror. We'll have the Windows guys matched exactly.
Linux needs something like Microsoft's Direct X to encourage game developers.
Also, like so many others, I make a good living writing Visual Basic apps. you can knock together some very nice database apps in no time at all. If I had this available under Linux, I would happily tell all my customers to switch.
Um, the sad thing is, I can't tell if you were being sarcastic, or if you were honestly trying to describe the current user base. People ARE easily confused. They hate remotes because the buttons are all in different places for each one. Have you ever seen someone stand in front of an ATM with a tortured look of confusion on their face, because this one is a Citibank machine, not the Royal Bank kind their used to? And Dashboards are partially standardised. Lusers are lazy (not dumb), and want to be able to sit down and not have to engage their brains.
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
Like the post above, I can't tell if you are being sarcastic. This is the kind of attitude lots of Lusers have. I've spoken to people who suggest things like this to me. Until of course I whack them with my hickory stick. I believe in negative reinforcement ;)
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
I see a couple ways to change the work force:
Companies should start offering classes on how to work with Linux. My wife, who is no computer slouch, went to a class at New Horizons Computer School to take an Introduction to Windows 98. Her company PAID for the class. Maybe Redhat, SUSE, or Mandrake or maybe a third party should develop a new user class that could guide a Newbie through the first few steps. This course could be offered as an incentive at CompUSA or Staples or where ever the new user buys his Linux Distro.
Linux needs more examples in it's help system. MAN pages are great reference once you already know how to do something but need a little reminder. The HOW_TO pages are a bit easier for newbies (Depending upon who wrote it), but they tend to lack lots of examples. An example which can easily be copied and solves a newbie's problem will keep him from re-installing Windoze.
I personally would never use an ISP like AOL or MSN, but I know a lot of people who do. These people know that there are better service out there, but they don't care. They use AOL because it's simple, or because they like the "You got mail" guy. For Linux to break into the mainstream desktop market we will have to see big ISP provide their software for Linux.
...
--
Phase 1: Collect Underpants
Phase 2:
Phase 3: Profit
My Dad doesn't know the difference between Windows and Linux. He doesn't know how to install software. He doesn't even know the difference between MS-Word, MS-Internet Explorer, and MS-Windows.
... followed by a strong support and informal marketing efforts by the Linux community.
He's like 90% of "real world" computer users.
He has all this MS software because it was installed that way out of the box. He'll never upgrade to Windows 2000 (why would he?). And he'll never upgrade to Linux, even if it was easier, cheaper, and seemless.
Linux advocates should think about the development and marketing of low-cost PCs that have pre-installed Linux and it's associated application tools. People buy computers these days regardless of the specs. A reliable Linux-based computer for 20% less than the competion will be (I speculate) quite successful.
I think the Linux community can learn some from (gasp!) Apple Computer. "Be different". An alternative OS in an alternative-looking box - and with amazing sales. I like that strategy for linux. Put the OS in a low-cost 4" x 6" x 10" black box, and sell it as "cheaper & faster & better & cooler".
And like Apple, if you start selling your hardware with MS-Windows on it, you loose your "different" status, and you lose the whole game.
So how can "we" get all this done? Well, the existing PC manufacturers (HP, compaq, apple, etc) won't be much help - the current Linux market isn't worth a zillion dollars. So perhaps only a smaller organization, along with technical advice and assistance from the Linux community, can get the ball rolling
If sales get big enough, retailers and the big boys (Dell, Compaq) will have to take notice and will need to start actively marketing Linux for the desktop. All in the name of profit, of course.
if you really need to run windows and linux or any other os you should really check out www.vmware.com,
Death is inevitable, but pain is only temporary
I've thought about what it would take to take an OS like Linux mainstream so that even my mother can use it. Here's my list of things that would do the trick.
/sys/fs folder which contains all of the file system drivers, or a /sys/video which contains video card drivers.
/sys/fs, we could have /System/File System Extensions. Note that as the entire user interface is graphical, there is no need to shorten the file names to three-character shortcuts which are easier to type.
1) Simplified installation. Preferably you drop the CD into the computer, boot the computer, type in your name and the name of the computer, and the thing sets itself up. (Of course that requires a degree of plug-and-play which isn't currently supported in older hardware PC models.)
2) Standardized and simplified user interface. First, the interface must be totally standardized so that my mother doesn't get confused when one button is shown in grey and another is shown in black and white. Second, the interface must be totally transparent--that means totally eliminate things like "right-click" unless there is some standard graphical element that says "you can right click on me," or unless we adopt a convention such as "all icons are right clickable."
3) Restructure the file system so that adding device drivers, file system support, and other elements to the kernel is a matter of dragging and dropping a file to a special magic folder and rebooting the system. For example, we could create a
4) Rename the folders so that they make sense to my mother. For example, instead of
And so forth. I think you can see that I'm going in the direction of pulling in Macintosh-isms and Window-isms onto Linux in order to create a consumer ready system.
There's the problem, though: by pulling in all of these consumer-friendly features such as simplifying the boot process or restructuring the file system, Linux is no longer Linux. Further, I fear that in order to accomodate the user, you wind up having to weaken a number of things such as weaken security (my mother tends to forget her password--and frankly doesn't understand why she needs one in the first place).
Perhaps we shouldn't ask the question "what do we need to change about Linux to make it mainstream," as I think from the above that if we did that, we wouldn't have Linux anymore.
Instead, perhaps the question should be "if we were to design and build an open-source consumer level operating system from the ground up, what features should it have?"
We're motivated to develop Linux the way it is because it works for us, it provides us with what we need. In ESR's terms, we've been scratching our own itches. The masses who need all this luser-molly-coddling aren't competent to develop and maintain an OS; they need other people to do it for them. I don't see who has the motivation to do that except for money. So it seems to me entirely appropriate that the commerical OS businesses - Apple, Be, Microsoft - should use the commercial model to develop software for the people who cannot develop it for themselves. They have a motivation which we don't.
Next, and more importantly, it isn't at all clear to me that you can add all these luser-molly-coddling features as gloss, as a thin shell on the top. It seems to me that at least some of them must percolate quite deeply into the system. If this is the case we may find that by converting Linux into a system which lusers can use we may have converted it into a system which we find significantly less useful and less comfortable.
There is a myth that one size fits all. It doesn't. This is why, for example, Apple still exists: because it offers an OS which is significantly and usefully different from the mainstream to offer real benefits to a significant community of users. Similarly, Linux as it currently is provides significant benefits for a significant community of users - and that community is us.
We would be mad to change it.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Automated font installation for TeX would be really nice. However, that's a tough nut to crack---what sort of virtual font are you going to make? is the italic a genuine one? is the italic angle reported correctly? etc.
Similarly, the CMYK color thing is a tough one---who's going to finance the creation of the color tables? Color space work and look up tables are expensive, especially if one really wants it to work with any verisimilitude.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I must admit that I'm about to go back to Windows through frustration...
/dev/sequencer and proper midi support it just hasn't materialised.
I have a laptop with an ESS Maestro soundcard... there is a commercial driver out there for it, but after spending weeks trying to find support for
I'm a musician. I want to be creative... it's just such a damn shame that the oppertunity isn't there for me... once it is I shall truly be a happy man.
One problem I have found with many linux newbies is that they never know what a program is called and how to run it. I mean, sure, you have KDE or GNOME default menus, but all of those applications on your menu are oddly named and most newbies are not going to know what they do. I get calls all of the time from people telling me that they are looking for a program to do something. Fortunatly, I know the names (from years of use), and I tell them what to type into teir Xterm to run it. Maybe something like a self-configuring intelligent menu could be useful to all of us. Of course it would be a little tough to make, being that there are a zillion Window Managers out there, but isn't that what linux is about? Being able to make really obscure code to do something really cool?
--Evan
Yea, except "make" doesn't always work for me. Half the time I try to compile something it says I'm missing a file or library or something. So then I either have to track down the file and figure out where the hell to put it, or else just not install the program. BTW, this is on a standard Mandrake distro. I've NEVER gotten any error message saying I was missing some file in Windows when installing software.
As for what you were replying too though, he was talking about a GUI application that Windows users would feel comfortable. I myself would absolutly love an Installsheild like install program for Linux. Shoot, why stop at installation, make it for adminstration too. For instance, to update your libraries, Gnome, or whatever else, just click a button and it does it all for you. That would be a godsend.
I've NEVER gotten any error message saying I was missing some file in Windows when installing software.
This is one of the reasons why Windows apps are so bloated in download / cd size. Almost every application you can run will come with the shared components it needs to allow itself to be run. When was the last time you had to go online to download a shared library for Windows? Short of downloading the vbrunXXX.dll's, I don't remember a single time.
That's another reason why Windows is so unstable. One app may require component A, and install component A. Another app may require component B, and install component B. Another app may require both component A AND component B, but install predated versions of A & B than what was previously installed. Thus, when those two components are called by the first two programs, they may perform executions in a manner different than what was intended for the original applications, therefore - CRASH. The install programs are getting better with shared components, but it's a dangerous assumption to know that an installer will know what's best for all applications on your computer.
Sigh please moderate that crap down... people like this fellow above are NOT the kind of people I want to represnt the Linux community... Dont you get it Fross? If you want to use some elitist OS WRITE YOUR OWN or are you too lazy and want everything handed to you? More people using Linux and not WINanything is a good thing... People like you who ignore that the avarge user doesnt have the time or want to spend hours doing things that are simple double-click operations are simply ignoring the fact the linux isnt your personal toy anymore. Like it or not its our in the world. The average user who doesnt agree with Microsofts' business practices and is looking for something else for thier machine has heard of Linux.. Everyone is saying how great it is for this and that..yadda yadda hype hype, But when Joe user tries to use it he gets hopelessly confused by things that were simple to do in windows.. They get frustrated and just go back to windows because it does what they need it to do in the least amount of hassle... You might say Great we dont want them anyway! However that attitrude does nothing constructive and only furthers Microsofts continuing domination of the OS world... Your attitude makes Microsoft MORE $$ congratulations im sure gates would love to shake your hand for donating to his cause.. We would be better off trying to increase the ease of use for Joe Average rather than telling him to bugger off... Of the few things Win9x does better than linux, possibly the only thing, is make things simple to do. People will live with a morally dubuios company and reduced perfomance if it means they can do what they need to simply.. They are thinking "Who cares if my machine runs 20% faster if it takes me 3 times longer just to figure out how to DO what I want to?" and they are right...unfortunately --the above was NOT checked for spelling and/or punctuation if you dont like it I don't really give a damn. The ideas are more important than the commas-- --Syowr
Re:Why I use Windows, and not Linux (Score:2)
./configure
by G27 Radio on Friday December 24, @08:44AM EST (#100)
(User Info) http://g27.org
I use Windows becuase it's easy to install a program, becuase it's easy to see what im doing, where im going and how to get
there. I use it because when i want an mp3 dbasing util, i can download a single package, and install it with a mouse click. I
don't need to hunt for an obscure library file, i don't need to make sure that it will run with the Window Manager i want to use, i
don't need to decode version numbers of updates to work out what i need and don't need. This may sound lazy, but i don't have
the time to do this, i don't have the energy to do this, i don't have the knowledge to do this.
This is an excellent point which I forgot to mention. There are several programs make installation and un-installation easier (like RedHat
Package Manager.) But no one seems to have agreed on a standard for this kind of thing. Most software is still distributed as gzipped
tape archives...which is a great format for many reasons.
tar xvfz package.tar.gz
cd package
make install
^ is pretty easy when you know how it works, but there's no reason that this couldn't somehow be condensed into a double-click.
But, what about when it doesn't work? What if you don't have the right c libraries? This happened to me and it was extremely frustrating. I'm not familiar with UNIX, but I'm not clueless. I just never studied computers in school, thus never been much exposed to UNIX. So, in this situation, I'm out of luck without help at every turn.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
While I think the UI point is a good one, I think it's going to be tougher than it looks. User interfaces--and the whole "desktop" concept--are in transition.
The WIMP metaphor was originally meant to simplify, but now the average MacOS, Windows, or KDE user is presented with all sorts of gadgetry and hidden options and fluff to simplify certain peripheral tasks, like keeping track of which application is frontmost, organizing files, setting system options, customizing the look of things, etc. People are flocking to game consoles, the Palm Pilot, and closed web surfing boxes.
Linux GUIs are in a funny spot. Except for KDE, which is duplicating all of Microsoft's user interface design mistakes, Linux window managers and desktops are stuck in the 1980s somewhere, without even a standard keyboard shortcut for something as simple as cut and paste. And now much effort is being put into trying to catch up to the Microsoft/Apple level, which is hardly a worthy goal at all.
With all of the open source developers out there, with all of the mind power going into writing code for Linux, I would expect there to at least one Alan Kay or at least one Jef Raskin, someone willing to invent the future. Instead, this great mass of combined effort is going toward recreating the flawed work of a few accidental empires.
Ubjrire, gur Freinagf bs Fgnyyzna jvyy cebonoyl fzbxr hf bhg. :-(
Hm... what about Tivoli? Have they managed a port to any Linux yet?
Usually simple make program suffices, or better yet, just make. Imagine mk were aliased to make. Now, learn about completion. So you often need to type no more than
to get build that program, and probably less than this.And with reasonable programmable completion, you can just hit the tab after the command, and it will tell you valid arguments. For example
Don't knock what you don't understand.#!/bin/sh
tr a-zA-Z n-za-mN-ZA-M
or simply
$ perl -pe y/a-zA-Z/n-za-mN-ZA-M/
works as well.
I can tell that most of the users here are "geeks" or the high tech type of computer user, I guess I would consider myself that also. So here is what I think.
Yes linux Does need a standard UI. Why?, so that things work how people percieve them to work. You almost never see some wierd dinky looking UI in a windows program with the scrollbars on the left and all this wierd junk. But in Linux it is very common, and once you get passed the initial "what the hell" you find that the program doesn't work how it is supposed to, why? not because it is that difficult to use but because the person whp wrote the program decided to change the "Accept" button to the "Okey dokey" button. This wouldn't be hard after a good night's sleep, but after spending 15 hours looking for the write version of the libraries you needed to install the program that is now confusing you.
Another thing Linux needs: And easier way to install drivers, hardware, programs and to uninstall them also. Linux makes the grave mistake of leaving everything up to the specific program to install/uninstall it self. Most of the time you have to hunt for the directory in which your spiffy modem dialer program is installed so you can hand edit one of the thousand configuration files so you can correct your error when you entered the phone number.
There are many more things wrong with linux. I am on NT here (not 98 ugh), and there are allot of things wrong with this too. But no matter what my mom can still figure out how to send her email, my dad can putz with his websites, and I can type a report without having to fight wtih a crappy interface and lack of printer drivers. I can turn of all my computer knowledge and talk to my dorky friends AOL Instant Messanger (By the way, If any of you feel like killing AOL....).
For the record I have used linux, I used linux allot, I DO know what I am talking about. But I have to say it is nice to be able to install a program without having to hurt your brain for an hour checking version numbers and other putzy time consuming crap. Linux is a great server, Linux is a great putzty OS. Bu8t it is a BAD Desktop OS. And it will continue to be untill someone makes some big changes in it.
"Linux is only free if your time isn't worth anything"
There is a difference here, None is trying to say that Solaris should and could be a competitor in the desktop OS arena. Solaris is "Da' Bomb" and a server it kicks NT's ass up and down the block then hits it over the head with it stick BUT it doesn't need to be easy to use and spiffied up. Why? becasue you don't have mom's and dad's and sisters's and borther's using it. To tell you the truth I don't know why people want linux to take over the window's market, but if people want itto do that then they better amek soem improvements.
As Microsoft and others have shown us time and again, its marketing and not product quality which makes a mass selling/successful product. Linux has to improve customer perceptions, market more aggressively (75 % of the laymen still don't know about linux). Most importantly Linux should endaveour to capture opening markets such as in Latin America, China and India. These are markets still being built.
There's no reason why everyone needs to run Linux. If someone is happy enough with his Win 98 or iMac system, then let him compute in peace. If he doesn't know that there are alternatives, though, then we haven't done our job. He should know that there's Linux, BeOS, DoomOS, or whatever. Actually, that's my philosophy on religion, but it also applies well here.
I think more important things need to be done than worrying over what Linux needs to become the OS of choice for secretaries and grandpas.
For one, USB support. I'd rather use an ugly ncurses interface to my USB webcam than have a mature version of GNOME or KDE that couldn't access my webcam. At least, that's why I'm not joining the GNOME, KDE, or KOffice projects any time soon... I want to get my hardware working.
OTOH, everyone knows a good operating system has lots of games. We need more games. That's why NT sucks.
In the next stable kernel (2.2.14), supermount will be introduced. This will allow for the auto-mounting of removable media, ala windows.
While the website is down right now, there is a Linux Standardization Effort which is pushing for a standard package system, and a standard linux installer, ala windows installshield. This would allow for the one click install which you speak of. Personally, I think that it is a good idea.
If there were more support for projects like this, Linux would be a lot more ready for the desktop.
..
"We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
Or whatever they're calling should be a good replacement for Microsoft Office. I use it on a windows machine at work, and it gets the job done. I just hope Corel uses QT or GTK instead of that awful Motif use in WordPerfect 8.
StarOffice is simple too bloated.
..
"We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
What's this? Why do we need a standard UI for app development to continue? I've never had any problem finding apps that I need, and that's that. I don't even use one of the more popular GUI's... I use E with no GNOME or KDE... just straight E. I've never had trouble running KDE apps or GNOME apps, because I have the libs installed. Now if you ask me, I think there should be an easier way to upgrade libraries automatically, and get new libraries when you need them. Hey there probably is, someone provide a link :-).
:-) I've been doing it the RIGHT way (tarballs) for about 6 months.
Not that I need help compiling new libraries
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Let me know if I left anything out.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
I got no problem with BSD and I'd use it if I had the time to download it... the fact is that right now I have linux on CD. :-). Yea I have a cablemodem but I don't have enough hard drive space. Maybe I could find a way... i'm gonna see what I can do about it right now.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
If Open Source applications such as AbiWord were packaged and sold on the shelves at cost of distribution, people would realize that software for Linux is available and of high-quality.
:-). I've noticed that I can now successfully login to slashdot with it and the only thing I can't seem to do is moderating. I think with M13 or M14 (assuming they exist... i mean they might reach the 1.0 stage before then :-) I'll be switching over.
I don't think so... The main attraction of Linux is that you can get anything for free. What needs to be developed is an easier way of getting these things, something like an online store without money... now I have no problem with the current system, "Search Engines" (hehe), but the average person would like a place he can go online to just browse what's available and say "Ooh that looks nice, I think I'll get that..." rather than knowing beforehand what he needs.
Even though there are numerous applications for Linux available, there really aren't that many of comparable quality and usability to their Windows counterparts in areas which the average user needs. For example, there is nothing for Linux that is comparable to something like Quicken for Windows, a popular financial application. While there are small applications being developed, there aren't any commercial applications developed that serve that purpose. Some Linux users seem to fear the commercialization of software, but in a sense, it is required for the further advancement and acceptance of Linux.
Picky picky picky... Yes financial software is one area where linux is deficient, the other (more prominent) area being web browsers. We've just about solved the web browser problem, with Opera and Konquerer on the way, and especially Mozilla. M12 looks great, and it seems to be almost as powerful as netscape 4.7 (and it IS more stable
For the most part, I agree with everything else in the article... I've felt the wrath of printer support, especially with the HP 722c's. Back in RH6.0 I was able to get mine working... slightly... After that, I haven't been able to. I'm now on Slackware 7 and I still can't. (The driver is available, at PPA for the masses.) BUT... I am extremely impressed in the amount of drivers available for linux, in the most recent kernel there is a working driver for the SB1000 Cable Modem, a Hybrid Cable Modem card used in some areas (like mine) where fiber optic cable is not yet available. This is such an obscure device I didn't think there would be a driver, but lo and behold there was a driver and a HOWTO!!! You don't need to go looking for drivers in linux, almost everything is included with the kernel. Recompiling a kernel is not hard, either. Try it some time!
yebyen@adelphia.net
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
What a strange and outdated concept! Who decides the standard? A commitee - a la CDE? Barf! A dictator a la Bill Gates? Double Barf!!
"You can have any car you want as long as it's black." - Henry Ford
One of the charms of Linux and all other Unixen is the _freedom_ to have any interface you want.
What we need to standardise is the plumbing under _all_ interfaces, not the user interface itself.
If you want an OS with an enforced standard look and feel, go play with a Mac.
Merry Christmas!
-M
There needs to be a standard user interface.
If Microsoft picked one of the standard UIs to release their big applications on - say 0ffice2000 and IE5.5, that UI and Linux itself would immediately gain legitimacy.
Wow! You are so COOL cuz you use linux like a REAL man! Seriously though, your comments are worthless. The highway system is easier to use than the civilian roads, they have been much safer than they used to be, again becuase of civilian use. Cars have gotten much simpler to operate. If car designers were like Linux designers, we would still be cranking up our new '00 boxters! Making something easier does not diminish its power in any way. 3 steps that would make linux MUCH easier to use. /dev, /etc/ and /var. But common tasks can be done through the prefernces applet. So I CAN do it, but if I just want to make a simple screen depth change to run a particular program (SNES 9x) I don't have to go into xconfig, find and change the setting, restart the server, play the app, then restart again to get back to normal. I have one of those fast res switching monitors and hell, I can put different colordepths and resolutions in each workspace without being annoyed! The current state of linux is that is powerful, but is ugly. Linux the kernel is a very elegant well designed piece of work, but the cruft thrown around it is junk to put it nicely.
1. Store all config files in one place, and make it standard. Screw the apps that store their files somewhere else, you don't need them. There is a REASON that registry type things have caught on! Even BeOS uses them to some extent in that ALL config files are stored in one directory. Sort of like a text based registry.
2. Super charge Linuxconf to handle all these files. Ditch the dumb netscape inspired tree config.
3. Dump the 3l33t attitude!
Power and Elegance are not mutually exclusive. Take a look at BeOS. You can mess with it as much as you want since it shares some directory layout with Unix. It has a
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I think you're absolutely right that we don't need to be urging everyone to use Linux, at least not yet. Linux isn't ready for most people and they aren't ready for it. Mostly the latter.
I think it important that we do whatever possible to help anyone who *wants* to try it have a successful experience. I think this is pretty easy in business and academia, where there is usually a paid guru around to help anyone with problems. It's still chancy for a home user with a low patience threshold, or with needs for specific applications.
While we should be friendly to the curious who want to try Linux we shouldn't do anything to alienate it's core constituency: software and web developers, students, scientists, and engineers. If Linux can capture most of that desktop market, and a good share of the general server market, then application and driver scarcity will be history, and more desktop marketshare will follow naturally with time, as will the polished desktops and pricey application sets. World domination is a nice, fun hobby. Keeping the core developers and users of Linux happy is a matter of survival.
In other words, Linux should always be the choice of those who value computing power and are willing to learn to have it. Those who value being able to tinker and share knowledge, rather than buying off-the-shelf proprietary solutions. It very likely will also be made useful to nearly anyone, but that must remain a secondary goal. It is not elitist to say that "Do one thing *well*" is a fundamental philosophy of Unix.
Elite is a typewriter size? Really? So, what sizes do typewriters come in? Rather, what sizes _did_ they come in, as I don't think they make them anymore.
Customer to clerk: "I'd like a typewriter, please."
Clerk: "What size of typewriter would you like? Elite, medium, or large?"
The word "elite," for your information, while it may denote a typewriter type (as in the alphanumeric relief character which strikes the page for printing) providing twelve characters to the linear inch, is also a perfectly functional noun (and sometimes adjective) which doesn't require the "é" in English even if it does have a French etymology.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Obviously, this is not the case: the piano is a very popular compositional tool, even amongst people for whom it is not their primary instrument. Simplicity of music doesn't even exclude it from greatness (although "great music" is a subjective thing): I personally like using Louie, Louie as a proof for the existence of God :)
There are some people who have a piano in their living room simply for family sing-alongs. They'll never play a tune more complex than Louie, Louie, Blue Moon or Chopsticks and will probably never compose their own music. Others with pianos will produce hundreds of original compositions. Both groups, if we ignore the type and quality of the piano, use essentially the same instrument.
You never hear of a great piano maestro looking down his or her nose at "newbie" piano players (the same applies to any musician, regardless of instrument). A maestro would never say "We don't want your kind playing this instrument. Perhaps you should play something more suited to your abilities...like the radio. Hur hur hur." It's not part of their nature to scoff at someone because they only play other people's music and never write their own compositions, or that they never playing anything more complex than a three-chord pop tune. You never hear anyone jump on someone's case because they don't know that the frequency of middle "A" is 440Hz or becuase they can't tell their canons from their fugues. Musicians understand that not everyone is going to be hardcore, but that many people amongs the non-hardcore still want (and deserve) the joy that comes from playing music. Many musicians encourage people to take up an instrument -- one argument they use is that these people should break away from music provided to them by corporate radio and TV.
Unfortunately, we don't always have this attitude in the Linux community. Can't write your own program, or even put together a simple Perl/Python script or C program? Stay away. You're not really interested in doing more than writing an essay, playing games or surfing the web? Go away. You're an artist who wants to use the computer to create art but can't be bothered to RTFM so you know what "ps auxww | grep -vv root" means? Fuck right off.
What we have here is a clique that's no better than the clique of popular kids at school, who are "better" only by some arbitrary measure. Ours is the only industry where this kind of arrogance is tolerated by the market, and that tolerance won't last forever. We'll probably never have a Columbine-esque incident (forgive the Katzism), but the desertion of the non-hardcore for other OSs will be just as devastating, and we will have earned it. What Linux needs more than anything is not hardware nor software; there's always a ready solution or workaround for tech problems. The hard thing will be a solution for its human element. As long as members of the high priesthood continue to act as they do, Linux will be relegated to a niche. We should borrow a trick or two from the musicians' book.
Plug and play would be nice, along with a truly simple user interface. I'm currently debating with my self which OS to install on my Mom's new PC. This is no trivial decision, since she lives 3 hours away and I get to support her PC use. I'm leaning towards Mandrake, instead of a MS OS, mainly because I can lock it in to a browser and wordperfect. But the rest of my family that lives in her town all run Win9X. Maybe I'll flip a quarter.
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
I was thinking about this the other day -- idiot-proofing Linux.
The only way you're going to do it is by the following:
Making sure that every last need that your end-user can have is covered by the GUI configuration tool.
Locking down all the scripts so they can't ever touch them, and auditing every last package to make sure it doesn't do anything ``unexpected''.
Let's face it, no computer is idiot-proof. (How many times have I, in my past life as a T/S whipping boy, had to help someone clean up a mess that they or another program made by doing something M$ never predicted?) And I don't think anyone is going to be able to anticipate every one of the end-user's needs -- that is what set-top boxes are for :-)
And in any event, once you idiot-proofed it (assuming you could), who would buy (into) it? How many people are swayed by promises of power when their needs are probably much better met with a lack of power?
Allow me to quote the original poster without the short-form:
..."
"I don't study information technology
This is a perfectly valid statement to position the user prior to their comments on Windows vs. Linux.
PS. How do you know they're English at all? They may be Russian trying to write English, young (perfectly valid) and/or just too lazy to use caps (or on a laptop or PDA where its hard). Get off it.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I worked for a company that used MySQL and www-sql as a front end for the web browser. It was a much cheaper solution to expensave visual basic and windows.
It was also faster and more stable then the visual basic solution done by someone else. I didn't really understand how you could program something in visual basic and actually make it crash, but it happened every day until we switched.
I also had stability problems with the version of GNOME I got with RH 6.1. So I switched Enlightenment for Sawmill and upgraded to October GNOME. I haven't had a crash since.
Those of us who hacked Mac in the early days (remember the "phonebook" version of "Inside Macintosh"?) know how the Apple guidelines acutally made our job easier. You didn't screw around trying to be unneccessarily snazzy, you worked out what your user needed to know and do, and designed accordingly based on the guidelines.
But who is to bell the cat now? Apple could influence developers in the use of UI in ways that even IBM or Microsoft were not and have not been able to do. I'm not sure that there is yet an equivalent organization for Linux. I'm not sure that we need a set of UI guidelines passed from Mount Sinai or Cupertino or Redmond -- we need some kind of community institution or organization to work in the open source manner to help the entire community evolve UI and usability guidelines, and to evaluate voluntary compliance. If we as the open source commmunity could make that work, I think it would preferable, but not only for philosophical grounds. Open source is not only software produced in a manner that I like, I use open source software when I can because it is usually better and more stable software.
So, is anybody interested in getting something like this going? What would it "look" like? What would its goals be?
one problem with fdisk is just finding it...i dont always see it included in one of the distributions, where do people usually get it from?
1. newbie != idiot, most of newbies I know get
it from freshmeat.net/gnu.org/kernel.org
2. Hype is a keyword. Many hardware companies,
one of them mentioned in the article, are fast to
jump in, but sign off as soon as it comes to real
talk.
3. Fonts, printers, etc.... Re-compiling xfs
doesn't require to sit by your box a week long
punching cards and reading kilometer sheets,
xmkmf;make, that's all, what's the problem?
KuroiNeko
The real difference between the Windows wrap-the-user-in-a-warm-fuzzy-GUI paradigm and the Linux I-can-do-it-myself-thank-you paradigm is quite simple when you examine it. It is the tension between two different sets of design criteria. On the one hand, Windows is designed to be appealing to new and occasional users. It is the even-grandma-can-use-it principle. It is not a bad idea.
On the other hand, Linux and open source in general is designed to be an environment that empowers programmers. We are the ultimate power users. We want control of everything we can see. And we have the training and skills to see a lot and know what we could do with it. Open source exposes the interfaces to any programmer or user who wants to see them. Communication protocols and file formats are documented and often come from standards. Those standards and documentation are usually available for free. That is how open source attracts programmer/users who may be potential contributers. It is not something we can abandon, or want to.
As an example, there is nothing that frustrates me more when using a piece of software than when a common task requires a a lengthy sequence of mouse clicks, and there is nothing I can do to put it on the keyboard or shorten it. I don't care how obvious the icons and menu items are when I have to click six times to accomplish something that I do a hundred time a day.
The reason for this difference in preferences and usage styles is a difference in usage patterns. Programmers tend to be deep users of a few tools. We know their features completely. And we want to tailor them to our exact needs. What could be better than open source for that. It is a paradigm that can let us find even a couple dozen people scattered around the globe who want some very low demand feature. And it allows us to collaborate to build it.
Does my mother want to be able to optimize her usage this way? No. She wants to finish placing an order at an e-commerce web site so that she can go play golf. She doesn't use any given piece of software often enough to make a long learning curve worthwhile to her.
Most of the Windows vs. Linux flaming over the years has boiled down to "Your interface sucks and if you try to make me switch you're an idiot." It leaves out the most important phrase: "for my usage pattern". The real fight should be to reach a point where those of use whose productivity profits from using Linux can use it, at home, at work, with any server on the net we want to reach, period. Windows and the software under it doesn't give me what I need to make my computing experience pleasant and productive because it limits the control I can exercise with the considerable knowledge I bring to it. On the other hand, Linux is limiting to people who don't have the knowledge to leverage and never want to spend the time to acquire it.
Can one environment satisfy both camps? Can you simultaneously expose interfaces to ann potential developers and programmer/power users while hiding those interfaces from Grandma? I think it can be done, but only if the importance of both user communities is balanced. If we ever bury the interfaces so deep that new geeks can never get to them, we will lose the open source collaboration and the software will stagnate. If we don't make it possible to use the system without seeing them, we are limited in the potential audience. We can do both, but it must be intensional, or at least one of the two goals will fail.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I thought Al Gore created the internet!
I use Windows becuase it's easy to install a program, becuase it's easy to see what im doing, where im going and how to get there. I use it because when i want an mp3 dbasing util, i can download a single package, and install it with a mouse click. I don't need to hunt for an obscure library file, i don't need to make sure that it will run with the Window Manager i want to use, i don't need to decode version numbers of updates to work out what i need and don't need. This may sound lazy, but i don't have the time to do this, i don't have the energy to do this, i don't have the knowledge to do this.
This is an excellent point which I forgot to mention. There are several programs make installation and un-installation easier (like RedHat Package Manager.) But no one seems to have agreed on a standard for this kind of thing. Most software is still distributed as gzipped tape archives...which is a great format for many reasons.
tar xvfz package.tar.gz
cd package
./configure
make install
^ is pretty easy when you know how it works, but there's no reason that this couldn't somehow be condensed into a double-click.
numb
On the face of it, it's not all that hard: parse the Makefile and pull out any configuration options. Present them to the user in a nice friendly format (complete with default options already selected) and give them a button to push.
Actually I thought about it a little more and it maybe a 'meta-configure' script could be set up to pop up a Tk GUI interface asking for options such as --prefix= for configure, etc.
The standard make targets defined in the GNU Coding Standards (here) include most of the work that needs to be done by the Makefile. Using a meta-configure program and make doesn't mean that you can't distribute the binary as part of the package. In fact I'm pretty sure you doesn't even have to include the source code as part of the package but it's recommended. (obviously you would need at least one or the other.)
Some of the stuff people release for Unix needs all kinds of wierd input to get it properly installed. But A LOT of it only needs stuff as simple as an installation path if you choose not to use the default.
The way I see it, autoconf and make already simplify installs and uninstalls tremendously. It seems like a relatively small step to make an interface to them that end-users can use as easily as InstallShield.
numb
I definitely agree with the author about what a hassle configuring Xwindows can be. I know RedHat 6.1 has made some improvements to their X configurator, but still with most systems I've installed it on I ended up having to do it manually anyway.
:) For me Linux already works great...I'd just like to see it be more available to my friends that don't have as much experience. Of course, a well-configured (and PRE-CONFIGURED) Linux system would be great for a newbie.
OK, disk partitioning is sort of a problem. I really don't like disk druid. It picks the name and order of partitions for me which would be nice for a new user, but it's not cool when they force it on you. Fortunately for me fdisk suits my needs just fine for partitioning--however disk druid would probably be the way to go for a new user. It's good that RedHat provides both. However, disk druid needs some work.
I recently installed Debian 2.1r4--liked that a lot despite some wierd problems, but it would still be a little much to ask a newbie. I don't think newbies are Debian's target audience anyway.
There are little nits here and there with Gnome and Enlightenment, but nothing that won't be fixed soon I'm sure.
Newbie documentation. Linux distributions include tons of in depth documentation about the operating system and all things related. If you bought Windows, you'd have to spend $50-$100 on books after buying the operating system and you'd still have nowhere near as much depth of technical information. The X/Gnome/E help systems available for apps look great also--however a lot of the apps don't use them. There is a good reason for this. So much of this software is still being developed and improved--documenting works in progress for newbies would take away from the time that could be put into the apps themselves.
I'm pretty sure these things are being worked on as we complain
ObWinDis: Installing any Windows operating system on a machine that didn't come with it is no joy either. In comparison to installing Linux, it's a long convoluted process that takes several reboots. In fact, installing RedHat 6.1 on a system that does not already have Windows on it, and has fully supported hardware, would probably be easier for a newbie than installing Windows. It would certainly take less time.
numb
If getting Linux pre-installed were really a viable option, many more people would use it.
Further, if the HPs, Epsons and Canons of this world sold their products marked "Linux compatible" (it could be the same product as sold for Windows) and included their drivers and driver installation programs in the box, that would help a lot too. If users see the words "Windows compatible" and "Linux compatible" next to each other more regularly, it would reduce their fear for the unknown and confirm that Linux too is an operating system.
Another problem is the fact that there is no rapid application dev tool for Linux as there is for Windows. Of course you can say that people could use C/C++ for their sales order processing apps, but then, in the same logic, they could use assembler too. I personally think that VB is as much responsible for the commercial success of Windows as MsOffice.
As a matter of fact, I don't think that people are so tied to MsOffice, since most of the information processed in MsOffice is for one time consumption (and then saved and forgotten forever...) Therefore, I don't think that the average user cares so much of his existing data in MsOffice format. It's usually different applications (often mainframe or else client/server, but surprisingly,hardly ever web-applications) that really run the company.
If the data processed in MsOffice is important, you will find that most users simply file the hardcopy (and actually consider this hardcopy as their backup).
To conclude, I think that the following will make large number of people use Linux:
(1) It comes pre-installed
(2) Devices usually have drivers for Linux included in the box.
(3) The VBers of this world can use an equivalently "rapid" tool on Linux.
This individual seems to take for granted that "linux" is only the kernel.
del c:\micros~1\*.*
Firstly, could you have your head further up your own elitism or what ?
If, as the article is directing you to, the linux community wants commerical and business success to give users a choice, you will have to accept that there are people who do not see the world as a screen, a keyboard and a cpu. My computer is a tool, it is a medium for getting what i want, and doing what i want. I want to to use this piece of electronics (remember that, its a machine) to interact with people, to gather knowledge, to experience things, not to have to write a program every time i need something done..
I am not a drooling Windows idiot, i script, i write programs, i understand C and C++, i would never ever say that im anywhere as knowledgable about the inner workings of a shared C library (as obviously you claim to be) i just don't have the time to write a program everytime i need it. i spend my time of graphics, on eye candy, making things look perty.. not on re-compiling the netscape installation script everytime an update comes in.
I have ALOT of enthusiasm about Linux, i love the concept, i love the way it has brought a community around a piece of software. I want to achieve something, i want to be able to use GIMP to substitute for other commercial programs (being a student, that's one of things i love about Linux, it's free).. i just don't want to have to wade through elitist bullsh*t like yours every time that i want to do something.. i know you have more knowledge than i do about coding, but you seriously lack any true intelligence...
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What the hell.. i wrote it just after 1:00am local time Xmas morning, what the hell do you expect, an english graduate thesis ?
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Like I've posted elsewhere, it was written early (1:00am) Xmas morning, my additude towards spelling and grammar are a little lax at that time of the morning. I apologise (BTW that's the correct spelling thank you, check your ENGLISH dictionaries) if it was hard to read.
I don't want Linux to be Windows, i don't like Windows, i don't want to change linux , i just think that if the community wants to fight MS for the desktop, people like me are the ones that it's going to have to convert.
I go on and on about the advantages of linux to non-computer savvy friends, becuase i believe in it not because i shortsightedly hate Microsoft.
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I have, several times, each time i find my self getting so frustrated with it that i inevitably find my self sitting in front of the Start button once again
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can't anyone take a joke these days ? ;)
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First things first, I'm a frustrated wannabe-Linux user still using Windows98 yet probably for the reasons that could easily answer this question.
I use Windows 98, even though i know its got dismal hardware efficiency, in that the equivalent machine on a RedHat installation could work alot better than on Windows. I use Windows knowing full well (and being disgusted with) the marketing practices of Microsoft. I use Windows knowing that my love of tweaking how my machine looks, works and runs could be fulfilled much easier on a linux box. I use Windows knowing that my data is about as secure on a WinBox than my personal possesions if I were to have the lock on my backdoor installed by a thief.
The single reason I personally use Windows and don't use my set of four RedHat v6 disks sitting right here is becuase one thing, Gloss.
It's shallow i know, but im an average user, im a student, i don't study IT, im more interested in the social context of the internet, it's effects upon communication psychology, but im the user that Linux needs to convert to have any hope of ever fighting back against the "Windows on every desk" mantra.
I use Windows becuase it's easy to install a program, becuase it's easy to see what im doing, where im going and how to get there. I use it because when i want an mp3 dbasing util, i can download a single package, and install it with a mouse click. I don't need to hunt for an obscure library file, i don't need to make sure that it will run with the Window Manager i want to use, i don't need to decode version numbers of updates to work out what i need and don't need. This may sound lazy, but i don't have the time to do this, i don't have the energy to do this, i don't have the knowledge to do this. Most of the market that Linux needs to reach out and grab is like me, the computer techs are sold, the geeks and nerds are sold, the average user ? not yet, they will, but not yet.
Please don't get me wrong, i love the concept of linux, open-sourced, free, community built and driven, and i would switch back in minutes given the chance, but linux really needs that single element that MS still has, Gloss and simplicity.
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We have one. It's called X.
Look at Loki's games. None of them require you to use KDE, or GNOME. They all work just fine with any windowing environment under X.
I tell ya, I was a died in the wool Mac OS user for a long time (for good reason: I was a graphic designer. There are STILL a few good reasons a Mac is a better tool for GD's. In those days there were lots).
A big thing was, there is TONS of software for the Mac. Like 11,000 titles (and that was a few years ago). But no one I talked to believed it. Why? Becuase when you went into a computer store in middle America, you would see MAYBE a few titles and that's it. None of the numerous Hybrid CD's would be separately labeled or even with a sticker. Ditto with the hardware. There was a fair amount of hardware that would work just fine with a mac (external modems come to mind, with the proper adapter cable), but it wasn't labeled.
In short, it's tough to fight the perception that there isn't software. Maybe on-line shopping has picked up enough that it isn't as big an issue. But I don't think so.
It's one of those "mindshare" problems. I STILL have yet to meet ONE non-geek (i.e., not in the IT business) who has heard of Linux.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Jeez. I said BUSINESS. As in REAL WORLD. Not university. IT/CS/MIS whatever. I don't mean majors. I mean what you department is.
What I meant (translated for people who haven't gotten out of school) is: I've yet to meet one non-computer hobbyist, i.e., a person who, while they may be very computer literate, doesn't view them as a hobby, but merely a tool, who has ever heard of Linux. Is that clear enough?
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Look, everyone seems to be arguing about what the user sees. With user configurable themes, i think this is less important.
The real problem is that there are too many APIs: QT+KDE, GTK+Gnome, Motif, Tcl/Tk, etc. etc.
If i'm a software developer and i want to port my windows or mac product over to linux which one do i choose? Which one is the most supported and has a future? Which one is the most widely used? RedHat defaults to Gnome, Caldera and Corel default to KDE.
And no matter which one i choose i'm guaranteed to get flamed on SlashDot by partisans of the other. Great, just what i need: bad publicity. So screw the whole thing, Linux is for servers anyways, right? Or if i do decide to forge ahead i'll follow Mozilla's lead and invent my own. Ick.
IMHO the KDE vs. Gnome wars have damaged the adoption of Linux on the desktop more than anything else. I don't know how to solve the problem, but standardizing on one or the other is a critical step in attracting more widespread commercial software support.
As little as a year ago, I think that this would be a pretty clear decision in favor of MS. Now, it's much tougher. Mandrake is now polished to such a degree that a pre-configured machine should be about as easy for a newbie to comprehend as Win9x is. But even as good as Mandrake is, I'd still have a hard time not just going with Windows.
If your mother is very old and has no prior computer experience, this might be for all practical purposes a permanent decision, since she might not have enough good years left to learn computing from scratch, then re-learn another OS if a different choice turns out to be better for her needs.
The thought of setting someone up as a Windows user _permanently_ makes it even harder to not go with Linux, but you need to put your mom's interests above your own, since she'll be the one using the machine. Make it easy for her. Give her what her friends will be using, so she can have meaningful conversations with them about computers, and so she has the option to use apps that she might want, like Quicken or a commercial tax package that just don't have good Linux alternatives right now. And think about the times when she can't get a plugin to view some cutesy web site that a friend suggests, or some web "greeting card" that someone sends her. Those things may seem better off avoided by you, but she may not see it that way. So, as much as I dislike Windows, I think it may still be the right choice for some users right now. Especially for older folks, who may not have enough lifespan or adaptability to benefit from the future improvements.
I guess it all depends on how much of a bet you want to make on the rate of development of Linux apps and/or software like Wine that would allow using Windows apps under Linux/X. (yes, I know VMware works pretty well right now, but that still requires learning a lot about two OS's, running Windows apps under Wine doesn't require quite as much learning about Windows). If a broad range of plugins appear, and most of the "application gaps" are filled with equal or better alternatives over, say, 18 to 24 months, then these things would be coming out at about the time she's far enough into the learning curve to start taking on new apps. It's a gamble. And she'd still have the problem of being on a different wavelength than most of her friends when it comes to discussing computers.
---
Peace,
vilvoy
Ease of use and flexibility don't have to be mutually exclusive. You can go a long way towards making a very flexible system easy to use just by having some carefully chosen defaults and a choice of either a very detailed manual process or a "just do it" kind of button that accepts all the defaults, (maybe with a few conditionals based on what's already present) and goes on about its business with little or no further user interaction. The newbies are taken care of, and the geeks don't lose any control in the process.
Even as much as "pointy clicky" things might rub some people the wrong way, this kind of ease can be valuable even to experts. Saving time is a valid benefit even for those who do know what they're doing. Accepting an automated default install then tweaking a few things afterwards can often be much faster than manually stepping through the whole process just to arive at the same place when it's all done.
Ease of use and ease of installation/configuration have much room for improvement. And that's true to some degree under Windows as well. And if it's done right, no one has to lose anything in the process.
Sometimes I think the uber geeks who almost religiously condemn anything that even hints at being useable by non-experts are almost as small minded, (and probably even more counter-productive) as the technophobes who seem incapable of doing or exploring anything that requires reading some documentation or clicking more than one button
---
Peace,
vilvoy
Apple got the GUI right the first time out, and nobody's really made any earth shattering improvements to it since.
Maybe that's the problem. Everyone is suffering from tunnel vision and can't come up with anything really innovative.
For a hint of something that a GUI might do differently, go to http://www.inxight.com and click the "site map" link. Then imagine what it might be like if your GUI could do that right on your desktop. Maybe problematic, but it could be refined. You probably can't use Inxight's "hyperbolic tree" idea as-is because of intellectual property issues, but maybe looking at it might get the creative juices flowing to help break out of the the traditional GUI thought box.
---
Peace,
vilvoy
Your hypothesis -- that Unix needs to match Windows' (hey, get that apostrophe right!) market penetration is false, so your consequent is, well, inconsequential. :-)
If you re-read my post, you'll notice that I never actually presented that hypothesis. The topic was how Linux might be made viable as a mainstream OS, which is, afterall, the topic of the article that started this discussion. Whether doing that is good or bad is a seperate issue.
---
Peace,
vilvoy
i think before linux can really make it big it pretty much needs to become slightly more idiot-proof. Something along the lines of, you whack a CD in your drive, click on some icon to install and voila there it is... but then again that's prolly not linux is really all about...
think the fact that it's predominatlyly an OS for people who knows what they're doing and/or people who are interested in computers enough to learn something about it... the moajority of computer users are still people who turns on their new user-friendly iMac to just look at stuff round the web and type up the occasional word doco here and there.. they don't give a toss really about what goes on, and i doubt they could be really bothered to just to learn about linux
I keep hearing complaints from winusers about Linux lacking a single .exe like file that could run on any Linux box without paying care about dists and/or libraries versions, the answer is there, and is really too simple but sadly most programmers are just too lazy: the STATIC binary. I know these are huge; but its just what these people want; why not make everyone happy, taking them away the complex of compiling by just making everything available as STATIC binaries as well?
Heck, even binaries are easier to install than RPMs thingies; and when truly STATIC you don't need to pay attention for dependencies either...
What we need people is a main Linux web site offering STATIC compiled version of all the popular and most needed software (if not all). If not fully STATIC, at least the usual LIBC5/GLIBC2.x flavor would give newcomers a heaven; and the price for not taking care on how to compile is the penalty in app size, just as is a reward if you do care and find out how.
So please give us those STATIC BINARIES! Not everyone can (or care to) compile you know.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Geek leader (got it)
Developers (got em)
More apps (need it)
Stability (got it)
Browser (got it)
_____________________________________
Xwindows manager manager ?
_____________________________________
There *is* a way to do that and it's called Debian. The apt-get utility manages all that and more. If you ask apt-get to install a new package, or a new version of an installed one, it will also download and install/upgrade the needed libraries.
I still find the combination of LaTeX and a PostScript printer to be unbeatable for all the text processing I do. No GUI app I've ever used even comes close for quality of output. And the IBM Infoprint Color 8 I've been working on at work produces very nice output from Linux and several other unices.
All that being said, I've suggested in the past that the X protocol could be used to render graphics into a printer format. This would give you the benefits of having a single unified driver which every application could use. Apparently there's a X Consortium extension to X called xprt which does that, but I've been able to find very little information on it.
In addition, your driver could be set up to read Adobe PPD files, which would let one printer driver drive practically every PostScript device on the planet. You could gain similar benefits with PCL by writing a parser for the Microsoft GPD format, which is pretty well documented. And The Printer Working Group (http://www.pwg.org) is working on an XML based printer definition format called UPDF (I sat in on one of their meetings and spread a little GNU propiganda :-)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If the world wants an operating system that they can put on all their desktops and think they're special for running, why doesn't someone make a free operating system based off of BeOS that stresses multimedia rather than a fast TCP/IP stack; something the "average user" cares about and leave Linux to the nerds.
--
Joshua C. Stein
Superblock Information Systems
Is the rest of your family in your mother's town going to use her computer? I think Mandrake is a great choice if she is not going to change the PC. I put Win95 on my mom's machine just because it was in the days of Redhat 5.0 and the gui was lacking a bit. She probably wouldn't have been as happy with AfterStep as with 95. Now I would like her to run Mandrake with KDE but she knows 95 a little and she detests change.
More software that's makes money needs to be developed. If Midwest cattle farmers raised beef cattle out of altruistic love for say NYC citizens, people in NY would starve (except maybe the vegetarians).If Linux users think everything should be free then they will figuratively starve too. That is not too say I don't like the open source movement, I do. It's just that more companies need to be started to address the things that need changing. Greed is good
I am a Microsoft certified Solutions Developer with a MS in Computer Science and over 10 years experience programming various systems...including Linux....for departmental/group solutions. I don't write kernels or compilers for a living. I write stuff that makes business more effiecient.
It is my humble opinion that Linux is missing 2 things:
1) A "standard" component architecture. Specifically a component arhitecture to define business objects. MS has COM, *nix is fragmented around various implementations of Corba and the closed source Java. MS's success can partially be attributed to their focus. Everything, *everything*, they produce is based on COM. I can write a component in whatever language and have it run equally well in VB, server side script, in Office etc...
2) Tools and a development environment to access coporate databases. Data is the life blood of business. MS makes it easy for developers to get at databases. Linux does not. Not surprisingly MS has made COM objects to access all sorts of databases (I am not talking about the silly data control here either).
Without these two pieces, business programming in Linux is a pain compared to MS. I would hazard a guess that 90% of the software that is written in the world can be classified as "business" software. I define "businness" software that solves problems at a departmental or group level. If you want world domination, go after the 90% of the market and the remaining 10% will follow.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Magic numbers? So what's the magic number for a plain text file in UTF-8 as opposed to ISO 8859-1?
My ideal file system would
- store a MIME 'content-type' for each file (as BeFS),
- allow file-names with up to at least 255 of any Unicode UCS2 codepoints, and
- have polyhierarchic directory structures (i.e. enforce acyclicity but not require trees -- as if you could hard-link to non-ancestor directories, giving directories multiple parents)
Trouble is, this sort of thing is rather outside what the average GNU/Linux program expects from a file-system...New OS, anyone?
Here's what I think people mean when they talk about an example of a standard UI:
Office2k, IE and Explorer all have all of the above, and it makes it much easier for everybody's grandparents to use computers if that's true.
Exactly. The more standard the gui is, the more people we don't want to see in the Linux community, the type who want to do their work, rather then constantly learning new interfaces.
As such, I suggest we start making Linux less friendly, or standardized.
Programs should all follow completely different user interfaces. Anyone who doesn't want to learn a completely different interface to use your program isn't important anyways.
As such, I have noticed some dimaying regularities in Linux.
The menu bar seems to always either be at the top of the screen, in the window, or accessable by right click. Be creative. Have the menu pop up by some easy key command like ctrl-alt-shift-F1, or something.
Scrollbars. While varying whether they are on the left or right is a good start, it isn't obscure, or creative enough. Either make it go on a diagonal, or some weird path, while reversing the arbitrary "up arrow goes up" sydrome, or, again, eliminate the scroll bars in favor of easy to use key shortcuts, like ctrl-alt-f, and cntl-alt-b.
What is with the ever present file and edit menus? Redistribute the commands to more entertainingly named menus, or better yet, get rid of some of them entirely. Your program is good enough that no one will ever need that quit option, anyways.
Moving and resizing the windows are entirely to easy. Surely we could tuck the functionality in a menu, a icon with a picture that bears no relation to the task at hand, or, again, a really obscure key shortcut?
Your program ought to rely on really obscure libraries. Don't bother to document where to find them, either. The hunt is all the fun.
Anyways, follow these suggestions in all your programs, and watch the number of people using Linux who complain about the user interface dwindle away, as they migrate back to other platforms...
--Arcum
--Arcum
Correct.
...). I can not understand why somebody would even consider using an OS which doesn't support file versions.
Lack of file versions is BY FAR the biggest problem in Linux (and Unix and Windows and
If you REALLY NEED to use Linux/Windows/Unix (e.g. forced by an employer), the correct solution is use a VMS machine connected with DECnet as the filesystem. Otherwise you are subject to Linux/Windows/Unix's complete brainlessness for writing files, and any file is liable to be randomly deleted at any time.
Fortunately, every implementation of file versioning has options to effectively turn it off. So, if you think it "sucks", you can turn it off. Unfortunately, OS'es which do not implement versioning do not have options to turn it on. So, if you support choice, file versioning is clearly the way to go.
Furthermore, versioning is not needed because of "rm"; it is needed by any program which writes files. Any programmer who has written a program which is even remotely non-trivial realizes that versioning is aboslutely integral to finding bugs. (And, no, CVS/RCS/etc. do not come close). Since you are obviously not a programmer, it will be harder to convince you and other non-programmers or the usefulness of versioning.
I don't want them using Linux. Actually, the best thing for Linux is to stay "fringe" or in the "power user" domain.
/etc/skel back" script, they can even recover from damage they've done - all without the possibility to damage their system.
t -delete-it-and-keep-running-Word" OS 98.
I disagree. Believe it or not, there are some (rather) intelligent people who can't (and don't necessarily need to) handle their computers well.
Would you want your favorite fiction writer's latest work destroyed by a bluescreen just before he could click on "save"? Probably not - so we should give them the option to have a very stable OS that suits all their needs, including usabiity for beginners.
With other words, Linux, runlevel 5, KDE and/or GNOME...
They don't even need to know the root password so they can't mess the system, up beyond repair - with an additional "su to root, delete all dotfiles and copy the ones from
Because of its stability and security, Linux is IMO a perfect OS for beginners. Much better than "I-never-used-that-C:\WINDOWS-program-so-I'll-jus
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Title says it all -- I want undelete/salvage built right into the file system. Not a trashy trashcan like Windows NT (where it only works for files deleted in Explorer) but deep down in the file system.
This is the feature that my users have been longing for since we replaced our Novell file server with a Linux machine
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
I have never read good user documentation for linux. Most linux documentation that I have seen is the equivalent of this:
Q: "How do I make my car go?"
Equivalent Linux A: "You use the fuel pump to draw fuel from the tank in the rear of the car into the fuel injection manifold.... blah blah blah."
This answer is technically correct and packed full of detail, however a better answer for a mainstream user is:
Good A: "Press the gas pedal."
Most users are users (duh), not programmers. They have neither the desire to program, nor are they likely to be good at it if they actually tried. They don't care how the code works, just that it does. Until linux programmers learn to write code (and documentation) for users not themselves, linux will not become mainstream.
I'm also wondering how long it will be until nontechnical newbies trying linux start really knocking it. This won't happen because the OS is bad, but because the average Linux user is really starting to turn into an @$$#*!= elitist technosnob who is unwilling to come off his (or her) high horse to help someone who has no desire to write code, understand the workings of an OS, or even become a programmer in any way shape or form.
In other words, stop making newbies edit intimidating .conf files to get their stuff to work in the first place. Write a nice graphical routine that allows the newbie to change the most common options by checkboxes. This will change the .conf file. Nothing is sacrificed because everything is still run from the text .conf file but the newbie gets to be less intimidated.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Actually, very few of these printers are winprinters. The HP Deskjet series have nothing to do with winprinters. They are by far the most usual printer you'll find on a desktop.
But in 99% of the cases, those HP's are driven by Windows drivers which use them as if they were winprinters.
But I can't agree with you. There's no real comparison between winmodems (which suck) and winprinters. The printer, by a rational definition, IS a printing head and a carriage system. Ask Gutenberg !
Moreover, the Windows model of transmitting a pre-processed bitmap to the printer works far better than the Linux (or un*x) model of transmitting a pre-processed postcript to an emulator which... transmits a bitmap to the printer !!! Remember real postscript systems are rare, expensive, and reserved to high-end systems.
Just look at the print quality you can achieve with a simple $100 printer with windows drivers and compare with the garbage Ghostscript usually produces. The Windows approach works better !
I think that Linux enthousiasts (I'm one of them) should stop slamming a technology just because it was Microsoft's choice and not Linux's.
Stéphane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
You're touching a very important problem here. When Linux was considered as a server-only OS (something it IS excellent for), the Post/Ghost-script model was OK.
:/
The Y2K goal for Linux seems to be the desktop. For that purpose, I'm not sure that the Post/Ghost-script model is OK : most desktop users use low-end printers, that aren't Postscript compatible.
Moreover, with Ghostscript, the applications (say the Gimp) are not aware of the limitations and abilities of the printer. Think about the paper borders, for instance. That's hard to print a precise job when your printer and your app can't communicate in both directions. Worse, only through an emulation
If desktop printers were Postscript-compatible, there would be no problem with it (for instance, Postscript does an excellent job in high-end Macintosh (pre-)press systems). But using an emulated mono-directional language, just doesn't make it for this purpose, IMHO.
Since companies (HP, Epson, Canon, Lexmark,...) don't seem to be ready to develop Linux drivers, we should encourage the projects to develop performant Linux printer drivers, not based on Postscript emulation anymore, but in a Windows-like approach, in other words in a bitmap approach. (I'm not trolling here, but the Windows approach is better for the desktop printers).
Stéphane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
Every one of my friends loves linux. It's stable, fast, secure, and looks better than any GUI. Problems is, you still can't play Rogue Spear on it. Or Falcon 4. Or Homeworld. Or almost any current game, save Quake 3 Arena. This is the only thing that makes me keep 500 megs of VFAT on my system.
Oh, and don't make me bring up WINE. It just doesn't cut it, ok?
What the heck is a 'sig'?
If Linux is so lame, why don't you try this test: Let's see if you can write and compile a parallel Finite Element CFD code for computing 3D flows on unstructured grids. Then run it on a grid with 10 million+ tetrahedral elements for over a week. I would venture a guess that Microsoft software is not even close to being able to do this. I routinely do accomplish runs like this on our Beowulf cluster at NASA. And yes, I do have a social life, a girlfriend and I ride my bicycle 20 miles a day (I don't drive my car unless I have to).
For starters, how about bootable linux cds? I routinely take hard disks from one machine to another with different motherboard, video, net NIC, etc. and within minutes, I'm up and running. Why not automate this? Take over 50 or 100 Meg of the harddisk, temporarily or not, but essentially a zero footprint and zero commitment (like the price!) I could then carry such a CD with me to demo/leave for friends.
Next step is for more or less the same thing, but without requiring a reboot, the ability to launch a trimmed down Linux kernel as an app running alongside the other MSWin apps. In this scenario, linux's distinct advantages would be more accessible. Evangelists like me could easily install it on my friend's computers and provide them with little tools. Heck, people are so blown away every time I do a "whois" for them. There are tons of little things like that, fips, fdisk, lilo... Linux could be the new what-the-old-Norton-Utilities-were. Also, MP3 tools I think are the Next (well, current) Big Thing and linux could be a big player.
With more extensive and low-level work, there are other short term opportunities. For example, network security, firewalls, NATs, etc. are much more transparent and fully developed under linux, and with the spread of cable modems and ADSL, there is a growing need for people at home. One architecture (not too complex?) might be a virtual network card for MSWin that redirects to the Linux TCP/IP stack (the way VMWare does). The same sort of scheme for Linux running under MS NT workstation (or even server, for that matter) could offer real server functionality for people trapped in the MS NT world. One idea is: port Samba to MSWin! MS OSes can only be in only one workgroup at a time! Samba offers many more possibilities. ("if I could get it working," I should add. Samba's author keeps pointing out all the ways that MS's implementations have bugs... well, how come they just work, and I have to keep squinting at smb.conf?)
BTW, this all would equally apply to *BSD, HURD, etc. running under MS OS or each other. Yeah, I know that these are all kernels and if you don't boot them you're not running the real thing. But perhaps they/you need to reinspect that notion: I want a platform or platforms that offer me APIs and services. I'd love to mix and match them. I'd love to run them on one machine. Do not overlook the value of exposing your platforms to future developers: if CS students or high school students are able to play with your stuff, they might start to love it.
One more thing about what Linux needs for acceptance: other people here are suggesting a "standard GUI". I would endorse that notion in the following sense at least: once I learn how to cut and paste text with the keyboard and with the mouse, it should work the same absolutely everywhere. Once I learn how to navigate the FileOpen filesystem browser, it should work absolutely the same everywhere. I experimented with Applixware a few years ago and threw it out in disgust. Paste didn't work in FileOpen... yikes! Someone mentioned printing: it's not just slowness that's the problem, it's that configing the printer once doesn't config it for all apps. That stuff should be part of the OS, not the app.
Setup and install need to be more flexible and friendly...do not make up titles for things and expect me to know what you mean RedHat asks some questions about printer services... I want to print, yes, but the printer is on another machine... so, do I want Printer Services? I still don't know the answer. And don't get me started with that business about "Networked Workstation"... ok, do not ask me questions I won't know the answers to till later: "do I want to run barfd?" I don't know. What does it do? Do I really need to answer this question now? Tell me how I can decide later, then I wouldn't have to agonize over the question. I'm making these suggestions as a relative expert: I configure ipchains, I configure hosts.deny, I know how to kernel-config, I know emacs, C++, java, perl, NSAPI blah blah... but I simply don't know what barfd is. How must the newbies feel?
Killer apps? I don't think new ones are needed in particular, but how about the following basics out of the box. No, I'm not being particularly original, but I think this is distilled down to the essence: a mail client that works with MS Exchange Server, and a relatively simple WYSIWYG word processor that can read and create .DOC mail attachments, and an .XLS compatible spreadsheet. These are staples in many offices.
However, what I especially learned was that I didn't make my point clearly enough. It's no fun posting in a moribund thread so I'll mostly await the day that the topic comes up again. However, if you are here reading this, no point in sending you away empty handed:
You make a big deal that linux is a kernel, it can't run on another OS. Don't think so narrow mindedly, it's kinda like recursion: the x86 architecture is a virtual machine created by the microcode running on the hardware. MS has a kernel running on that which presents another virtual machine I like to call Win32. VMWare takes that virtual machine and turns it back into a virtual x86. linux-kernel is software that turns a x86 into "linux", and linux-kernel can also turn an SPARC or Alpha into "linux". All I'm saying is that it would be useful to turn Win32 into "linux".
For, after all, a linux kernel is mostly what it does, a black box, not what it is inside. Inside is memory management, scheduling, etc... all the stuff that gives geeks software-woodies. But none of that matters most of the time. It's a VM that apps run on.
To show you how you don't actually disagree with me: you should have replied to the main topic of the thread "What does linux need". You should have said, "nothing, linux is a kernel, it already has everything a kernel needs." Everyone else in this thread's been saying stuff about apps, ui, etc. What made my post different was that I was pointing out places on the bottom end, the back end, all of the places that linux needs to plug into and for some reason that always ruffles geek feathers. The network of MS Win installations, sys admins, people who know how to use it, etc. is extremely deep. The network is the computer, that network is the computer, that's the VM on which linux needs to run. Then, when users get used to the new black box, swap out the back end.
I recall a few years back seeing a beta version of Microsoft Site Server somethingrather that had a site visualization tool which looked _extremely_ similar to the sitemap device used at inxight.com. I'm not sure if MS licensed it from them, or they licensed it from MS, or if it's just a nifty public-domain idea, but that is not the only place I've seen it.
Has anybody else seen this elsewhere?
if you want cool words.)
Finally, tap button#2 to paste whatever is in your cut buffer. Cut and paste works fine. It's easy.
Many posts here are bashing the concept of a UI standard or even catering to the average user.
The whole "I am ultra computer literate and everyone else can go to hell" attitude will not make Linux more popular with consumers. With all the hype there is right now, many are going to, and will attempt to adopt it as an alternative to what they have now. By not even making a serious effort to accomadate them, the Linux community will come off as unconcerned and otherwise purpetuate the myth that all Linux users have some sort of superiority complex that puts them above those who want their computing experiance to be consistant and easy.
It appears that people are trying to cause a backlash by being high-and-mighty about things. The harsh reality is that most home users don't care about the technical aspects of their OS. Why do you think the current MacOS has been so popular even though the underlying code is extremly outdated?
People enjoy the user experiance, they can do what they want, figure out how to fix problems in a matter of seconds without having to fight with their computer.
No great philosiphy or freedom of choice will bring most users to Linux. Unless they have a good reason to switch, they won't. When you take away all the technical advantages, Linux isn't very compelling. Making people feel bad about the fact they are not willing to throw away what they find a superior user experiance just makes them less likely to bother trying it again in the future.
Alternatives such as OS X and even Be are closing in, and many, many people are willing to pay for an OS they can use than get one they are afraid of for free.
Make newbies welcome, or face the fact they won't be coming back.
From my experiences both of those window managers are very stable, although I will admit to running KDE more ofter then Gnome just because I like it more. The only time Iv ever had X crash at all was when I was trying to get Mesa and my Voodoo3 card to play Quake2, but that was my own fault for not configuring it correctly. But in that case all I did was hit ye' olde Alt-Ctrl-Backspace to kill X and everything was happy again.
I honestly think that linux is going to hurt itself by attempting to go mainstream right now. Any inroads that it makes into the average home right now will be based on hype. Hype spread by underinformed media to completely uninformed people. The hype that everyone is hearing about doesn't flaunt the technical marvels of linux, because the average person doesn't understand or care about that. Any computer novice that tries to install linux will run into problems, they'll get super frustrated, they'll hate it, and that'll be the end of it for them, back to windows. When linux gets all of this cleared up, it'll be too late.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
You can find them here.
Apple got the GUI right the first time out, and nobody's really made any earth shattering improvements to it since. Why not just steal their work, as great artists are known to do? There can still be a lot of flexibility in how widgets look, but programs should work in more or less the same way from the user's standpoint. Users should be able to expect a new program to work like other programs they already know. This, as much as anything, has been what's kept Apple's rabid customers loyal to the Mac over the past 15 years.
-jimbo
"Hold me Bob!" "I would if I could man!" -Larry and Bob in VeggieTales
Hey, I don't have a rot13 button on my webbrowser, and it's Nutscrape on Linux. I had to rot13 that the hard way. ;)
Syllable : It's an Operating System
My wife is a second grade teacher in a low income district. We have no problem getting friends and businesses to donate hardware, but we have a problem with software. My wife needs packages which get the kids more familiar with the computer while reinforcing their math/reading with visual rewards. Linux has many desirable features for her classroom: price, security, reliability, word processing, internet tools... But a lack of comercial quality educational games.
This makes Linux nearly acceptable as an operating system.
linux is on the heals of M$ in such a short amount of time linux is on the lips of so many people, the threats to M$ are looming, we're having this thread. Linux is DOING all the right things, linux is moving forward at a rapid pace, linux will pass M$. I'm sure linux will not dominate the world as a monopoly of sorts, people like us will always be developing something new, cutting edge, and . . difficult for most. The general public will use what we give them that is User friendly, pretty and simple. we will make that for them in linux im sure. But, us, the developers the REAL Linux users will work in the trenches making it stronger, faster, more robust, more unlike M$. Linux will be all that we make it to be. Give linux some time and viola, all those crazy things we asked for will be there. --The Remembered vist
--The remembered vist
In early '95 I installed Solaris 2.4 on a Sparc5.
After choosing the packages I wanted to install (from a clean and easy-to-understand menu), the install program decided how much disk space I needed, suggested minimum and recommended partition sizes, and wouldn't let me go below the minimum. Up until actually hitting the 'start install' button, I could change any of the partition sizes and packages at will.
Recently I installed RedHat6.0. After FIRST choosing the partition sizes, I picked my packages to be installed from a long and ugly list, at which point I was told my proposed partitions were too small. Changing them required starting the install process over from scratch!
I wanted my MBR to remain intact, and point to lilo on hda2 to boot from hda5. Lilo insisted on installing itself in the (unusable) BR of hda5.
And don't even get me started on setting up/configuring X11. Last week's discussion speaks loudly enough on that issue.
The point is, I am a professional Unix admin, and this was the most damnably aggravating install I've EVER done, since SunOS4.0! (where you had to configure the kernel by hand before starting the install) RedHat6.0 is so far behind Sun, HP, IBM, SCO, and yes, Windows (gasp!) in terms of getting a machine up and running that I've started telling my friends to go with Solaris on their Intel boxes. A friend of mine is using Caldera, and he said it was a breeze (and it worked) to install. Maybe that's the way to go.
But if you can't install it and get it RUNNING in half a day, people won't use it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
To be honest, I don't think it is just the FPS shooters which are attractive to the Linux crowd. In fact, the history of games on Unix in general seems to suggest that almost anything goes, from the phenomenal longevity of Xpilot with its fast multiplayer action, to the Rogue-like collection (most notably Angband and Nethack, along with Omega and others) and of course the many MUDs. In my opinion, the balance seems to be more towrds thinking, strategy games than anything else.
Now, the reasons for this trend so far may well be that vt terminals are fairly universal, and that the games in the past have been developed for universality. Looking at the current state of development in the Linux game web pages, such as LinuxGames and HappyPenguin, I see various hopeful signs that 3D is really picking up (Parsec, Xracer) and the arrival of Xfree86 4.0 will further enhance developments in this area.
One of the weaknesses of the Linux game development is that the big companies are still too wary of getting into producing Linux games. Loki is doing a great job in getting companies to give the go-ahead for porting games. For the foreseeable future I suspect that Loki's expertise in the Linux field will continue to make this an easier route for games to appear on the Linux platform. It will be a while before Linux expertise is widely grounded inside commercial game companies and Linux versions are produced in-house, although obviously id software has no problems in this area!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Note that both StarOffice and Framamaker support decent font use, but have created their own unique ways of doing things. Adobe seems to have an ATM bundled somewhere in Frame. They use bitmapped fonts for smaller font sizes, use afm files for character kerning.
GTK and QT both only support an RBG, but not a CMYK model which keeps graphic applications out in the cold. Thus, Killustrator, Gimp, etc. don't get used when I'm trying to make a buck with my pitiful design business.
I have to file up my old 60mhz Power Mac for that.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
I am currently looking at setting up a small company in UK with a view to providing at cost+miniscule margin distribution of linux software (other than core O/S) but this is obviosly reliant on demand being high.
/. today? I guess most sysadmins have booked the day off for xmas :) :(
There is currently little market knowledge about linux demand so this is something I will have to begin tentatively.
Whether or not I will be distributing the commercial packages will remain to be seen as, likewise, will the possibility of distributing to retail outlets.
There is so much excellent software under GPL already, its only getting better and yet, joe public and joe corporate user know nothing of it; yet it is they who could benefit the most.
BTW: Isn't it going slow on
Unluckily I have to work
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I think that ACL Support could be very useful for linux in the server enviroment. Many poeple go with NT beacuse they have a much better control over acesss.. -a
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
It's just silly. The mainstream acceptance of Linux as a desktop OS would require concessions to be made in order for the jackass public to be able to use it. How could this possibly benefit those of us who use and enjoy Linux in its present state (somewhat difficult to use, steep learning curve)? Sure, then we could boast about how we were using it "before it was cool", but what good does that do? By just shutting up and enjoying Linux for what it is, we will ensure that any improvements are done with us in mind, not Larry Lunchpail or Sally Housecoat, who even now find Windows95 baffling.
Yes, I'm selfish, but I don't care. I've had enough of the "make it simple enough for a chimp to use" mentality that has become so common in computers and technology. Sometimes, quality means inconvenience. I like the fact that installing Linux software requires more than a mouse click... it means I have to know and understand what is happening. Dumbing things down so that every mindless cretin can 'play too' will eventually lower Linux to the level of Windows... guaranteed.
So, be careful what you wish for when spewing ideas on how to get Linux to the desktop - it might actually happen.
-SG
NerdPerfect.com : breakfast of champions.
Stupid Winix whiners ???? THAT is why linux will never come close to beating windows, macos, or even coming into a quasi mainstream. 80-90% of all linux comments involve bashing windows, well guess what a lot of people recognize that windows isn't the best, but it's got a lot of features that make it easy to use, I for one don't want to read a few 100 pages just to write a letter to granny. I've used linux, windows, macs, you name it, and the best os is prbly WinNT, because it's supported, and it's easy to use. Not to mention MS doesn't yell and threaten whenever someone offers a suggestion on how to improve windows, they consider the idea, then they buy it. I for one am just sick and tired of hearing about how grand linux is and how windows blows, guess what, I can do everything I want on a windows machine, and I can do everything I want on a linux machine, the only diffrence to me is that one group of users are assholes, and the other are idiots.
1) Hardware support with most linux distributions blows. No sort of new printer is ever supported. Some old one aren't either. My HP 860Cse is 3 years old, and there's not printer support for it with any RedHat product. Likewise, trying to get X to work is a crapshoot --- Sometimes my video card driver works, sometimes it won't. It worked fine for my Diamond Stealth, but refuses to detect my RAGE IIC chipset built-in to my new motherboard. Same for ethernet cards. RH 5.x autodetects my NE2000 rip-off, but 6.x doesn't. Go figure. I shouldn't have to play these games. Either RedHat, Debian, etc should include 80 bajillion drivers, or hardware manufaturers should include linux drivers on their install disks. Let em add one more gripe --- installing new hardware without reinstalling Linux.
2) Installation is typically painful. Repartitioning under Win98 is generally difficult unless you have partition magic. But this is not the fault of the Linux people. Most of the time it works, but occasionally it will do strange things like lock up, or lilo will refuse to install itself.
3) Despite the fact that LaTeX and Emacs means freedom from Microsoft Word & Powerpoint for me, the average business user (who would be our mainstream) still is looking for similarly powerful products from Linux. Corel WP is out there, but a lot of other product niches are not filled. They have to be for the average Joe to go to linux.
When i first installed linux i accidently wiped out windows (not a big loss - my excuse for such a stupid mistake : incoherent from lack of sleep (or as some may look at it "the right way to install linux"))
My second attempt was successful(mostly) but it wasnt as easy as installing Windows and dear god nothing near as easy as installing macOS. Making the installer less ugly, less stupid, and less frustrating would also help.
(oddly i've always have more problems installing 98 than NT)
piranesi (unfortunatly an idiot)
For Linux to really take off, it needs to be a better Windows.
I don't know if it's better now, but a year or so ago, installing E + Gnome on my system brought it to a halt. I was stunned by the performance improvement that came from switching to a more lightweight UI. Programmers need to be more careful what they release, and let let their s/w kill people's systems.
As far as installs, I'm embarassed to say that I work with several engineers who can barely install Windows, let alone any version of Linux. People, even technical people, are dumbing down. I grew up with a soldering iron in my hand (my parents wouldn't let me plug it in til I was 10 -- just kidding) wire-wrapping boards, modifying BIOS, burning EPROMs. To me, a glitch in an install is just something to be researched and fixed. To many others, it's a sign that "this thing sucks" and they give up. Corel Linux is the only distro that installs cleanly on my notebook. All others break on the install and need massaging. Corel's acheivement is moving Linux forward.
Sun has a good start with StarOffice. But the whole UI (taking over the interface) is confusing. I hope the new version they are working on will do things a little smarter -- like have a small dock to launch the individual apps. I saw StarOffice (open, modify, save) a 19 MB. word document in a fraction of the time that NT + Word took -- on a computer with (literally) 1/4 the CPU and memory. Apps like StarOffice show great promise, but they need not be o "wierd". It was obviously laid out during the GUI wars.
As a final note, I suspect that most people do little more than surf the web with their PCs. Corel Linux, once again, has focused on this. They have a simple install, KDE ends up with a netscape icon on the desktop, but I will say the ISP info should be easier for the mainstream person.
One big concern I have for Linux is the shift to NT servers. Many pages I visit have "FrontPage" generated html now, asp, and the cgi stuff is going away. In my opinion, they who control the server will control the desktop. For example, if NT see a Linux/Netscape machine attach, just refuse to serve. Or server an error page -- "Your browser needs to be upgraded".
Linux needs better software on both ends, and also to pick up slack in ecommerce, video streaming, etc., as well as online software distribution and searching. In many ways, I think Linux is falling back. But I did notice the bookstore in the local mall had SUSE Linux on the shelves. That's a plus.
I saw a display for Windows 2000 at Staples last night. Special introductory offer : $695. Well at that price, it must have been some kind of bundle.
Linux and Linux software is priced well, but where is the Linux Media Player? Or an Exchange-compatible mail client? Web content is going to kill Linux, I can practically guarantee that. Remember, all those windows media streams popping up everywhere are presumable created on NT boxen...
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Consider, what does Linux do for the average user that Windows does not? Surf the web? Nope. Word processing? Nope. Financials? Nope. Instant messaging? Nope. The arguement for general market acceptance is a hard one to make at this point. You have to realize, that means not me or you, but our parents and nontechnical friends. My dad frankly does not care what OS he's running so long as he can get his stock quotes, do his online trades, write his emails, and call it a day. Yes, it's true Linux can do all that...but it's *way* more difficult than in windows. (Also, the whole lack of a leading browser is a big problem. NS cannot compete with IE5 at this point, but that's another story.) See, my parents don't care about being able to telnet in. They have no desire to tweak their X setup to run perfectly on their hardware. They already paid for their win98 and if there's no compelling reason to switch, they're not going to. Remember, Linux is only free if your time isn't worth anything...
I tried over and over again to get XFree86 to work with a couple of Trident video cards I had lying around (3DImage 985 and TGUI 9680), and never could seem to get a "standard" sync rate out of the damn config programs. The 985 was a total loss so I used it in the Windoze machine I made for my brother and his family. And on a NEC MultiSync 4D, the best I could do with the 9680 was 1024x768 interlaced. Solaris 7, in spite of its poor video card support (as in don't bother if the card is less than a year or two old) got a proper 1024x768 out of it.
But when I put in an S3 card I got for $5 at a computer swap meet show, it worked perfectly the first time. So there was more involved than just getting the right mode line for the monitor. I still haven't quite yet figured out (even after reading ESR's HOWTO) where the clocks line comes from. (Other than "X -probeonly")
But what bugged me most was that I was at the mercy of the config programs to decide what sync rate to use with the monitor, rather than selecting resolution + refresh rate like NT 4.0 lets you do.
There's nothing wrong with being able to come up with your own modelines, but there should also be the option to select from at least the VESA standard sync rates.
But the main thing keeping me from switching away from MacOS as a desktop OS (I already love Linux as a server/cmdline OS) is the lack of a good newsreader. Basically, I hate paned newsreaders more than I hate frames in web pages. You have a choice between either seeing six messages at a time or six lines of a message at a time, because I've only seen them with a horizontally divided pane. What I really want is a newsreader which opens the messages in separate windows, like NewsWatcher, and can display Japanese text, too. (which is the only reason I don't use MT NewsWatcher)
But in trying to find one, of the first two I downloaded, one had a RPM and when I ran it, I found it unsatisfactory. The other one was just source code and I couldn't get it to compile because it wanted the header file to some library I couldn't find.
What I am trying to say is this: Linux also needs more binary software. The source code is nice to have for the tweaks and the geeks who have the time to waste. But a precompiled binary saves a lot of time to get something up and running quickly and painlessly.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
ISTR that NT isn't C2 either unless you run one of a couple of specific patch levels and have no network card installed.
Just because one particular almost useless configuration of NT received a C2 certification doesn't mean every NT installation is C2.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }