Do you not know anything about the war of 1812? The US were the ones invading Canada, the British Empire was defending itself from the Americans not the other way around.
Because the closed source drivers/programs usually suck and no one can improve on them except for the company that made them and therefore they won't stop sucking usually. If its open source, then if it sucks people can fix it. I believe Linux has about 1% marketshare or so and just because it has low market share doesn't mean the community should accept every contribution.
When did you last use linux? 5 years ago? I hardly ever fiddle around with my install of Slackware which is supposed to be a lot harder to use then Ubuntu. What do you find thats a lot of work?
Most people probably won't know what to do with it anyway and it will end up in the bin. The average person will need help installing and configuring anything.
That's an explanation, not a solution - and tends to support the parent poster's argument.
I wasn't trying to solve anything.
It fundamentally IS NOT RELEVANT what technical arguments can be made to support a particular design, if the upshot is that that design DOES NOT DELIVER a functional system.
Where 'functional' in this case means 'the system should at all times work with currently shipping bulk-retail hardware.'
I don't think that any os works at all times with current hardware, hell, I've had just about as much problems with wireless cards in windows as in linux.
It just doesn't matter what technical reasons may or may not hold why Linux doesn't work with Currently Selling Widget X. If it does not work for User Z with Currently Selling Widget X, then that's a bug and needs to be fixed.
Sure it does, but kernel devs are superman and can't write drivers for all hardware instantly and thats why people use ndiswrapper, its a temporary fix
I think the OP's main problem was that he was using an unstable distro, if he were to use a distro that doesn't upgrade the kernel as much, then he/she would have a much better experience
If it's open source and *doesn't* have a GUI, it's probably fantastic. My email, programming, backups, version control etc. is all open source and I wouldn't have it any other way.
But as soon as you add a GUI and plug in a monitor, the quality drops away and things start to get iffy. What happened with KDE4, for example, was unacceptable. You can't just dump everything and expect users to accomodate that.
Actually it was the distro maintainers that did that to the users, the KDE 4 team made it quite clear that it wasn't ready yet.
And stability. A lot of open source apps are fantastic but they have rough edges - little bugs and issues. The way media managers like Rhythmbox and Amarok handle an iPod, for example: sometimes I get weird errors about mounting the iPod, or it doesn't behave properly when there's no free space left, and other little issues. They may not be show stoppers, but they're enough to give you a bad impression. The quality just isn't quite there.
Its not like Apple goes out of its way to make sure iPods only work with itunes or anything
And you know what the worst part is? This isn't getting any better. Open source GUIs are about the same quality now as they were a decade ago. Sure they're more capable, but all the rough edges are still there and don't seem to be going away. I've been using desktop Linux since Redhat 5.2 and I can honestly say the standards and general incompleteness, relative to the competition, are about the same today as they were back then.
I still use Linux on my desktop but I'm tempted to buy a Mac next time and use it as a front-end, while keeping all the 'real' stuff on a Linux box. But I don't want to manage two computers if I can help it. Ho hum.
I find it hard to believe that F/OSS GUIs haven't changed at all in a decade, perhaps you can give some examples?
Are you smoking something? Obviously since not all hardware works in linux then the way kernel handles drivers is out dated and busted. There are 2 reasons why the OP's wireless card didn't work very well, the first reason is that a lot of hardware companies don't make drivers for linux and so you have to use hacks to get the windows drivers working in linux.
The second reason is that Ubuntu is an unstable distro, which means that the software gets updated a lot, including the kernel. The way ndiswrapper works, is that part of it, is a userland app and another part of it is a kernel modue. The kernel module has to be recompiled every time you upgrade your kernel because of the way ndiswrapper is designed.
Pain-free soldiers could take the suffering out of war...
Pain-free Asian children could take the suffering out of Nike shoes...
I don't want to sound like a douche or anything, but I became vegitarian (not vegan though) a few months ago, and except for a few exceptions for fish, I've stuck to it pretty tight. I'll joke about the Nirvana lyric 'its ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings', but this is kind of just a step too far. Yeah, I think its somewhat ghoulish to find nourishment in the chard flesh and dead animals
Except for that fact that I can't use most of these sites because I'm a few miles north of the border, so I have to resort to torrenting because these sites are so retarded. IMO, they don't "get it" until you can stream where ever you are
I doubt anyone that uses Chrome cares about how it looks. The reason I use it is because it's as fast as Firefox 1.0 was. Now that Firefox 3.5 takes 30 seconds to start and crashes constantly (on Linux at least), I'd rather use a browser that's fast and stable (and yes, Chrome on Linux is still pre-alpha and it's more stable than Firefox).
Really? On my rig running slackware 12.1, firefox 3.5 starts almost instantly and crashes very rarely
I just tried Gimp 2.6 on windows XP SP3 and it worked perfectly fine, so I would be hard-pressed to believe that it still exists. If you can find a bug report or something similar that documents that behavior, then that would be different.
Take Gimp for example. It mimics almost everything in Photoshop and it does a great job generally, but there are many things that are just downright glitchy. Things that would never fly in a pay product, but I suspect for OSS, they were categorized as 'good enough' and lowered in priority for other bug fixes. Things like having to sometimes click on a tool 2 or 3 times before it registers or you end up applying the wrong tool. I haven't been using gimp for oh..say more than 2 years give or take, but the problem still exists.
Really? I've been using GIMP for over 2 years and I've never had that problem and I don't really understand how you know the bug still exists when you haven't used it for 2 years
There are always going to be bugs that linger for awhile, but exploits are usually fixed pretty quickly in high-profile F/OSS projects and compared to Adobe or Microsoft, I think they do pretty decent without having tons of paid developers
Slashdot Mirror
Do you not know anything about the war of 1812? The US were the ones invading Canada, the British Empire was defending itself from the Americans not the other way around.
Except for the fact without the US, China would make hardly any money
Because the closed source drivers/programs usually suck and no one can improve on them except for the company that made them and therefore they won't stop sucking usually. If its open source, then if it sucks people can fix it. I believe Linux has about 1% marketshare or so and just because it has low market share doesn't mean the community should accept every contribution.
When did you last use linux? 5 years ago? I hardly ever fiddle around with my install of Slackware which is supposed to be a lot harder to use then Ubuntu. What do you find thats a lot of work?
First you need to sacrifice your first born child and your right hand before you can even get within 50 feet of a hospital
Most people probably won't know what to do with it anyway and it will end up in the bin. The average person will need help installing and configuring anything.
Fixed it for you
That's an explanation, not a solution - and tends to support the parent poster's argument.
I wasn't trying to solve anything.
It fundamentally IS NOT RELEVANT what technical arguments can be made to support a particular design, if the upshot is that that design DOES NOT DELIVER a functional system.
Where 'functional' in this case means 'the system should at all times work with currently shipping bulk-retail hardware.'
I don't think that any os works at all times with current hardware, hell, I've had just about as much problems with wireless cards in windows as in linux.
It just doesn't matter what technical reasons may or may not hold why Linux doesn't work with Currently Selling Widget X. If it does not work for User Z with Currently Selling Widget X, then that's a bug and needs to be fixed.
Sure it does, but kernel devs are superman and can't write drivers for all hardware instantly and thats why people use ndiswrapper, its a temporary fix
I think the OP's main problem was that he was using an unstable distro, if he were to use a distro that doesn't upgrade the kernel as much, then he/she would have a much better experience
If it's open source and *doesn't* have a GUI, it's probably fantastic. My email, programming, backups, version control etc. is all open source and I wouldn't have it any other way.
But as soon as you add a GUI and plug in a monitor, the quality drops away and things start to get iffy. What happened with KDE4, for example, was unacceptable. You can't just dump everything and expect users to accomodate that.
Actually it was the distro maintainers that did that to the users, the KDE 4 team made it quite clear that it wasn't ready yet.
And stability. A lot of open source apps are fantastic but they have rough edges - little bugs and issues. The way media managers like Rhythmbox and Amarok handle an iPod, for example: sometimes I get weird errors about mounting the iPod, or it doesn't behave properly when there's no free space left, and other little issues. They may not be show stoppers, but they're enough to give you a bad impression. The quality just isn't quite there.
Its not like Apple goes out of its way to make sure iPods only work with itunes or anything
And you know what the worst part is? This isn't getting any better. Open source GUIs are about the same quality now as they were a decade ago. Sure they're more capable, but all the rough edges are still there and don't seem to be going away. I've been using desktop Linux since Redhat 5.2 and I can honestly say the standards and general incompleteness, relative to the competition, are about the same today as they were back then.
I still use Linux on my desktop but I'm tempted to buy a Mac next time and use it as a front-end, while keeping all the 'real' stuff on a Linux box. But I don't want to manage two computers if I can help it. Ho hum.
I find it hard to believe that F/OSS GUIs haven't changed at all in a decade, perhaps you can give some examples?
Are you smoking something? Obviously since not all hardware works in linux then the way kernel handles drivers is out dated and busted. There are 2 reasons why the OP's wireless card didn't work very well, the first reason is that a lot of hardware companies don't make drivers for linux and so you have to use hacks to get the windows drivers working in linux.
The second reason is that Ubuntu is an unstable distro, which means that the software gets updated a lot, including the kernel. The way ndiswrapper works, is that part of it, is a userland app and another part of it is a kernel modue. The kernel module has to be recompiled every time you upgrade your kernel because of the way ndiswrapper is designed.
Its because you run ubuntu, the slowest and most unstable distro ever made
Pain-free soldiers could take the suffering out of war... Pain-free Asian children could take the suffering out of Nike shoes... I don't want to sound like a douche or anything, but I became vegitarian (not vegan though) a few months ago, and except for a few exceptions for fish, I've stuck to it pretty tight. I'll joke about the Nirvana lyric 'its ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings', but this is kind of just a step too far. Yeah, I think its somewhat ghoulish to find nourishment in the chard flesh and dead animals
Because there is no protein in meat obviously.
Except for that fact that I can't use most of these sites because I'm a few miles north of the border, so I have to resort to torrenting because these sites are so retarded. IMO, they don't "get it" until you can stream where ever you are
Because you need to install all the cds
And as always, England Prevails!
If you aren't allowed to use the cd burner, then why do they have one in those computers?
Derp derp. I took something I didn't pay for.
No one took anything, they made a copy of it
If it was opt-in, then it could work, but if you had to use it like the iphone, then it wouldn't be so great
Yes, because we all want one company controlling what apps we can install.
One cannot simply walk in to Mordor
I doubt anyone that uses Chrome cares about how it looks. The reason I use it is because it's as fast as Firefox 1.0 was. Now that Firefox 3.5 takes 30 seconds to start and crashes constantly (on Linux at least), I'd rather use a browser that's fast and stable (and yes, Chrome on Linux is still pre-alpha and it's more stable than Firefox).
Really? On my rig running slackware 12.1, firefox 3.5 starts almost instantly and crashes very rarely
Wait....theres another one?
I just tried Gimp 2.6 on windows XP SP3 and it worked perfectly fine, so I would be hard-pressed to believe that it still exists. If you can find a bug report or something similar that documents that behavior, then that would be different.
Take Gimp for example. It mimics almost everything in Photoshop and it does a great job generally, but there are many things that are just downright glitchy. Things that would never fly in a pay product, but I suspect for OSS, they were categorized as 'good enough' and lowered in priority for other bug fixes. Things like having to sometimes click on a tool 2 or 3 times before it registers or you end up applying the wrong tool. I haven't been using gimp for oh..say more than 2 years give or take, but the problem still exists.
Really? I've been using GIMP for over 2 years and I've never had that problem and I don't really understand how you know the bug still exists when you haven't used it for 2 years
There are always going to be bugs that linger for awhile, but exploits are usually fixed pretty quickly in high-profile F/OSS projects and compared to Adobe or Microsoft, I think they do pretty decent without having tons of paid developers
If thats the case, then exploits in acrobat reader and flash should be fixed next day, or in a few hours.