Agreed. My first Slashdot account was in the high four digits, not as old school as yourself, but I've been reading for a while. My current Slashdot account is newer still.
But back in the day, Slashdot was THE place online for a generation of people (young and old, but the overlap of a particular community and a particular time period) that saw computing, technology, and the Internet come of age and that were deeply interested in and involved with these things at all levels.
I wonder if maybe some of the Slashdot decline is due to the diversification and growth of its users. For a moment in history (the '90s, basically, tapering off in the early '00s) humankind underwent a massive technological transformation. Because mainstream society was behind the curve despite its best efforts to grok what was going on, the technology community needed its own meeting place for discussion, news, announcements, and so on.
But once the transformation was complete and we had become "a network society," I wonder if the community, too, diversified in its interests. When I started reading Slashdot I was part salesman and part network admin, talking smaller organizations that didn't know what a network was (much less what it was for) into letting me build them one. Because these things were once at a significant premium, there was a market for people like me that weren't working at the enterprise level or in R&D who had connections and could get their hands on tons and tons of cast-off tech junk and cobble it together into working systems at affordable costs, often so idiosyncratic as a result that we had to be the ones that administered them.
In the '90s my two-car garage was packed to the gills with network equipment, cabling, racks and racks of spare parts, and stacks of computing systems in mid-recycle (there was a time when I specialized in taking off-lease desktops in quantity and helping to recycle them as parallel clusters for funds-starved research projects at local state universities). I was a salesman, an architect, a technician, a plumber/electrician, a software engineer, and a scientific computing specialist all rolled into one.
Today, I own a Mac, and iPhone, and an iPad. The only "parts" I have in my entire house amount to a currently unused external hard drive and a box of cables, none of which are particularly specialist in nature (some USB, some firewire, some HDMI, a few RCA audio, etc.) The only occasion I have to solder things is when a household item is broken and I feel like getting out the screwdriver, VOM, and soldering iron. If I do any "development" at all, it's just some basic HTML, PHP, and JS on my homepage. It must be 10 years since I touched C, 15 since I touched ASM (last batch was Motorola 6809 in an embedded system, I think).
From hardcore techie I've transitioned into working as an editor and an lecturer in mass media. I garden and keep goldfish. I guess you could say that I grew up, but the market also has a hand in this—computing and technology became commodities; coding and deployment became nigh-on unskilled labor. Few research projects need more computing power than they have in the principal investigator's iPhone, and more often than not there is now off-the-shelf software for Windows or Mac to do almost anything they want to do, now firmly established in channels.
Former tech industry friends have followed the same paths. People from the local computer club that used to load up their entire van with junk every Saturday to get together and solder, breadboard, and code for 12 hours now spend Saturdays on football, or on the yardwork, and are perfectly happy with a DVR, an XBox, and a couple of laptops and smartphones in the house.
Slashdot is in decline in a way, but it's because the sorts of territory that Slashdot used to cover are in decline. There's just not much to talk about. Enthusiasm for hacking the latest console or iPhone is not nearly as intense, widespread, or filled with unlimited possibilities as was hacking on Linux and evo
Slackware (1993) -> Red Hat -> Debian -> Fedora -> OS X (2010)
During the Slackware period I was in love with Linux. By the end of the Fedora period, I was constantly exasperated.
As an aside, I'm not at all "in love with" OS X the way I once was with Linux (I wrote books, converted people and organizations, founded a company, worked for some big Linux names back in the day). I was a Linux fanatic. I'm not the same with OS X. It has its problems. But it works for me, and I rarely think about it, and that's where I am (and want to be) in life.
All it has to do is win in court with an argument that by all appearances to this layperson has failed already many times in patent cases.
"All it has to do to win is not lose yet again" seems tautological to me. But I'm not a lawyer.
I'd love it if the lawyers here responded that this was in fact under the subtleties of the existing law an entirely new tack that is likely to be a winner in an actual case and establish the given precedent.
I would love it even more if it actually happened. But this (again:) layperson wouldn't be likely to bet on such an outcome within our current system using actual betting dollars.
Office 2007 gets released. You had better upgrade with the rest of your enterprise or you won't manage to open files correctly and without error. Wine doesn't run it yet at Gold level. It will be 2-3 years until it runs it at that level, and there will still be issues. By then, the enterprise will be on the next major release.
Wine is practically worthless in corporate work, and incomplete/unstable to boot.
Linux is exactly the right product for those in the self-selected Linux community.
But there seems to be a deep ambivalence about the limited size of this community (witness the endless discussions on Slashdot about desktop Linux and what it needs/what's wrong with it/why it hasn't taken off) in the Linux world.
I doubt it will go away—Linux users want Linux to continue to be what it is, but they have also shown a long-term desire to find more fellows, to grow the userbase, and to engage in advocacy. I suspect the deeper wish here is that much of the world was more computer literate and/or that much more of the world was OSS. Of course, both of these scenarios are unlikely to happen, for reasons that have been discussed here for years now.
the latest versions of Office, Adobe products, corporate infrastructure products, games, etc.
In short, to get to the 95% figure, you have to count every last shareware and freeware app for doing not much of anything in particular as a part of the "Windows software" ecosystem. There's a reason Obscure Shareware App X 1.0 is obscure, and it's because not many users care about it.
Most users do care very much about Office, Photoshop, games, and a few other essential apps, which is why Wine has never fulfilled its promise.
In short, your post is willfully obtuse. Or perhaps my post was. Let me change it:
"Only it didn't do the most critical things that Windows does: run the latest versions of MS Office, Adobe products, retail PC games, and Windows enterprise connectivity applications. So it was, in fact, completely different."
Between your post and mine, the dichotomy/disagreement has been made clear.
There are two views of users, computing, what computing is for, and what useful computing actually is at work in this discussion. Another way to say what I was saying is that broader Linux community's ideas of what computing is for and what a user is like are very different from the ideas that are in the economic mainstream.
Rather than respond to your points, I'd like to draw them into relief and point to them. You've made good points with respect to a particular set of goals and a particular value system. But the continuous questions about Linux on the desktop that we see on Slashdot suggest that there is some ambivalence in the Linux world about the ways in which meeting these goals and these values does not seem to lead to widespread adoption.
The stalemate (a decade-old, at least, one) is crystallized by the way in which the Linux community does not want to change its goals and values, yet wants somehow to enjoy widespread adoption. The two are not compatible; to enjoy widespread adoption, Linux must share the goals of the people walking around Best Buy right now. If the broader community wants to distance themselves from these people and these goals, it is destined to fight windmills for a long time when it comes to widespread adoption.
Better, to my eye at least, to simply concede on that point and enjoy the system that exists, understanding that for the limited userbase that it has, it is probably currently the best choice.
Or: You can have users that are not developers or you can have users that are also developers, but there is a distinct limit on the degree to which you can have both groups with the same product.
This discussion happens over and over ad infinitum on Slashdot and elsewhere, and indeed the KDE 3->4 and GNOME 2->3 "revolutions" are giant meditations-in-code on the problem of Linux on the desktop/Linux for regular users, yet the Linux community never seems to get their head around the problem, despite dozens of comments from users giving simple directions and despite very successful examples in Windows and Mac OS.
I suspect that the self-selection of the Linux community with respect to Linux's political goals and characteristics (which have been the most consistent dimension of Linux since the beginning) leaves the Linux world culturally and ideologically blind when it comes to being "good on the desktop" or "good for regular users."
Witness the way in which so many complaint posts from regular users are shouted/modded down, here and elsewhere.
They're giving the Linux community plain, simple, honest directions about what would encourage them to select Linux as a tool, but I think that what you're hinting at is right—Linux as a social project (not a technical one) is incompatible with the consumer marketplace at a broad scale. This has basically left the "Linux on the desktop" question as a waste of time for many years now—witness all of the wasted development hours in KDE/GNOME since their respective beginnings. Sure, lots of people here will post and suggest that "KDE 4 is great" and "GNOME 3 is the best ever," but in terms of the actual number of real-world users being served by these codebases vs. the amount of time and resources invested in them, they're much more expensive at the social/labor level than most commercial software, and with poorer ultimate results when measured in the same way (though that's something of a tautological calculation).
What I wonder about is whether this will ever die off—or, on the other hand, will we continue to see questions like this in another 10 years, with Linux still at the same marketshare and with the same public perception, and with a lot of code churn and invested labor hours over that time?
Linux is fabulous as a sever OS at almost every scale.
But most desktop users don't care about running their own servers, and those that do can generally get the few services that they want in a set-it-and-forget-it appliance from the Best Buy or the Apple Store. And even Windows and Mac OS offer much easier-to-manage implementations of (for example) Windows file sharing and web services. Why would I want to install and configure Samba by hand when I can just check a box to enable file sharing in OS X? Even better, why do either when I can get a router with a USB port and a file server inside it for just a few dollars, stick it in the corner, and forget about it.
Back in the day I had a Linux box running (I forget which) minimal Linux distro as a file server, print server, DHCP server, and NAT/firewall box on my LAN. It was diskless and sat behind my couch and did its job very well for years. Now I just have an Airport Extreme. Uses less power, was infinitely easier to set up, and makes no noise.
You can see where Linux is great by looking at where its marketshare is. You can see where Linux is lousy (e.g. the desktop/laptop everyday applications user space) in the same way. People aren't dumb—they do actually tend to use the right tool for the right job. Right now if you want to set up a departmental server, Linux is a prime choice. If you want to equip your college freshman with a general purpose homework computer for school, it's not even on the radar.
the same set of things I suggested above. Kudos to you.
I started using Linux in '93 but stopped in 2009 because, frankly, I was exhausted. I had forgotten that in 1993 I started using Linux because it let me do the things that I wanted to do at a cost (free) that significantly beat ($thousands) what was on offer in the Unix world at the time.
In 2009 when KDE took a shit on everyone and news that GNOME was about to do it, too, hit the netwaves, I suddenly realized that the situation had become inverted. Now being a Linux user kept me from doing the things that I wanted to do—not in theory (in theory, everything is possible—hell, you can design and fab out your own damned CPU and architecture and create a platform port for it if you want), but in practice. I was spending 10 percent of my time re-learning every major subsystem in Linux that changed every 6 months to 1 year, and another 20 percent of my time constantly fighting to get apps installed, keep them installed across distro releases, support my slowly evolving hardware (which required upgrading to new distro releases or doing backports by hand), and getting those apps to do the things that commercial apps could do easily.
Linux was no longer saving me many $thousands, since consumer-level OSes were now adequate to my needs and the applications I needed to use were only in the $hundreds camp. The capabilities that I wanted—working multimedia, powerful apps that shared file formats with the rest of the world, set it and forget it tools that I didn't need to build myself and that could manage my data—were right there, on the shelf at affordable prices, in every way that they weren't in 1993.
It was like a light bulb went on over my head—and I suddenly realized that Linux was holding my real career back, rather than enabling it as it had done in the early '90s. Bye-bye, Linux.
The culture of Linux remains the culture of 1993 mid-range computing—but we no longer live in a world in which CS students can't afford the hardware/software they use at school and mainstream OSes can't do the fun stuff. Quite the opposite. It's funny to think back at how thrilled I was to have X11 on the desktop (compared to Windows 3.1) versus how I feel now, twenty years on, comparing KDE or GNOME on Fedora or Ubuntu to OS X 10.8. The tables have been exactly turned. Linux is still essentially the same in architecture and philosophy, while the rest of the world has moved to a completely different paradigm in which computing is essentially appliance-driven. In 1993 Linux was ahead of its time. In 2013 Linux is a decade behind.
These days, I want an complete, polished, turnkey appliance at low cost and with no labor time investment, not a set of building block. Today's appliances are fast, intuitive, stable, durable, powerful, and integrated like the iPad (which I do, yes, use for serious work about 5-6 hours a day). For most users (which is where I have always ultimately fallen), Linux is solution in search of a problem that no longer exists.
"a troublesome couple of days trying to get some obscure bit of hardware working properly followed by a full on feet-eating system meltdown due to excessive fiddling in the wrong places"
That is not a learning curve. That is refusing to separate the role of developer from the role of user, which is the primary characteristic of the Linux community.
This comes up every time there's a story about security on Slashdot ("they shouldn't be allowed on the net without first learning...") It comes up every time there's a story about a Linux project ("...don't like it, you can write your own...beauty of open source...what have you coded...") It comes up in every story on GNOME or KDE ("...fixed by extensions...prefer choices to no choice...")
Blah, blah, blah.
Users are not developers. Every product that wants to be successful amongst users must treat them as users. Users want:
1) Full functionality out of the box. 2) To apply tools toward other problems (not to apply their own labor toward tool maintenance/creation). 3) A sensible basic tool configuration/set of properties that never needs to be changed. 4) Respect for what they're trying to accomplish.
Linux provides none of these, 20 years on. From the user's perspective, it is thus broken.
- In many cases it doesn't work out of the box. - In most cases *some aspect of the system* doesn't work out of the box. - Their requests for help are met with instructions to apply themselves toward learning more about how the tool is/was made and toward improving the tool itself. - The defaults are almost always wacky. No distro or desktop has really ever shipped with good (non-ideological/non-developer) defaults to this day. - Users are constantly condescended to, as though anyone whose primary task isn't Linux software debugging/development is a worthless n00b.
Here's how to fix the Linux desktop:
- Stop focusing on OS development pie-in-the-sky and call the core OS and desktop implementations and APIs good enough. Stabilize them for a decade at a time in this "good enough" state and allow bugs to become "known issues with workarounds" that can be used for a decade at a time. - Pour development hours into consumer-level/user-level stuff: multimedia, graphics and audio support, broad-based hardware and driver fixes. - Stop "shipping early and often." Ship late (i.e. once bugs have been fixed/stabilized) and rarely (no more than once every couple of years). - Stop providing "learning curve" instructions. If they have to resort to dotfile edits or man/info pages, just say "Linux can't do that yet for users" instead. (Yes, it can do that for developers, but developers are not users.) - Stop the "free software" puritanism. If something that's needed can be licensed and included on a "free as in beer" binary basis, and it can't practicably solved with OSS software in time for ship date, include the "free as in beer" version. This goes double for vendor-supplied hardware drivers. - Create a desktop kernel fork. Linus & co. are not in the business of writing/maintaining a desktop kernel. Their goals are larger (and smaller) than that. The desktop kernel can track the mainline kernel, but shouldn't adopt every latest ABI or other change—just do a major update every 3-5 years. - Value polish. Stop making fun of "flashy" and "shiny." Consumers buy shiny things. I buy shiny things. People here may prefer a rusted out pickup truck with a working winch to a shiny new performance sedan, but the market for rusted out pickup trucks is relatively small. People want a clean, neat, orderly world, and their computing world is a part of that. The non-developer that keeps clean windows and clean carpets wants a clean and beautiful desktop visible in their living room (and living in their consciousness), not a cluttered black console screen or rainbow-technicolor KDE icon sets with twelve different sets of widgets for twelve different apps. Visuals matter to people and are part of the larger c
about 12-year-olds, long division, and fractions. Not to mention world geography and world history.
Elementary education is great for kids that are working on basic literacy and social skills.
By the time we're into pre-algebra, world history, basic natural sciences, and cultural literacy, you're into an area in which many education majors are already in over their heads and are either unable to convey information that they only partially understand themselves or simply providing misinformation.
IMHO this begins to be a serious question at the 5th-9th grade levels and by the time we're in 10th-12th, we need subject experts because we're rotating through subject area classes and talking in terms of "college prep," which right now is no such thing since universities generally agree that students arrive woefully underprepared and must spent Subject Area 98, 99, 100, 101, and 102 re-learning what they should have learned (or what was learned incorrectly) in high school.
No, not the current teachers whose degrees are in elementary education or secondary education.
Let people with advanced degrees in actual subject areas teach. If you want to give the elementary education people something to do, let them be TAs and handle "classroom management" and "pedagogical methods," which is what most school districts right now tell people with advanced subject degrees they're lacking.
In the early 2000's as someone with an ivy league masters in a science subject, I wanted to teach at the high school level. Forget it. Now, as someone with a Ph.D. I'm still ineligible to teach anywhere but at the university level. I have fabulous course evaluations, loads of teaching hours (many thousands), and have mentored multiple high school juniors and seniors into the university system. But it doesn't matter—they want an education degree.
I went to a public high school (three years early, but a public high school nonetheless). My math teachers did not know math. My science teachers did not know science. My literature teachers did not actually know much about literature, much less literary criticism. It was a total yawn. I withdrew after a year, studied on my own, and applied to enter university early. The next year, I applied again. Finally they gave me an interview and I was admitted in my early teens.
What a difference! My calculus instructors knew calculus! My physics instructors knew a thing or two about physics!
One important detail missing from all of the discussions about "good teachers" and "bad teachers" is that no one can teach something they don't actually know. Period. No amount of training in an "education" graduate program can give one the finer details of theory and practice in some other field.
My niece recently took a social sciences class in her high school, and she suffered from the same experience. The instructor was "mainly" a "physical science" teacher (who didn't, of course, have a degree in any science, but rather an M.A. in elementary education), but she drew the short straw and was handed a social sciences book and told to teach it. The result? Read the chapter, fill out the (textbook publisher supplied) worksheets, and don't ask any questions because the instructor can't answer them. (Or answers them woefully incorrectly—something I know since after my science masters I took a social sciences Ph.D.—and the class my niece had was nonsense.)
It all brought back horrible memories of my linear algebra teacher in high school that was learning it as we were, doing the chapter and problems the night before and struggling the next day to duplicate the work on the board for students.
And yet we prevent subject area experts that are interested in teaching from teaching their subjects. Apparently four (or more) years later, at university, the same instructors can be not only employable but great. But god forbid we let people that know the subject actually teach it to high schoolers, without making them wait while drooling on their shirts with frustration.
It's the education equivalent of MBA culture. Only an MBA can run a [insert noun here] company, not someone that actually knows [insert same noun]. And only an education major can teach [insert subject here], not someone that actually knows [insert same subject].
Until this is fixed, no amount of extra days will help.
on the strength of its continuous improvement and technical superiority (specifically meaning that you could make hardware do stuff in Linux that required much more expensive hardware in other platforms).
But by the late 2000's things had turned around: both had disappeared. I was struggling to do the same things with hardware in Linux that you could easily do in Windows and Mac OS for the same price, and the experience was getting worse with every release.
It was time to bail, and I considered both Windows 7 and OS X but settled on OS X.
and suggest not only does the Linux community imagine that it has Office equivalents, etc., but that the Linux community doesn't imagine there's much actual call for Office out there (witness the referrals to OpenOffice every time an MS Office story makes the Slashdot headlines).
Basically, most of the Linux community has mistaken the server room for the entire corporation, or indeed for all of society. Who could possibly need more than Linux currently has to offer? All of those things that OS X and Windows have that Linux doesn't? Either they aren't important enough to need to be distinguishable from a free (albeit not compatible) clone, or it's just garbage and groupthink: "Who does that? Who uses MS Office? I mean, jesus, it's so bloated compared to vim! I've never seen anybody using it, and you can't do anything useful with Office anyway—ever try to edit a dotfile with Word? What was Microsoft thinking? People must be stupid." And so on...
Because "does it work for me" is a different question from "will it work for me just as well next year and five years down the road?"
The latter question is equally important for a rational platform decision, and the latter question is strongly correlated to the size of the userbase; platforms without users will lose developers, and will struggle to support the latest hardware/software standards and workflows.
It's the Amiga issue. Maybe you liked Amiga. Maybe you even liked it long after everyone left. But there was a point at which, if you look carefully, Amiga users became essentially not a part of the technology ecosystem. Any Amiga skills became worthless in the marketplace, because the population was doing something else.
And then all of your investment in hardware, software, and skills became worthless—unless you were willing to pursue those of the choice that you *didn't* make, playing catch-up all the way and having to significantly reinvest.
because an OS is not a tool unless you're a developer.
For everyone else, an OS is useless. They need applications. There were none for BeOS (I know, I had it back in the days when it was fashionable to have a bootloader with 10 different OS'es just so you could test web platforms across OS/browser combos and generally tinker with development on various platforms).
BeOS was boring because you couldn't even browse the web properly in it.
Even as a developer, who wants to spend time in an OS where you're basically facing the task of writing the entire userland from scratch?
Even devs want to check their email now and then...
is that the Linux desktop was at the mercy of the GNOME and KDE devs.
What, you can write any code you want to fix what they have done?
Guess what? Macs have Xcode and gcc as well. You can do just as much hacking to "fix" what you don't like there.
The non-ideological facts are:
1) Most users use software written by others. 2) Most users will never modify this software, either at the system or userland level. 3) Most users want this software to work indefinitely so that they don't have to change data stores and/or workflows. 4) Apple has been much better at this than GNOME/KDE/Linux. 5) The market tells you so.
Of course, Linux users will continue to try to tell Grandma and the boss that the reason it's so important to use Linux is so that they can become hardware and software hackers and build their own userlands from the ground up.
I submitted detailed bug reports and did a lot of repository code testing for KDE, and submitted code myself during the 1.x and 2.x series to a few parts of KDE. No, I wasn't a major contributor or developer—I had/have a real job and it wasn't KDE—but I considered myself just another tech-literate community member that could help out with a snippet of code here or a bug fix there.
I anticipated doing the same with 4.0.
But there's a level of "not ready yet" at which you can't even operate at the level of "if I see a bug I'll try to fix it and send it along" because you can't even stay logged in long enough to encounter a single thing that could be isolated as a "bug." KDE 4.0 was released at the "general framework is still under heavy development and really doesn't even work level," the level at which the things that go wrong aren't about bug reports or about bug fixing but are at the level of deep familiarity with the evolving codebase in large chunks.
They shouldn't have said that KDE 4.0 was a test release not ready for prime time. They should have said it was alpha-level code that was more or less guaranteed to break early and often, and should be installed only by those willing to help bootstrap a codebase that was just to the point equivalent to "kernel now boots on the device but no userland yet and/or highly unpredictable/unstable userland guaranteed to come crashing down within 10 minutes of boot." Because that's basically where KDE 4.0 was as a graphical environment. It wasn't ready for beta testing or development of apps. It was only ready for people that wanted to seriously bang on core KDE.
That would have accurately described what they released.
They released a 4.0 that quite simply _did not function at all_ and then were surprised when people got upset about it.
As a very serious Linux+KDE user (KDE since 1.0 beta 3) at the time, I stuck to 4.0 trying to make it work for the better part of a month. It routinely required the complete erasure of all KDE dotfiles just to log back into the desktop.
It's not just a matter of "it's still a bit buggy," which people expect in a "point-oh" release, but the fact that you could not do work in it. Panel and window management would inelegantly disappear or crash without any elegant handling of the issue (how about an auto-restart?) and quirks would leave you unable to access your applications even to save data. One moment you're typing, the next moment it's CTRL-ALT-BKSP or even holding down the power button on the laptop because the X server is totally wedged and after logging in remotely via SSH you can't find a single damned thing you can do about it. All work gone. Then you boot back up and graphics mode fails to start or you can't log in and you're back at your VC removing all dotfiles in root+user and then starting over yet again.
I wasted time on 4.0 for weeks because I had such an investment in the KDE workflow up until 3.x, but finally it was just "fsck this" and off I went to GNOME 2. Shortly thereafter I started reading blog posts about the upcoming 3.0 and the controversies surrounding it.
I literally started hackintoshing because I believed I needed an "escape route" from Linux.
And several others in my work circles are now Mac users as well. Yet people here and in the OSS community still defend both KDE and GNOME and condescend to users that didn't want to go along for the ridiculous ride.
If you're going to change the fundamental, system-wide UI that most people rely on *for their livelihoods*, you'd better:
1) Test it well and be damned sure the majority of your users will find it to be acceptable 2) Not release a point-oh until you're sure that the "instability" they experience won't lead to data loss as a result of UI bugs (-- should NEVER happen)
model of science argue exactly that—individual personalities (and indeed bodies) are the same kind of emergent order (hence behavior) that a company, or indeed a society is, at the abstract level. Just a giant information processing system that imports energy from connected systems and exports entropy; the particular characteristics are the emergent epiphenomena of the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. My first Slashdot account was in the high four digits, not as old school as yourself, but I've been reading for a while. My current Slashdot account is newer still.
But back in the day, Slashdot was THE place online for a generation of people (young and old, but the overlap of a particular community and a particular time period) that saw computing, technology, and the Internet come of age and that were deeply interested in and involved with these things at all levels.
I wonder if maybe some of the Slashdot decline is due to the diversification and growth of its users. For a moment in history (the '90s, basically, tapering off in the early '00s) humankind underwent a massive technological transformation. Because mainstream society was behind the curve despite its best efforts to grok what was going on, the technology community needed its own meeting place for discussion, news, announcements, and so on.
But once the transformation was complete and we had become "a network society," I wonder if the community, too, diversified in its interests. When I started reading Slashdot I was part salesman and part network admin, talking smaller organizations that didn't know what a network was (much less what it was for) into letting me build them one. Because these things were once at a significant premium, there was a market for people like me that weren't working at the enterprise level or in R&D who had connections and could get their hands on tons and tons of cast-off tech junk and cobble it together into working systems at affordable costs, often so idiosyncratic as a result that we had to be the ones that administered them.
In the '90s my two-car garage was packed to the gills with network equipment, cabling, racks and racks of spare parts, and stacks of computing systems in mid-recycle (there was a time when I specialized in taking off-lease desktops in quantity and helping to recycle them as parallel clusters for funds-starved research projects at local state universities). I was a salesman, an architect, a technician, a plumber/electrician, a software engineer, and a scientific computing specialist all rolled into one.
Today, I own a Mac, and iPhone, and an iPad. The only "parts" I have in my entire house amount to a currently unused external hard drive and a box of cables, none of which are particularly specialist in nature (some USB, some firewire, some HDMI, a few RCA audio, etc.) The only occasion I have to solder things is when a household item is broken and I feel like getting out the screwdriver, VOM, and soldering iron. If I do any "development" at all, it's just some basic HTML, PHP, and JS on my homepage. It must be 10 years since I touched C, 15 since I touched ASM (last batch was Motorola 6809 in an embedded system, I think).
From hardcore techie I've transitioned into working as an editor and an lecturer in mass media. I garden and keep goldfish. I guess you could say that I grew up, but the market also has a hand in this—computing and technology became commodities; coding and deployment became nigh-on unskilled labor. Few research projects need more computing power than they have in the principal investigator's iPhone, and more often than not there is now off-the-shelf software for Windows or Mac to do almost anything they want to do, now firmly established in channels.
Former tech industry friends have followed the same paths. People from the local computer club that used to load up their entire van with junk every Saturday to get together and solder, breadboard, and code for 12 hours now spend Saturdays on football, or on the yardwork, and are perfectly happy with a DVR, an XBox, and a couple of laptops and smartphones in the house.
Slashdot is in decline in a way, but it's because the sorts of territory that Slashdot used to cover are in decline. There's just not much to talk about. Enthusiasm for hacking the latest console or iPhone is not nearly as intense, widespread, or filled with unlimited possibilities as was hacking on Linux and evo
Slackware (1993) -> Red Hat -> Debian -> Fedora -> OS X (2010)
During the Slackware period I was in love with Linux.
By the end of the Fedora period, I was constantly exasperated.
As an aside, I'm not at all "in love with" OS X the way I once was with Linux (I wrote books, converted people and organizations, founded a company, worked for some big Linux names back in the day). I was a Linux fanatic. I'm not the same with OS X. It has its problems. But it works for me, and I rarely think about it, and that's where I am (and want to be) in life.
All it has to do is win in court with an argument that by all appearances to this layperson has failed already many times in patent cases.
"All it has to do to win is not lose yet again" seems tautological to me. But I'm not a lawyer.
I'd love it if the lawyers here responded that this was in fact under the subtleties of the existing law an entirely new tack that is likely to be a winner in an actual case and establish the given precedent.
I would love it even more if it actually happened. But this (again:) layperson wouldn't be likely to bet on such an outcome within our current system using actual betting dollars.
Linux advocate:
"It may be slower, but you're not stuck with anything Windows-like and you can fix the code yourself!"
Prospective user:
"Wait... It's slower, AND it doesn't work like Windows, AND you want me to fix the code myself?!"
one major release back. It doesn't work.
Office 2007 gets released. You had better upgrade with the rest of your enterprise or you won't manage to open files correctly and without error. Wine doesn't run it yet at Gold level. It will be 2-3 years until it runs it at that level, and there will still be issues. By then, the enterprise will be on the next major release.
Wine is practically worthless in corporate work, and incomplete/unstable to boot.
Linux is exactly the right product for those in the self-selected Linux community.
But there seems to be a deep ambivalence about the limited size of this community (witness the endless discussions on Slashdot about desktop Linux and what it needs/what's wrong with it/why it hasn't taken off) in the Linux world.
I doubt it will go away—Linux users want Linux to continue to be what it is, but they have also shown a long-term desire to find more fellows, to grow the userbase, and to engage in advocacy. I suspect the deeper wish here is that much of the world was more computer literate and/or that much more of the world was OSS. Of course, both of these scenarios are unlikely to happen, for reasons that have been discussed here for years now.
the latest versions of Office, Adobe products, corporate infrastructure products, games, etc.
In short, to get to the 95% figure, you have to count every last shareware and freeware app for doing not much of anything in particular as a part of the "Windows software" ecosystem. There's a reason Obscure Shareware App X 1.0 is obscure, and it's because not many users care about it.
Most users do care very much about Office, Photoshop, games, and a few other essential apps, which is why Wine has never fulfilled its promise.
In short, your post is willfully obtuse. Or perhaps my post was. Let me change it:
"Only it didn't do the most critical things that Windows does: run the latest versions of MS Office, Adobe products, retail PC games, and Windows enterprise connectivity applications. So it was, in fact, completely different."
Between your post and mine, the dichotomy/disagreement has been made clear.
There are two views of users, computing, what computing is for, and what useful computing actually is at work in this discussion. Another way to say what I was saying is that broader Linux community's ideas of what computing is for and what a user is like are very different from the ideas that are in the economic mainstream.
Rather than respond to your points, I'd like to draw them into relief and point to them. You've made good points with respect to a particular set of goals and a particular value system. But the continuous questions about Linux on the desktop that we see on Slashdot suggest that there is some ambivalence in the Linux world about the ways in which meeting these goals and these values does not seem to lead to widespread adoption.
The stalemate (a decade-old, at least, one) is crystallized by the way in which the Linux community does not want to change its goals and values, yet wants somehow to enjoy widespread adoption. The two are not compatible; to enjoy widespread adoption, Linux must share the goals of the people walking around Best Buy right now. If the broader community wants to distance themselves from these people and these goals, it is destined to fight windmills for a long time when it comes to widespread adoption.
Better, to my eye at least, to simply concede on that point and enjoy the system that exists, understanding that for the limited userbase that it has, it is probably currently the best choice.
Or: You can have users that are not developers or you can have users that are also developers, but there is a distinct limit on the degree to which you can have both groups with the same product.
I find this particularly interesting.
This discussion happens over and over ad infinitum on Slashdot and elsewhere, and indeed the KDE 3->4 and GNOME 2->3 "revolutions" are giant meditations-in-code on the problem of Linux on the desktop/Linux for regular users, yet the Linux community never seems to get their head around the problem, despite dozens of comments from users giving simple directions and despite very successful examples in Windows and Mac OS.
I suspect that the self-selection of the Linux community with respect to Linux's political goals and characteristics (which have been the most consistent dimension of Linux since the beginning) leaves the Linux world culturally and ideologically blind when it comes to being "good on the desktop" or "good for regular users."
Witness the way in which so many complaint posts from regular users are shouted/modded down, here and elsewhere.
They're giving the Linux community plain, simple, honest directions about what would encourage them to select Linux as a tool, but I think that what you're hinting at is right—Linux as a social project (not a technical one) is incompatible with the consumer marketplace at a broad scale. This has basically left the "Linux on the desktop" question as a waste of time for many years now—witness all of the wasted development hours in KDE/GNOME since their respective beginnings. Sure, lots of people here will post and suggest that "KDE 4 is great" and "GNOME 3 is the best ever," but in terms of the actual number of real-world users being served by these codebases vs. the amount of time and resources invested in them, they're much more expensive at the social/labor level than most commercial software, and with poorer ultimate results when measured in the same way (though that's something of a tautological calculation).
What I wonder about is whether this will ever die off—or, on the other hand, will we continue to see questions like this in another 10 years, with Linux still at the same marketshare and with the same public perception, and with a lot of code churn and invested labor hours over that time?
Linux is fabulous as a sever OS at almost every scale.
But most desktop users don't care about running their own servers, and those that do can generally get the few services that they want in a set-it-and-forget-it appliance from the Best Buy or the Apple Store. And even Windows and Mac OS offer much easier-to-manage implementations of (for example) Windows file sharing and web services. Why would I want to install and configure Samba by hand when I can just check a box to enable file sharing in OS X? Even better, why do either when I can get a router with a USB port and a file server inside it for just a few dollars, stick it in the corner, and forget about it.
Back in the day I had a Linux box running (I forget which) minimal Linux distro as a file server, print server, DHCP server, and NAT/firewall box on my LAN. It was diskless and sat behind my couch and did its job very well for years. Now I just have an Airport Extreme. Uses less power, was infinitely easier to set up, and makes no noise.
You can see where Linux is great by looking at where its marketshare is. You can see where Linux is lousy (e.g. the desktop/laptop everyday applications user space) in the same way. People aren't dumb—they do actually tend to use the right tool for the right job. Right now if you want to set up a departmental server, Linux is a prime choice. If you want to equip your college freshman with a general purpose homework computer for school, it's not even on the radar.
that Windows does: run Windows software. So it was, in fact, completely different.
the same set of things I suggested above. Kudos to you.
I started using Linux in '93 but stopped in 2009 because, frankly, I was exhausted. I had forgotten that in 1993 I started using Linux because it let me do the things that I wanted to do at a cost (free) that significantly beat ($thousands) what was on offer in the Unix world at the time.
In 2009 when KDE took a shit on everyone and news that GNOME was about to do it, too, hit the netwaves, I suddenly realized that the situation had become inverted. Now being a Linux user kept me from doing the things that I wanted to do—not in theory (in theory, everything is possible—hell, you can design and fab out your own damned CPU and architecture and create a platform port for it if you want), but in practice. I was spending 10 percent of my time re-learning every major subsystem in Linux that changed every 6 months to 1 year, and another 20 percent of my time constantly fighting to get apps installed, keep them installed across distro releases, support my slowly evolving hardware (which required upgrading to new distro releases or doing backports by hand), and getting those apps to do the things that commercial apps could do easily.
Linux was no longer saving me many $thousands, since consumer-level OSes were now adequate to my needs and the applications I needed to use were only in the $hundreds camp. The capabilities that I wanted—working multimedia, powerful apps that shared file formats with the rest of the world, set it and forget it tools that I didn't need to build myself and that could manage my data—were right there, on the shelf at affordable prices, in every way that they weren't in 1993.
It was like a light bulb went on over my head—and I suddenly realized that Linux was holding my real career back, rather than enabling it as it had done in the early '90s. Bye-bye, Linux.
The culture of Linux remains the culture of 1993 mid-range computing—but we no longer live in a world in which CS students can't afford the hardware/software they use at school and mainstream OSes can't do the fun stuff. Quite the opposite. It's funny to think back at how thrilled I was to have X11 on the desktop (compared to Windows 3.1) versus how I feel now, twenty years on, comparing KDE or GNOME on Fedora or Ubuntu to OS X 10.8. The tables have been exactly turned. Linux is still essentially the same in architecture and philosophy, while the rest of the world has moved to a completely different paradigm in which computing is essentially appliance-driven. In 1993 Linux was ahead of its time. In 2013 Linux is a decade behind.
These days, I want an complete, polished, turnkey appliance at low cost and with no labor time investment, not a set of building block. Today's appliances are fast, intuitive, stable, durable, powerful, and integrated like the iPad (which I do, yes, use for serious work about 5-6 hours a day). For most users (which is where I have always ultimately fallen), Linux is solution in search of a problem that no longer exists.
"a troublesome couple of days trying to get some obscure bit of hardware working properly followed by a full on feet-eating system meltdown due to excessive fiddling in the wrong places"
That is not a learning curve. That is refusing to separate the role of developer from the role of user, which is the primary characteristic of the Linux community.
This comes up every time there's a story about security on Slashdot ("they shouldn't be allowed on the net without first learning...")
It comes up every time there's a story about a Linux project ("...don't like it, you can write your own...beauty of open source...what have you coded...")
It comes up in every story on GNOME or KDE ("...fixed by extensions...prefer choices to no choice...")
Blah, blah, blah.
Users are not developers. Every product that wants to be successful amongst users must treat them as users. Users want:
1) Full functionality out of the box.
2) To apply tools toward other problems (not to apply their own labor toward tool maintenance/creation).
3) A sensible basic tool configuration/set of properties that never needs to be changed.
4) Respect for what they're trying to accomplish.
Linux provides none of these, 20 years on. From the user's perspective, it is thus broken.
- In many cases it doesn't work out of the box.
- In most cases *some aspect of the system* doesn't work out of the box.
- Their requests for help are met with instructions to apply themselves toward learning more about how the tool is/was made and toward improving the tool itself.
- The defaults are almost always wacky. No distro or desktop has really ever shipped with good (non-ideological/non-developer) defaults to this day.
- Users are constantly condescended to, as though anyone whose primary task isn't Linux software debugging/development is a worthless n00b.
Here's how to fix the Linux desktop:
- Stop focusing on OS development pie-in-the-sky and call the core OS and desktop implementations and APIs good enough. Stabilize them for a decade at a time in this "good enough" state and allow bugs to become "known issues with workarounds" that can be used for a decade at a time.
- Pour development hours into consumer-level/user-level stuff: multimedia, graphics and audio support, broad-based hardware and driver fixes.
- Stop "shipping early and often." Ship late (i.e. once bugs have been fixed/stabilized) and rarely (no more than once every couple of years).
- Stop providing "learning curve" instructions. If they have to resort to dotfile edits or man/info pages, just say "Linux can't do that yet for users" instead. (Yes, it can do that for developers, but developers are not users.)
- Stop the "free software" puritanism. If something that's needed can be licensed and included on a "free as in beer" binary basis, and it can't practicably solved with OSS software in time for ship date, include the "free as in beer" version. This goes double for vendor-supplied hardware drivers.
- Create a desktop kernel fork. Linus & co. are not in the business of writing/maintaining a desktop kernel. Their goals are larger (and smaller) than that. The desktop kernel can track the mainline kernel, but shouldn't adopt every latest ABI or other change—just do a major update every 3-5 years.
- Value polish. Stop making fun of "flashy" and "shiny." Consumers buy shiny things. I buy shiny things. People here may prefer a rusted out pickup truck with a working winch to a shiny new performance sedan, but the market for rusted out pickup trucks is relatively small. People want a clean, neat, orderly world, and their computing world is a part of that. The non-developer that keeps clean windows and clean carpets wants a clean and beautiful desktop visible in their living room (and living in their consciousness), not a cluttered black console screen or rainbow-technicolor KDE icon sets with twelve different sets of widgets for twelve different apps. Visuals matter to people and are part of the larger c
(The "too little" part doesn't even matter anymore.)
about 12-year-olds, long division, and fractions. Not to mention world geography and world history.
Elementary education is great for kids that are working on basic literacy and social skills.
By the time we're into pre-algebra, world history, basic natural sciences, and cultural literacy, you're into an area in which many education majors are already in over their heads and are either unable to convey information that they only partially understand themselves or simply providing misinformation.
IMHO this begins to be a serious question at the 5th-9th grade levels and by the time we're in 10th-12th, we need subject experts because we're rotating through subject area classes and talking in terms of "college prep," which right now is no such thing since universities generally agree that students arrive woefully underprepared and must spent Subject Area 98, 99, 100, 101, and 102 re-learning what they should have learned (or what was learned incorrectly) in high school.
No, not the current teachers whose degrees are in elementary education or secondary education.
Let people with advanced degrees in actual subject areas teach. If you want to give the elementary education people something to do, let them be TAs and handle "classroom management" and "pedagogical methods," which is what most school districts right now tell people with advanced subject degrees they're lacking.
In the early 2000's as someone with an ivy league masters in a science subject, I wanted to teach at the high school level. Forget it. Now, as someone with a Ph.D. I'm still ineligible to teach anywhere but at the university level. I have fabulous course evaluations, loads of teaching hours (many thousands), and have mentored multiple high school juniors and seniors into the university system. But it doesn't matter—they want an education degree.
I went to a public high school (three years early, but a public high school nonetheless). My math teachers did not know math. My science teachers did not know science. My literature teachers did not actually know much about literature, much less literary criticism. It was a total yawn. I withdrew after a year, studied on my own, and applied to enter university early. The next year, I applied again. Finally they gave me an interview and I was admitted in my early teens.
What a difference! My calculus instructors knew calculus! My physics instructors knew a thing or two about physics!
One important detail missing from all of the discussions about "good teachers" and "bad teachers" is that no one can teach something they don't actually know. Period. No amount of training in an "education" graduate program can give one the finer details of theory and practice in some other field.
My niece recently took a social sciences class in her high school, and she suffered from the same experience. The instructor was "mainly" a "physical science" teacher (who didn't, of course, have a degree in any science, but rather an M.A. in elementary education), but she drew the short straw and was handed a social sciences book and told to teach it. The result? Read the chapter, fill out the (textbook publisher supplied) worksheets, and don't ask any questions because the instructor can't answer them. (Or answers them woefully incorrectly—something I know since after my science masters I took a social sciences Ph.D.—and the class my niece had was nonsense.)
It all brought back horrible memories of my linear algebra teacher in high school that was learning it as we were, doing the chapter and problems the night before and struggling the next day to duplicate the work on the board for students.
And yet we prevent subject area experts that are interested in teaching from teaching their subjects. Apparently four (or more) years later, at university, the same instructors can be not only employable but great. But god forbid we let people that know the subject actually teach it to high schoolers, without making them wait while drooling on their shirts with frustration.
It's the education equivalent of MBA culture. Only an MBA can run a [insert noun here] company, not someone that actually knows [insert same noun]. And only an education major can teach [insert subject here], not someone that actually knows [insert same subject].
Until this is fixed, no amount of extra days will help.
on the strength of its continuous improvement and technical superiority (specifically meaning that you could make hardware do stuff in Linux that required much more expensive hardware in other platforms).
But by the late 2000's things had turned around: both had disappeared. I was struggling to do the same things with hardware in Linux that you could easily do in Windows and Mac OS for the same price, and the experience was getting worse with every release.
It was time to bail, and I considered both Windows 7 and OS X but settled on OS X.
and suggest not only does the Linux community imagine that it has Office equivalents, etc., but that the Linux community doesn't imagine there's much actual call for Office out there (witness the referrals to OpenOffice every time an MS Office story makes the Slashdot headlines).
Basically, most of the Linux community has mistaken the server room for the entire corporation, or indeed for all of society. Who could possibly need more than Linux currently has to offer? All of those things that OS X and Windows have that Linux doesn't? Either they aren't important enough to need to be distinguishable from a free (albeit not compatible) clone, or it's just garbage and groupthink: "Who does that? Who uses MS Office? I mean, jesus, it's so bloated compared to vim! I've never seen anybody using it, and you can't do anything useful with Office anyway—ever try to edit a dotfile with Word? What was Microsoft thinking? People must be stupid." And so on...
Because "does it work for me" is a different question from "will it work for me just as well next year and five years down the road?"
The latter question is equally important for a rational platform decision, and the latter question is strongly correlated to the size of the userbase; platforms without users will lose developers, and will struggle to support the latest hardware/software standards and workflows.
It's the Amiga issue. Maybe you liked Amiga. Maybe you even liked it long after everyone left. But there was a point at which, if you look carefully, Amiga users became essentially not a part of the technology ecosystem. Any Amiga skills became worthless in the marketplace, because the population was doing something else.
And then all of your investment in hardware, software, and skills became worthless—unless you were willing to pursue those of the choice that you *didn't* make, playing catch-up all the way and having to significantly reinvest.
because an OS is not a tool unless you're a developer.
For everyone else, an OS is useless. They need applications. There were none for BeOS (I know, I had it back in the days when it was fashionable to have a bootloader with 10 different OS'es just so you could test web platforms across OS/browser combos and generally tinker with development on various platforms).
BeOS was boring because you couldn't even browse the web properly in it.
Even as a developer, who wants to spend time in an OS where you're basically facing the task of writing the entire userland from scratch?
Even devs want to check their email now and then...
it just works. I have a GNU userland at the CLI and tons and tons of ports installed that I use heavily. Never a problem.
In fact, none of the dependency issues and periodic needs-database-rebuilding issues that I used to have in Fedora.
is that the Linux desktop was at the mercy of the GNOME and KDE devs.
What, you can write any code you want to fix what they have done?
Guess what? Macs have Xcode and gcc as well. You can do just as much hacking to "fix" what you don't like there.
The non-ideological facts are:
1) Most users use software written by others.
2) Most users will never modify this software, either at the system or userland level.
3) Most users want this software to work indefinitely so that they don't have to change data stores and/or workflows.
4) Apple has been much better at this than GNOME/KDE/Linux.
5) The market tells you so.
Of course, Linux users will continue to try to tell Grandma and the boss that the reason it's so important to use Linux is so that they can become hardware and software hackers and build their own userlands from the ground up.
I submitted detailed bug reports and did a lot of repository code testing for KDE, and submitted code myself during the 1.x and 2.x series to a few parts of KDE. No, I wasn't a major contributor or developer—I had/have a real job and it wasn't KDE—but I considered myself just another tech-literate community member that could help out with a snippet of code here or a bug fix there.
I anticipated doing the same with 4.0.
But there's a level of "not ready yet" at which you can't even operate at the level of "if I see a bug I'll try to fix it and send it along" because you can't even stay logged in long enough to encounter a single thing that could be isolated as a "bug." KDE 4.0 was released at the "general framework is still under heavy development and really doesn't even work level," the level at which the things that go wrong aren't about bug reports or about bug fixing but are at the level of deep familiarity with the evolving codebase in large chunks.
They shouldn't have said that KDE 4.0 was a test release not ready for prime time. They should have said it was alpha-level code that was more or less guaranteed to break early and often, and should be installed only by those willing to help bootstrap a codebase that was just to the point equivalent to "kernel now boots on the device but no userland yet and/or highly unpredictable/unstable userland guaranteed to come crashing down within 10 minutes of boot." Because that's basically where KDE 4.0 was as a graphical environment. It wasn't ready for beta testing or development of apps. It was only ready for people that wanted to seriously bang on core KDE.
That would have accurately described what they released.
They released a 4.0 that quite simply _did not function at all_ and then were surprised when people got upset about it.
As a very serious Linux+KDE user (KDE since 1.0 beta 3) at the time, I stuck to 4.0 trying to make it work for the better part of a month. It routinely required the complete erasure of all KDE dotfiles just to log back into the desktop.
It's not just a matter of "it's still a bit buggy," which people expect in a "point-oh" release, but the fact that you could not do work in it. Panel and window management would inelegantly disappear or crash without any elegant handling of the issue (how about an auto-restart?) and quirks would leave you unable to access your applications even to save data. One moment you're typing, the next moment it's CTRL-ALT-BKSP or even holding down the power button on the laptop because the X server is totally wedged and after logging in remotely via SSH you can't find a single damned thing you can do about it. All work gone. Then you boot back up and graphics mode fails to start or you can't log in and you're back at your VC removing all dotfiles in root+user and then starting over yet again.
I wasted time on 4.0 for weeks because I had such an investment in the KDE workflow up until 3.x, but finally it was just "fsck this" and off I went to GNOME 2. Shortly thereafter I started reading blog posts about the upcoming 3.0 and the controversies surrounding it.
I literally started hackintoshing because I believed I needed an "escape route" from Linux.
And several others in my work circles are now Mac users as well. Yet people here and in the OSS community still defend both KDE and GNOME and condescend to users that didn't want to go along for the ridiculous ride.
If you're going to change the fundamental, system-wide UI that most people rely on *for their livelihoods*, you'd better:
1) Test it well and be damned sure the majority of your users will find it to be acceptable
2) Not release a point-oh until you're sure that the "instability" they experience won't lead to data loss as a result of UI bugs (-- should NEVER happen)
model of science argue exactly that—individual personalities (and indeed bodies) are the same kind of emergent order (hence behavior) that a company, or indeed a society is, at the abstract level. Just a giant information processing system that imports energy from connected systems and exports entropy; the particular characteristics are the emergent epiphenomena of the system.