I think it'll be a hit, and yes, I think it'll be bigger than you seem to think. VLC especially is very widely used. Many, many of my non-geek friends use it instead of the crippleware that MSFT and Apple ship, because it works flawlessly all the time for whatever you throw at it. I'd imagine (no data to back it up, but shooting from the hip) that Firefox, OOo, and VLC are the three most widely recognized free software applications out there, and of those three, VLC has the highest reputation for quality, ease of use, and reliability.
People (not just geeks, but a bunch of people) know the road cone means quality. If word starts getting around that people can't install it on their iTrash, I'll bet you a lot of people look elsewhere for their hardware. Not all, not even the majority, but a non-trivial percentage.
Then you should keep using Windows. I say that as a Linux user, evangelist, and professional. Keep using Windows. I keep a Windows partition around to play Civ 4 even though it'll theoretically run in Wine (or so some people keep trying to tell me) just because it's not worth the aggravation to me.
If you want to play Playstation games, you need to have a Playstation. You can't put them in a Wii. Sure, with Linux we have Wine, and given the mountain they're trying to climb, it's a goddamn miracle it works at all. I say that in total sincerity, I don't use it for anything, but my hat is totally off to those folks. But for the most part, if you want to Playstation games you need a Playstation, and if you want to play Windows games you need Windows.
So it's a hierarchy of wants. Do you want to play Windows games more than you want to not have Windows? If the answer is yes, then great, do that. And seriously, I'm as vocal a free software believer as you'll talk to. But for all that, I don't see any difference between having a Windows gaming console and a Playstation gaming console. That's what they both are, after all. "Windows: At Least We've Still Got Games!"
As for me, I'm pretty close to cutting the cord. I'm still playing Civ 4, like I said, but if I can't run Civ 5 on XP (which I think you can although I haven't looked into it much) and on my current hardware (which I'm pretty sure I can't) I'm probably not going to buy it, and I'll most certainly send Firaxis a letter telling them why they just lost a customer who has bought every new version and every new expansion pack of Civilization since Civ 2. I'd also settle for running in Wine on the new machine I'm buying on Black Friday. But for damn sure I'm not buying a new box to put Windows on it, and that's the bottom line, and if that means Firaxis lost a customer, that's what it means.
If 2% == 3M, which doesn't seem unreasonable, then 98% == 147M.
I know a VC or two. They aren't investing in companies producing software that has a target market of 3M customers when they could be investing in companies who are writing for those other 147M.
Oh dang. I guess we'll just have to keep making better software ourselves, like we've been doing for twenty years.
Gnome and KDE have come a long way and they're pretty decent now, but they're not "killer app" better experiences than what you get on Mac and Windows these days.
I completely disagree, and would call it a case in point for my previous statement. The free desktops have been superior to anything you can buy for money for years now. OS X is still stuck in poor design choices they made at the beginning of the last decade and show no signs of even wanting to start digging their way out of that, let alone being able to. Windows 7 was a big step forward, almost bringing it to feature parity with Gnome, which only leaves it about three years behind KDE.
Close. Saying that something is "gay" does make you seem of bad taste and not very professional. I'm gay, and I don't "find it offensive." I just think it makes you sound like an asshole.
You are off your meds. Steve Ballmer has said on record that Microsoft is much more afraid of Linux (and free software as a whole) than they are of the niche market that Apple serves.
You not liking the default setup is not a bug. Everything that ships with Ubuntu seems to keep it pretty standard with their use of ~/Music, ~/Pictures, et cetera. That's a feature, and one that really appeals to Ubuntu's target market. It takes the guesswork out of "Where'd that file go?"
If you don't like it, by god use something else, but don't blame the Ubuntu team for doing their job right.
I'm a fairly regular purchaser of both vinyl and compact disc, and I can testify that's it's been more records lately than CDs. Part of this really is the album art and cetera that you get with vinyl. If I buy a CD, I rip it and put it away, and will probably never touch it again. My record collection I turn to again and again, partially for the tactile enjoyment that I derive from it. It's kinda like smoking cigarettes, it's as much the ritual of doing the thing as it is the thing itself.
For the record, I am under 30. When I was really young it was cassette tapes, by the time I was old enough to have my own money it was CDs. I have no personal nostalgia for "the good ol' days of vinyl" or anything like that. I just like them better, I feel like I get more for my money.
But it won't stay that way very long if it's not getting out to a wider audience. That's the trap that a lot of otherwise good software (free and not) falls into; if it's being used by the same little insular group of people, it stagnates.
I've learned in five years of professional Linux sales and support that nothing sells itself.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm certainly not saying that everyone who uses Ubuntu is a rookie. I'm saying that the community that they've built around it is geared toward beginners. And that's fine. Hell, more than fine, that's a good thing for free software, we need that. But (and as a non-beginner yourself, I'm sure you'll get this) once I got past a certain point, the Ubuntu community ceased to be very helpful to me, because I was more knowledgeable than most of the people that I would have been looking to for help (be it on the forums or the IRC or whatever). I guess where you and I might differ is that I didn't feel like I was knowledgeable enough to not require any help, so I felt the need to move on and find a community that was more my speed.
But that's the other point I was trying to make, about your statement about "debug it yourself, noob." Seriously, I have never gotten that anywhere. In fact,/. is the only place I've seen that meme propagated. No matter where I've gone, whether its been the KDE forums or #archlinux or wherever, I have never once been treated with anything other than generosity, respect, and the spirit of service. Which is why I take exception when I see this meme of "all other Linux communities are full of assholes," because in my experience it's the furthest thing from the truth.
Ubuntu's got an amazing community of really awesome, devoted, generous people around it, and that's what makes it great. But it's not the only one. Not by a country mile. We are so blessed in the world of free software to have dozens and dozens of communities, large and small, with every bit as much passion and devotion.
1) You can't put a Playstation game in a Wii. You can't put a Windows game in Linux. (Well, there's Wine, but yeah. Given what they're up against, it's a miracle they make it work at all.) Jesus Christ, why do I have to post this same goddamn thing every time a Linux article rolls around? This is not rocket science, people.
2) Unless you're a sysadmin, you will never touch anything outside of/home/eepok (hey, it's the home directory for eepok! you're right, how can we expect people to handle this level of complexity?). Seriously, we could rename/dev to Frank for all any desktop user would notice or give a shit.
"Notoriously bad support for desktop drivers?" Are you high? Everyone sing along now: Linux supports more devices than any other operating system in the fucking world! And what's more, they are all in the kernel already! That's right, it's already ready already. Whatever "desktop drivers" you're talking about must be for something that was put on the market this morning, because by next weekend, we've got a driver for it, and by the next version of Ubuntu, it's in there. (This is all ignoring the fact that if you were installing Windows yourself like you install Linux yourself, it doesn't come with shit for drivers. God help you if you don't have your five year old wireless card's driver disc handy, because you are boned.)
"Very little support for games?!" Jesus, this is just richer by the minute, isn't it? Did you go buy a Wii and return it because it wouldn't play your Playstation games?
Say, for example, what popped out at me was when they mentioned that they had a hard time because they couldn't maximize windows by dragging them to the top of the screen
KDE's got that. Just like every other "new innovation" in the Windows UI.
iPods work just fine with all kinds of audio software on Linux. Rythmbox, Banshee, Amarok, just to name three off the top of my head. I wouldn't have one of those pieces of crap if they were free, but I support users that have them. What's the problem?
It's the first UNIX/Linux forum that I've ever used where the default answer to any question isn't "I'm far to busy to answer this. You've got the source, debug it yourself, noob".
You know, maybe it's a generational thing (and here I mean Linux generations, which seem to run about 2-3 years) but I have never once in my six years of using Linux been met by such a response on any forum or IRC channel I've ever used for support, and that's a list that is much wider than the Ubuntu forums.
Frankly, I think i've outgrown Ubuntu, or at least the community support. The kind of questions that get answered on the Ubuntu forums are the questions I got answers to five years ago. Once I got beyond "intermediate beginner" in my understanding of the system, the Ubuntu forums simply had nothing to offer me. And the IRC channel's so crammed full of people as to be utterly worthless.
None of this should be construed as me trying to disparage Ubuntu. I think there's a really important place in free software for the "Linux for human beings" philosophy (although I'd say it's more accurate to call it "Linux for beginners"). But I'm no longer a beginner, so I realized it was time to move on.
because open source drivers means that they always work, no matter how strange or obscure your hardware and software combination is.
Pretty damn much, yeah. They certainly beat the piss out the nonfree competition.
As someone who runs Linux exclusively on a decently broad variety of hardware, I can say without qualification that the devices I've owned with free drivers (be they wireless cards or video chipsets or sound cards or what have you) have. Always. Worked. Full stop. Not always flawlessly, to be sure. In the case of a certain maker of low end desktop video chipsets who may or may not be named Intel, often not flawlessly. But by the same token, I've never seen it crash X, I've never not been able to get to KDM. Not ever once ever ever. For ever ever? For ever ever.
The flip side of this, of course, is that everything I've ever had with a nonfree driver has without exception caused me grief. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, and for the rest of our lives. One day that sucker's gonna shit the bed and you will never know why. Guaranteed.
YMMV, and God knows there's gonna be plenty of people who could give me counterexamples and I'm not calling them liars by any means, but this has been my overwhelmingly prevalent experience for years, and I'm morally certain what I have just said is true a solid 95% of the time.
Barring government intervention in the form of software patents, there are no limited resources when it comes to ads on the web
That's nonsense. There most certainly are finite advertisements to be sold, and finite people to advertise to. Just because it's on teh internet doesn't magically make it infinite.
I'm under the impression that Arch Linux and Gentoo would both require a lot more time and effort to maintain than Ubuntu? Not in my experience (about 3 years of using Ubuntu, switched to Arch back in '08 because the KDE packages are so much nicer). It would be more accurate to say that Arch requires a lot more time to configure,as you're starting from much closer to scratch. Probably took me a month or two to really get it just right, but since that day it's been as close to "no maintenance required" as you're ever gonna see.
You will have to learn stuff and read stuff because Arch doesn't hold your hand like Ubuntu does (which is not a value judgment, just a difference in styles), but if you are willing to do that the rewards are great.
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I predict that the rise of the Android OS is going to force Apple to open their phone to non-App Store apps.
Statements like this remind me of the 'Year of the Linux Desktop' claims.
Android is outselling the iPhone right now. Make all the false equivalences you want to, but The Year Of The Linux Phone was last year.
(IANTheOriginalPoster)
I think it'll be a hit, and yes, I think it'll be bigger than you seem to think. VLC especially is very widely used. Many, many of my non-geek friends use it instead of the crippleware that MSFT and Apple ship, because it works flawlessly all the time for whatever you throw at it. I'd imagine (no data to back it up, but shooting from the hip) that Firefox, OOo, and VLC are the three most widely recognized free software applications out there, and of those three, VLC has the highest reputation for quality, ease of use, and reliability.
People (not just geeks, but a bunch of people) know the road cone means quality. If word starts getting around that people can't install it on their iTrash, I'll bet you a lot of people look elsewhere for their hardware. Not all, not even the majority, but a non-trivial percentage.
Wait a minute, Mozilla lost the browser war? To who?
Then you should keep using Windows. I say that as a Linux user, evangelist, and professional. Keep using Windows. I keep a Windows partition around to play Civ 4 even though it'll theoretically run in Wine (or so some people keep trying to tell me) just because it's not worth the aggravation to me.
If you want to play Playstation games, you need to have a Playstation. You can't put them in a Wii. Sure, with Linux we have Wine, and given the mountain they're trying to climb, it's a goddamn miracle it works at all. I say that in total sincerity, I don't use it for anything, but my hat is totally off to those folks. But for the most part, if you want to Playstation games you need a Playstation, and if you want to play Windows games you need Windows.
So it's a hierarchy of wants. Do you want to play Windows games more than you want to not have Windows? If the answer is yes, then great, do that. And seriously, I'm as vocal a free software believer as you'll talk to. But for all that, I don't see any difference between having a Windows gaming console and a Playstation gaming console. That's what they both are, after all. "Windows: At Least We've Still Got Games!"
As for me, I'm pretty close to cutting the cord. I'm still playing Civ 4, like I said, but if I can't run Civ 5 on XP (which I think you can although I haven't looked into it much) and on my current hardware (which I'm pretty sure I can't) I'm probably not going to buy it, and I'll most certainly send Firaxis a letter telling them why they just lost a customer who has bought every new version and every new expansion pack of Civilization since Civ 2. I'd also settle for running in Wine on the new machine I'm buying on Black Friday. But for damn sure I'm not buying a new box to put Windows on it, and that's the bottom line, and if that means Firaxis lost a customer, that's what it means.
Dismissing non-believers as heretics/trolls makes you an ideologue
I don't think he said that.
Your natural reaction to this will be to dismiss regular users as not worthy of Linux
I don't think he said that either.
nobody wants to adopt a platform that gets them trashed by smelly, overbearing, slogan-yelling hippies.
Oh, you're just a douchebag. I get it now.
If 2% == 3M, which doesn't seem unreasonable, then 98% == 147M.
I know a VC or two. They aren't investing in companies producing software that has a target market of 3M customers when they could be investing in companies who are writing for those other 147M.
Oh dang. I guess we'll just have to keep making better software ourselves, like we've been doing for twenty years.
Gnome and KDE have come a long way and they're pretty decent now, but they're not "killer app" better experiences than what you get on Mac and Windows these days.
I completely disagree, and would call it a case in point for my previous statement. The free desktops have been superior to anything you can buy for money for years now. OS X is still stuck in poor design choices they made at the beginning of the last decade and show no signs of even wanting to start digging their way out of that, let alone being able to. Windows 7 was a big step forward, almost bringing it to feature parity with Gnome, which only leaves it about three years behind KDE.
Close. Saying that something is "gay" does make you seem of bad taste and not very professional. I'm gay, and I don't "find it offensive." I just think it makes you sound like an asshole.
San Francisco Giants!
You are off your meds. Steve Ballmer has said on record that Microsoft is much more afraid of Linux (and free software as a whole) than they are of the niche market that Apple serves.
But which one is easier to remember? The graphical ones.
[citation desperately needed]
You not liking the default setup is not a bug. Everything that ships with Ubuntu seems to keep it pretty standard with their use of ~/Music, ~/Pictures, et cetera. That's a feature, and one that really appeals to Ubuntu's target market. It takes the guesswork out of "Where'd that file go?"
If you don't like it, by god use something else, but don't blame the Ubuntu team for doing their job right.
I'm a fairly regular purchaser of both vinyl and compact disc, and I can testify that's it's been more records lately than CDs. Part of this really is the album art and cetera that you get with vinyl. If I buy a CD, I rip it and put it away, and will probably never touch it again. My record collection I turn to again and again, partially for the tactile enjoyment that I derive from it. It's kinda like smoking cigarettes, it's as much the ritual of doing the thing as it is the thing itself.
For the record, I am under 30. When I was really young it was cassette tapes, by the time I was old enough to have my own money it was CDs. I have no personal nostalgia for "the good ol' days of vinyl" or anything like that. I just like them better, I feel like I get more for my money.
But it won't stay that way very long if it's not getting out to a wider audience. That's the trap that a lot of otherwise good software (free and not) falls into; if it's being used by the same little insular group of people, it stagnates.
I've learned in five years of professional Linux sales and support that nothing sells itself.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm certainly not saying that everyone who uses Ubuntu is a rookie. I'm saying that the community that they've built around it is geared toward beginners. And that's fine. Hell, more than fine, that's a good thing for free software, we need that. But (and as a non-beginner yourself, I'm sure you'll get this) once I got past a certain point, the Ubuntu community ceased to be very helpful to me, because I was more knowledgeable than most of the people that I would have been looking to for help (be it on the forums or the IRC or whatever). I guess where you and I might differ is that I didn't feel like I was knowledgeable enough to not require any help, so I felt the need to move on and find a community that was more my speed.
But that's the other point I was trying to make, about your statement about "debug it yourself, noob." Seriously, I have never gotten that anywhere. In fact, /. is the only place I've seen that meme propagated. No matter where I've gone, whether its been the KDE forums or #archlinux or wherever, I have never once been treated with anything other than generosity, respect, and the spirit of service. Which is why I take exception when I see this meme of "all other Linux communities are full of assholes," because in my experience it's the furthest thing from the truth.
Ubuntu's got an amazing community of really awesome, devoted, generous people around it, and that's what makes it great. But it's not the only one. Not by a country mile. We are so blessed in the world of free software to have dozens and dozens of communities, large and small, with every bit as much passion and devotion.
1) You can't put a Playstation game in a Wii. You can't put a Windows game in Linux. (Well, there's Wine, but yeah. Given what they're up against, it's a miracle they make it work at all.) Jesus Christ, why do I have to post this same goddamn thing every time a Linux article rolls around? This is not rocket science, people.
2) Unless you're a sysadmin, you will never touch anything outside of /home/eepok (hey, it's the home directory for eepok! you're right, how can we expect people to handle this level of complexity?). Seriously, we could rename /dev to Frank for all any desktop user would notice or give a shit.
You're a gamer. A Windows gamer.
I bet your Playstation games don't work if you try and stick them in a Wii. This isn't rocket science.
"Notoriously bad support for desktop drivers?" Are you high? Everyone sing along now: Linux supports more devices than any other operating system in the fucking world! And what's more, they are all in the kernel already! That's right, it's already ready already. Whatever "desktop drivers" you're talking about must be for something that was put on the market this morning, because by next weekend, we've got a driver for it, and by the next version of Ubuntu, it's in there. (This is all ignoring the fact that if you were installing Windows yourself like you install Linux yourself, it doesn't come with shit for drivers. God help you if you don't have your five year old wireless card's driver disc handy, because you are boned.)
"Very little support for games?!" Jesus, this is just richer by the minute, isn't it? Did you go buy a Wii and return it because it wouldn't play your Playstation games?
Come with real arguments or GTFO.
Say, for example, what popped out at me was when they mentioned that they had a hard time because they couldn't maximize windows by dragging them to the top of the screen
KDE's got that. Just like every other "new innovation" in the Windows UI.
No, this is trying to silence someone: Shut the fuck up.
iPods work just fine with all kinds of audio software on Linux. Rythmbox, Banshee, Amarok, just to name three off the top of my head. I wouldn't have one of those pieces of crap if they were free, but I support users that have them. What's the problem?
It's the first UNIX/Linux forum that I've ever used where the default answer to any question isn't "I'm far to busy to answer this. You've got the source, debug it yourself, noob".
You know, maybe it's a generational thing (and here I mean Linux generations, which seem to run about 2-3 years) but I have never once in my six years of using Linux been met by such a response on any forum or IRC channel I've ever used for support, and that's a list that is much wider than the Ubuntu forums.
Frankly, I think i've outgrown Ubuntu, or at least the community support. The kind of questions that get answered on the Ubuntu forums are the questions I got answers to five years ago. Once I got beyond "intermediate beginner" in my understanding of the system, the Ubuntu forums simply had nothing to offer me. And the IRC channel's so crammed full of people as to be utterly worthless.
None of this should be construed as me trying to disparage Ubuntu. I think there's a really important place in free software for the "Linux for human beings" philosophy (although I'd say it's more accurate to call it "Linux for beginners"). But I'm no longer a beginner, so I realized it was time to move on.
If you use contributions to Gnome as a major metric, shouldn't Canonical get some points for indirectly contributing to KDE
All Canonical's done for KDE is give people the impression that it sucks.
because open source drivers means that they always work, no matter how strange or obscure your hardware and software combination is.
Pretty damn much, yeah. They certainly beat the piss out the nonfree competition.
As someone who runs Linux exclusively on a decently broad variety of hardware, I can say without qualification that the devices I've owned with free drivers (be they wireless cards or video chipsets or sound cards or what have you) have. Always. Worked. Full stop. Not always flawlessly, to be sure. In the case of a certain maker of low end desktop video chipsets who may or may not be named Intel, often not flawlessly. But by the same token, I've never seen it crash X, I've never not been able to get to KDM. Not ever once ever ever. For ever ever? For ever ever.
The flip side of this, of course, is that everything I've ever had with a nonfree driver has without exception caused me grief. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday, and for the rest of our lives. One day that sucker's gonna shit the bed and you will never know why. Guaranteed.
YMMV, and God knows there's gonna be plenty of people who could give me counterexamples and I'm not calling them liars by any means, but this has been my overwhelmingly prevalent experience for years, and I'm morally certain what I have just said is true a solid 95% of the time.
Barring government intervention in the form of software patents, there are no limited resources when it comes to ads on the web
That's nonsense. There most certainly are finite advertisements to be sold, and finite people to advertise to. Just because it's on teh internet doesn't magically make it infinite.
I'm under the impression that Arch Linux and Gentoo would both require a lot more time and effort to maintain than Ubuntu?
Not in my experience (about 3 years of using Ubuntu, switched to Arch back in '08 because the KDE packages are so much nicer). It would be more accurate to say that Arch requires a lot more time to configure,as you're starting from much closer to scratch. Probably took me a month or two to really get it just right, but since that day it's been as close to "no maintenance required" as you're ever gonna see.
You will have to learn stuff and read stuff because Arch doesn't hold your hand like Ubuntu does (which is not a value judgment, just a difference in styles), but if you are willing to do that the rewards are great.