In addition to that Linux starts to exhibit side-effects of "too much choice". There are at least two desktop interfaces (GTK, and QT) so, half of the people only get half of the applications, because their desktop user interface is not supported. Things like that.
Yes, definitely. I am most certainly not replying to you from Firefox running on KDE. And it is, as everyone knows, impossible to use Krusader as your file manager in Gnome. I definitely don't have that on my laptop.
Now, I know that there are alot of apps for Linux...
That's about as far as you got before you stopped making any damn sense at all. It seems to me that you proceeded to list off a bunch of things that are already happening in the free software world. Let's review....but the installation and use of them are not as seamless as those for Windows or OSX.
We've had that for ten goddamn years. It is called apt. There is absolutely nothing that is more seamless and braindead simple for installing, removing, and managing your system than apt. Nothing. There's nothing in Windows or OSX that's even in the same ballpark. And why not? Is it a technical problem? Obviously not. The answer is "they can't, because they are not free."
a set of agreed upon application practices
Rebuttal the first: Yeah, because application developers for Windows are sooo conscientious about coding to desktop standards. They never use their own ugly widget sets, or dump a bunch of horseshit in the system tray, or make you run as root, or force you to waste resources to run their own super-special update mechanism. It might sound silly at first blush, but a large part of why I initially came to Linux in the first place is that I wanted more uniformity and general neatness.
Rebuttal the second: It is called freedesktop.org, and it has been around for eight years.
Finally, on a more general level, what the hell are you talking about? Are you making reference to any particular project(s)? Because I can't figure out what they could possibly be.
Then you've got to pay the floor staff, the cashier, the janitor, the coffee in the employee lounge, if it's a store in the north country someone's gonna have to plow the parking lot when it snows, et cetera, et cetera. And BB's still gotta make money. Have you no idea how this whole "stores selling things" concept works?
Hey, you kiss my ass. I charge people, well, not quite $150 to install Linux on their home machines, but in that ballpark, and no I don't feel like it's an unreasonable number. What's Suzie Soccer Mom gonna do if she installs Ubuntu on her Acer laptop and that thing's got a Broadcom wireless chip in it that "the little thing in the corner can see, but it's not getting a signal"? What's she gonna do if her headphones don't turn the speakers off? Yes, sometimes it's easy money. Sometimes it's hours of work.
Now, I do have a problem with the Geek Squad's "fire and forget" attitude, for instance I include written instructions to replicate every single thing I did to set the computer up from which non-default programs I installed to how to compile the madwifi driver. So yeah, in that sense I feel like the Geek Squad specifically underserves (at least compared to me). But if you think that charging someone money to install and configure a Linux desktop is somehow "ripping them off," then you do not understand the people we're dealing with here at all.
Bike analogy (I don't have a car): I don't know how to true my wheels. I'm sure I could do it if I wanted to learn. I don't. I pay someone else what they probably think is a stupid amount of money to have it done for me in a timely and professional fashion. I consider this money to be well-spent.
To advance the usage of Linux it will have to be done the same way as DOS/Windows. It needs to come pre-installed and used at school and in the workplace, areas we are already seeing improvements in.
You are wrong. I mean, obviously having Linux available pre-installed is a good thing, I'm not arguing that, but we're entering a new era here. People have gotten sick of Windows (and by sick I mean ill), and with the economy in the toilet, America is not beating down the door of the Apple Store to buy a Mac (no, hipsters, I'm not talking talking about you).
And here we are, waiting where we've always been, doing what we've always been doing, but now people are starting to take notice. Right now being able to tell people "You don't have to buy a new computer! I can make your old computer a new computer!" is a win.
Now, you can say it's unfair that they bundled their own apps with Windows, but that makes them no different that any other OS (including IBM, Apple, and pretty much every Linux distro).
To my knowledge not one Linux distro makes their own web browser.
(What is a totem and WTF does it have to do with playing media? WTF is a xine anyhow?) Non-starter. What's an Adobe? What's an iPod?
try installing an app that plays podcasts WITHOUT KNOWING that democracyplayer and VLC play podcasts. I accept your challenge. Opened Synaptic (okay, so I really did it in aptitude, sue me), searched for "podcast," and lo!
democracyplayer - GTK+ based RSS video aggregator gpodder - A GTK+ Media aggregator and Podcast catcher hpodder - Tool to scan and download podcasts (podcatcher) idjc - graphical shoutcast/icecast client kitty - a Qt/KDE based RSS podcast and video aggregator libxmlplaylist-ocaml-dev - Playlist parser for various xml formats listen - music player and manager for GNOME miro - GTK+ based RSS video aggregator miro-data - GTK+ based RSS video aggregator data files mythstream - MythTV plugin for playing Internet audio and video streams newsbeuter - text mode rss feed reader with podcast support penguintv - podcasts and video blogs for Linux podget - Podcast aggregrator/downloader optimized for cron podracer - podcast aggregator/downloader xmms2-plugin-rss - XMMS2 - RSS podcast plugin rhythmbox - music player and organizer for GNOME rhythmbox-dbg - debugging symbols for rhythmbox
For doing their jobs? I don't think so. Assuming you did RTFA, you know that the employer took this to the police. The police and justice system then proceeded to do what we pay them for. That's their job. They'd be negligent if they did not pursue this case, at least with the information that they could be reasonably expected to have. If you're looking for a lawsuit, I'd say the place to start would be the company itself, and maybe the IT staff.
The difference here is that technically speaking, binary drivers on Linux are not the way to go. They will always be buggy because they're trying to aim at a moving target, and if they're not willing to open the source they can't get included in the kernel tree. This gives companies who are willing to provide open drivers (or at least specs) a huge competitive advantage because their drivers will always be more stable.
Are you upset that windows doesn't ship with drivers for every printer and accessory, or are you upset that Windows doesn't ship with 400 other programs pre-installed?
Not upset at all. I'm just gonna keep using the OS that does do these things. Welcome to the 21st century.
More and more, I find that's already done in the Ubuntu install (depending on your model, of course, and as long as you're willing to suffer through using Rhythmbox, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy).
Regardless of whether you're right or wrong in any or all of your points, if I had mod points I'd give you -1 Offtopic. None of what you just said had fuck-all to do with any business model that I can see.
I don't typically respond to "here's my list of Linux shortcomings" comments like this one (not that I think you're trolling, some of your comments in this thread have been excellent), but...
a real nice Lexmark All-in-one...
I'll see your anecdote and raise you a datapoint. I got a free (and nice) HP All-in-One from a customer when she graduated college and decided she didn't need a printer anymore, and the Linux drivers are a lot better than the Windows drivers. When I plugged it in under XP, I thought the heads needed to be cleaned, but then I plugged it into my Ubuntu machine, and no, it just prints with little blue streaks all the time in Windows for no good reason.
My story is no more or less informational than yours. HP has excellent Linux hardware support. Lexmark fucking sucks the goat's balls. Them's facts. No blame.
Add to that most of my customers have software that came with their hardware(Nero Suite,Kodak or other photo editing,etc) that they truly love...
All of my customers have software that came with their computer (K3b or Brasero, Krita or the Gimp for photo editing, etc.) that they also love, whose quality at least equals anything that exists in the proprietary world.
that at least 60% of my customers play at least SOME games,if nothing but Age of Empires...
I believe that, I do still occasionally boot to XP even now to play AoE3 (but mostly Civ 4, to be honest, yes I could run XP in a VM, but...) Anyway, I've started including Battle for Wesnoth on the machines that I sell, and it seems to be pretty popular among that same (soccer mom, non-hardcore gamer) set. And it's still under constant development, and there are new mods, campaigns, and maps hitting the internet every single day.
I'm not saying that AoE isn't a great game. In my book, it's one of a short list of things that Microsoft really did well. But great games exist for Linux. More every day....you have the reason why even a free Linux distro can cost a lot of money to convert to.
Yes, we know that. Thanks to you, every single Slashdot user has heard at least fourteen times in the last day and a half that Twitter has more than one account and you don't like it. We know. We all know. Now would you please shut the fuck up about it?
I have lived in a lot of places. The city I live in now has just shy of half a million souls in it, and I agree with your statement as it applies there.
I have also lived in a small town on the western Minnesota prairie, population 204. Where you are literally 45 minutes by car from a public internet terminal. I know that's just one little prairie town, but there's a hell of a lot of little prairie towns in this country, and when you add them all together, they're almost half the population of the United States.
No, the internet is not "free just about everywhere I've gone." I find 20% to be a pretty conservative estimate, honestly.
The general market still has so much to learn about other options besides Windows. Mac is gaining popularity because of cool-factor and crossover conversions, none of which Linux has. Honestly, it won't be until you can fool someone into using Linux before they figure out its not Windows that you will see a change in general market trends. Either that or some unforeseen landmark change in the computer landscape is going to have to take place.
I'm onboard with your general premise, but I think you go off the rails there at the end. I think Apple has shown with astonishing effectiveness the dirty secret that everyone's known in their hearts for years: everyone hates Windows. So this company comes along and says "hey! this is different! this is better! you know you've gotta have this!" and make money like fuckin' train robbers.
This is where the free software community totally doesn't get the job done. We know how to deal with machines, but we don't know how to deal with people (although I think Aaron Seigo and the KDE folks are getting there quick). We've also got something that's different, something that's lightyears better, but we can't figure out how to sell this shit. Why on earth is that?
I'm going to get bashed by Apple fanatics, but if people were buying based on features, they wouldn't be buying iPods. The iPod is nice, but feature-wise there are better players.
Such as?
Such as the ability to listen to.flac or.ogg.
Such as an FM radio.
Such as the ability to sort my music the way I want to, the way it's sorted on my computer, the way it's been sorted for over a goddamn decade. To me, this is a major dealbreaker with the iPod. Do not try to outsmart me, little audio player.
Such as an equalizer.
Such as not having to worry about losing your goofy proprietary iPod cable, because it uses a standard USB like everyone else in the world.
Such as buttons. You know, things that click when you press them, so you know you've gone N number of clicks. Contrast this with the "wheel" which I think is a horrible interface.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to that Linux starts to exhibit side-effects of "too much choice". There are at least two desktop interfaces (GTK, and QT) so, half of the people only get half of the applications, because their desktop user interface is not supported. Things like that.
Yes, definitely. I am most certainly not replying to you from Firefox running on KDE. And it is, as everyone knows, impossible to use Krusader as your file manager in Gnome. I definitely don't have that on my laptop.
Now, I know that there are alot of apps for Linux...
That's about as far as you got before you stopped making any damn sense at all. It seems to me that you proceeded to list off a bunch of things that are already happening in the free software world. Let's review. ...but the installation and use of them are not as seamless as those for Windows or OSX.
We've had that for ten goddamn years. It is called apt. There is absolutely nothing that is more seamless and braindead simple for installing, removing, and managing your system than apt. Nothing. There's nothing in Windows or OSX that's even in the same ballpark. And why not? Is it a technical problem? Obviously not. The answer is "they can't, because they are not free."
a set of agreed upon application practices
Rebuttal the first: Yeah, because application developers for Windows are sooo conscientious about coding to desktop standards. They never use their own ugly widget sets, or dump a bunch of horseshit in the system tray, or make you run as root, or force you to waste resources to run their own super-special update mechanism. It might sound silly at first blush, but a large part of why I initially came to Linux in the first place is that I wanted more uniformity and general neatness.
Rebuttal the second: It is called freedesktop.org, and it has been around for eight years.
Finally, on a more general level, what the hell are you talking about? Are you making reference to any particular project(s)? Because I can't figure out what they could possibly be.
I think there's a pretty big difference between the GPL and a shrink-wrap EULA. The GPL isn't even a user license, it's a distribution license.
I can buy an Ubuntu machine from System 76 that does all those things out of the box. And more. For less.
Then you've got to pay the floor staff, the cashier, the janitor, the coffee in the employee lounge, if it's a store in the north country someone's gonna have to plow the parking lot when it snows, et cetera, et cetera. And BB's still gotta make money. Have you no idea how this whole "stores selling things" concept works?
Hey, you kiss my ass. I charge people, well, not quite $150 to install Linux on their home machines, but in that ballpark, and no I don't feel like it's an unreasonable number. What's Suzie Soccer Mom gonna do if she installs Ubuntu on her Acer laptop and that thing's got a Broadcom wireless chip in it that "the little thing in the corner can see, but it's not getting a signal"? What's she gonna do if her headphones don't turn the speakers off? Yes, sometimes it's easy money. Sometimes it's hours of work.
Now, I do have a problem with the Geek Squad's "fire and forget" attitude, for instance I include written instructions to replicate every single thing I did to set the computer up from which non-default programs I installed to how to compile the madwifi driver. So yeah, in that sense I feel like the Geek Squad specifically underserves (at least compared to me). But if you think that charging someone money to install and configure a Linux desktop is somehow "ripping them off," then you do not understand the people we're dealing with here at all.
Bike analogy (I don't have a car): I don't know how to true my wheels. I'm sure I could do it if I wanted to learn. I don't. I pay someone else what they probably think is a stupid amount of money to have it done for me in a timely and professional fashion. I consider this money to be well-spent.
To advance the usage of Linux it will have to be done the same way as DOS/Windows. It needs to come pre-installed and used at school and in the workplace, areas we are already seeing improvements in.
You are wrong. I mean, obviously having Linux available pre-installed is a good thing, I'm not arguing that, but we're entering a new era here. People have gotten sick of Windows (and by sick I mean ill), and with the economy in the toilet, America is not beating down the door of the Apple Store to buy a Mac (no, hipsters, I'm not talking talking about you).
And here we are, waiting where we've always been, doing what we've always been doing, but now people are starting to take notice. Right now being able to tell people "You don't have to buy a new computer! I can make your old computer a new computer!" is a win.
Invalid comparison. OOo is also encumbered with 20+ years of bad code. See for yourself. Then go get KOffice.
Now, you can say it's unfair that they bundled their own apps with Windows, but that makes them no different that any other OS (including IBM, Apple, and pretty much every Linux distro).
To my knowledge not one Linux distro makes their own web browser.
Yeah, like Amarok, Okular, gmusicbrowser, KDE 4, Compiz...oh wait.
democracyplayer - GTK+ based RSS video aggregator
gpodder - A GTK+ Media aggregator and Podcast catcher
hpodder - Tool to scan and download podcasts (podcatcher)
idjc - graphical shoutcast/icecast client
kitty - a Qt/KDE based RSS podcast and video aggregator
libxmlplaylist-ocaml-dev - Playlist parser for various xml formats
listen - music player and manager for GNOME
miro - GTK+ based RSS video aggregator
miro-data - GTK+ based RSS video aggregator data files
mythstream - MythTV plugin for playing Internet audio and video streams
newsbeuter - text mode rss feed reader with podcast support
penguintv - podcasts and video blogs for Linux
podget - Podcast aggregrator/downloader optimized for cron
podracer - podcast aggregator/downloader
xmms2-plugin-rss - XMMS2 - RSS podcast plugin
rhythmbox - music player and organizer for GNOME
rhythmbox-dbg - debugging symbols for rhythmbox
Prosecutors and police can be sued.
For doing their jobs? I don't think so. Assuming you did RTFA, you know that the employer took this to the police. The police and justice system then proceeded to do what we pay them for. That's their job. They'd be negligent if they did not pursue this case, at least with the information that they could be reasonably expected to have. If you're looking for a lawsuit, I'd say the place to start would be the company itself, and maybe the IT staff.
(IANAL, but I don't think you are either.)
I wish there was a -1 Modappeal modifier on /. like there is on Plastic.
The difference here is that technically speaking, binary drivers on Linux are not the way to go. They will always be buggy because they're trying to aim at a moving target, and if they're not willing to open the source they can't get included in the kernel tree. This gives companies who are willing to provide open drivers (or at least specs) a huge competitive advantage because their drivers will always be more stable.
If you're on 8.04, the ppa repo is no longer necessary. Just pull from main.
Are you upset that windows doesn't ship with drivers for every printer and accessory, or are you upset that Windows doesn't ship with 400 other programs pre-installed?
Not upset at all. I'm just gonna keep using the OS that does do these things. Welcome to the 21st century.
More and more, I find that's already done in the Ubuntu install (depending on your model, of course, and as long as you're willing to suffer through using Rhythmbox, which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy).
Regardless of whether you're right or wrong in any or all of your points, if I had mod points I'd give you -1 Offtopic. None of what you just said had fuck-all to do with any business model that I can see.
Never heard of him. Try again.
They make a fundamental error in they're argument
And you seem to have made a fundamental error in you're grammar.
I don't typically respond to "here's my list of Linux shortcomings" comments like this one (not that I think you're trolling, some of your comments in this thread have been excellent), but...
...you have the reason why even a free Linux distro can cost a lot of money to convert to.
a real nice Lexmark All-in-one...
I'll see your anecdote and raise you a datapoint. I got a free (and nice) HP All-in-One from a customer when she graduated college and decided she didn't need a printer anymore, and the Linux drivers are a lot better than the Windows drivers. When I plugged it in under XP, I thought the heads needed to be cleaned, but then I plugged it into my Ubuntu machine, and no, it just prints with little blue streaks all the time in Windows for no good reason.
My story is no more or less informational than yours. HP has excellent Linux hardware support. Lexmark fucking sucks the goat's balls. Them's facts. No blame.
Add to that most of my customers have software that came with their hardware(Nero Suite,Kodak or other photo editing,etc) that they truly love...
All of my customers have software that came with their computer (K3b or Brasero, Krita or the Gimp for photo editing, etc.) that they also love, whose quality at least equals anything that exists in the proprietary world.
that at least 60% of my customers play at least SOME games,if nothing but Age of Empires...
I believe that, I do still occasionally boot to XP even now to play AoE3 (but mostly Civ 4, to be honest, yes I could run XP in a VM, but...) Anyway, I've started including Battle for Wesnoth on the machines that I sell, and it seems to be pretty popular among that same (soccer mom, non-hardcore gamer) set. And it's still under constant development, and there are new mods, campaigns, and maps hitting the internet every single day.
I'm not saying that AoE isn't a great game. In my book, it's one of a short list of things that Microsoft really did well. But great games exist for Linux. More every day.
I don't see it.
Yes, we know that. Thanks to you, every single Slashdot user has heard at least fourteen times in the last day and a half that Twitter has more than one account and you don't like it. We know. We all know. Now would you please shut the fuck up about it?
I have lived in a lot of places. The city I live in now has just shy of half a million souls in it, and I agree with your statement as it applies there.
I have also lived in a small town on the western Minnesota prairie, population 204. Where you are literally 45 minutes by car from a public internet terminal. I know that's just one little prairie town, but there's a hell of a lot of little prairie towns in this country, and when you add them all together, they're almost half the population of the United States.
No, the internet is not "free just about everywhere I've gone." I find 20% to be a pretty conservative estimate, honestly.
The general market still has so much to learn about other options besides Windows. Mac is gaining popularity because of cool-factor and crossover conversions, none of which Linux has. Honestly, it won't be until you can fool someone into using Linux before they figure out its not Windows that you will see a change in general market trends. Either that or some unforeseen landmark change in the computer landscape is going to have to take place.
I'm onboard with your general premise, but I think you go off the rails there at the end. I think Apple has shown with astonishing effectiveness the dirty secret that everyone's known in their hearts for years: everyone hates Windows. So this company comes along and says "hey! this is different! this is better! you know you've gotta have this!" and make money like fuckin' train robbers.
This is where the free software community totally doesn't get the job done. We know how to deal with machines, but we don't know how to deal with people (although I think Aaron Seigo and the KDE folks are getting there quick). We've also got something that's different, something that's lightyears better, but we can't figure out how to sell this shit. Why on earth is that?
Such as the ability to listen to
Such as an FM radio.
Such as the ability to sort my music the way I want to, the way it's sorted on my computer, the way it's been sorted for over a goddamn decade. To me, this is a major dealbreaker with the iPod. Do not try to outsmart me, little audio player.
Such as an equalizer.
Such as not having to worry about losing your goofy proprietary iPod cable, because it uses a standard USB like everyone else in the world.
Such as buttons. You know, things that click when you press them, so you know you've gone N number of clicks. Contrast this with the "wheel" which I think is a horrible interface.
Such as an off button.
Shall I continue?