Submitted by “In days gone by, the personification of Linux might have conjured up the image of a hotshot college kid full of half-baked ideas and sharp edges. But that college kid has now graduated into the business world, and unleashed his furious entrepreneurial spirit. Today, Linux has a sharper, more refined edge than before, and has branched out into private, public, enterprise and governmental sectors. Linux also spans all manner of hardware platforms, and serves an incredibly wide variety of purposes.”
It’s a nice article overaul, and as the name states, talks about the current state of linux.
But to be honest, while covering the spots where linux is used, for me it’s 10 pages don’t say much at all.
I use linux for 6 years as a desktop and server platform and I love it. The only problem for desktops is directx support for games. Linux isn’t more difficult then editting and tweaking the registry with windows.
The management in the hospital I work for even considered linux as a desktop. But the lack of hardware support (the pda’s of doctors) turned their minds to a windows and citrix platform.
Yes it is true that linux had more edge today than 10 years ago. i also have edgeif i compare to myself. That polish, edge advancements of linux needs to be compared with something, and more precisely with MS and Mac. The MS and Mac will be always one step ahead in this game. it’s not lack of efforts by linux devels but lack of collective efforts to bring linux mainstream.
BTW can someone tell why I have to MOUNT and UNMOUNT cd in cddrive(on almost all distros) before read, even though it detects and shows nicd cd icon with green corner on my KDE desktop. Why can’t I use the push button(hardware) on cd drive to eject it??
Such a simple task shouldn’t take 10 years of linux devls time, right?
i sadly have to agree … the only thing preventing linux adoption, is the diluted development effort.
adoption: i mean success
its not that way for me with my gentoo system
(insert dvd)
mplayer dvd:// -ao alsa:device=headset
(finish dvd)
(hit eject button)
(take dvd out put on rack)
If a process is accessing the drive It won’t eject, and you can find out which is attatched to it.
If you want to read files from it, I prefer manually mount’ing and umount’ing
For writing I don’t have to mount
Different distros handle it differently
and of course my gentoo is custom to me
I don’t know, it works for me on my gnome desktop.
I’m using Ubuntu Dapper Drake and I don’t have to umount anything… Just press the button.
You’re right on the community usually duplicating efforts (you can argue the need for n WM, and m DE or x Office suits), but one of the OSS flags is also choice, nevertheless a better cooperation on core elements would be nice.
I don’t see Linux just going after MS or Apple. The human-computer interface is a tested discipline, you can’t fight what’s already tested. Most OSS projects don’t have the means or money to put up big HCI tests, and their users are the testers. So going after the way MS or Apple does some things, mostly because they can invest time and money on HCI tests (I believe they do) is a safe way to do it. Although I see some projects being able to work their away into new paradigms of HCI, maybe that can make the OSS desktop go its own route, and stop the thinking that OSS copies what MS or Apple do.
What I still don’t understand is people attacking OSS the way they do… It’s free, and aims to give people an alternative to vendor lockin, it has its flaws, but being developed sometimes for free, in people’s spare time, doing the best they can, why do some people seem to want to destroy it? Do they want the computers or computing all to themselves? Do they all have shares in some software company?
Cheers.
“Yes it is true that linux had more edge today than 10 years ago. i also have edgeif i compare to myself.”
That’s weird, I certainly have less edge than 10 years ago. Turning 30 sucks.
“The MS and Mac will be always one step ahead in this game. it’s not lack of efforts by linux devels but lack of collective efforts to bring linux mainstream.”
You know, I’ve been following the development of Linux for some years now and so far, all the nay-sayers, and there were more than enough of them, turned out wrong.
Also, the article talks for pages about the collective effort you claim to be missing. Now you might of course argue that it’s not enough, or that it’s going in the wrong direction, but to simply ignore it in order to support a rather stupid assertion isn’t very convincing.
“BTW can someone tell why I have to MOUNT and UNMOUNT cd in cddrive(on almost all distros) before read, even though it detects and shows nicd cd icon with green corner on my KDE desktop.”
Um, you don’t. CDs have been mounted automatically by any mainstream distro for years now.
“Why can’t I use the push button(hardware) on cd drive to eject it??”
You can. It might not be enabled by every distro by default, but you certainly can.
“Such a simple task shouldn’t take 10 years of linux devls time, right?”
And it didn’t.
Btw., doesn’t posting flamebaits on online forums get pretty boring after time?
Edited 2006-06-07 19:10
Such criticisms aren’t always flamebait. In this case, I’m guessing it has more to do with out of date or incomplete information about what’s out there. Not all distros have the same level of polish.
In this case, his history seems to indicate that he’s using Debian Pure and compiles everything himself (http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=14063&comment_id=106797). Debian Pure might very well not automount things by default since Debian is more server-oriented and on a server you tend to want to have more control over what devices are mounted. His compile-time customizations might also throw a wrench into it, even if Debian Pure does do automounting.
Such criticisms aren’t always flamebait
But in this case it is, or rather, it is a troll.
In this case, I’m guessing it has more to do with out of date or incomplete information about what’s out there. Not all distros have the same level of polish
Which excuse is that ? “out of date” or “incomplete” information, when we’re talking about “state of Linux in 2006” ?
It doesn’t make sense. Someone that is supposed to talk about the state of Linux in 2006 and is still using a distro from 2003 or before is just a troller.
In this case, his history seems to indicate that he’s using Debian Pure and compiles everything himself (http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=14063&comment_id=10…)
That’s BS and poor excuse. If you compile everything yourself, you should not use Debian (or any other RPM/APT based distro), and you learn that pretty fast.
I know because I’ve done it, and it’s a HUGE pain. And when you compile everything yourself like I do, you learn all kind of things pretty fast too, and can’t say uninformed things like that.
BTW can someone tell why I have to MOUNT and UNMOUNT cd in cddrive(on almost all distros) before read, even though it detects and shows nicd cd icon with green corner on my KDE desktop. Why can’t I use the push button(hardware) on cd drive to eject it??
No idea, it works for me in Fedora and gentoo.
“The MS and Mac will be always one step ahead in this game.”
My experience here is just the opposite. SUSE linux fully supports my Pentium D 920, both with a smp kernel and support for 64 bit. Windows XP (not the 64-bit version) feels choppy and sluggish at the best.
Mac OS X is a lot better (than Windows XP), but you need either to buy a Mackintosh or to use a hacked DVD.
Because you’re reading it as a data cd and you have to mount those to access the gooey files inside.
If it’s a music cd you shouldn’t be mounting it, in fact I’m surprised it plays if you are mounting it! Same goes for DVD video.
With both you can’t eject it if it’s being accessed.
And you can’t eject a mounted disc(k) of any form either. The way Windows gets around this is by unmounting the disk when you are no longer accessing files on it. The disadvantage to this is that it has to be remounted when you want to access a file again. I think it stems from the floppy era where Microsoft engineers realized that stupid people will pop floppies and not think to unmount them first. With cd drives, though, you can stop them from popping them.
The core reason is probably that Unix users prefer to learn and control their systems where typical users are happy to do it the way Bill Ghee (or whoever else) tells them to. Not to demean either, there’s certainly good reason to believe you don’t have to know all.
Remember that in Windows ejecting a CD while it is in use gives you a blue screen asking to put it back. Do you want the same behaviour for Linux?
Does it still happen as of XP+SP2? Anyone tested this on Vista’s test builds?
the 9x tree did that, 2k and xp don’t
They always stretch their fluff articles out for as many pages as possible to get tons of ad revenue. Really irritating. I once saw them stretch a comparison of “bling bling” cases out to 47 pages.
Yup, that must be why they don’t even have a print view for the articles…
I use linux for 6 years as a desktop and server platform and I do not love it. The only problem for desktops is no easy to install and stable drivers support for games. Windows isn’t more difficult then editing and tweaking the dozens of scattered configuration files under Linux.
The plumbers in the hospice I work for even considered linux as a desktop. But the lack of stable and professional software support (the pda’s of nurses) turned their minds to a Windows, Office platform.
Edited 2006-06-07 18:38
This article reiterates the reason major IT players give for not going with Linux: it’s not unified. Linux fans can chant “choice!” holding hands together as long as they want, but this so-called choice is what keeps Linux behind. There isn’t one, and only one public face for Linux. saying “Linux” is not enough. What DE? What distribution? And which multimedia framework?
I feel that choice is great when it comes to applications. But NOT for the system itself. It should be one DE, one API for drivers, one multimedia framework, etc. One coherent system that is well understood and provides the base that countless developers and users need. On top of this system, install apps to your heart’s content.
It’s 2006, people. Joe Desktop User shouldn’t even know about KDE, GNOME, GStreamer, X… just like a Windows user doesn’t need to know about DirectX, .NET, DLLs – his apps and games just work, whatever is under the hood. (Yes, it’s simplistic, but you understand what I mean).
It’s a bit ironic that after years of going in different directions, there are now projects like freedesktop. If things were unified, it wouldn’t have been necessary.
And just to make it clear, there is nothing more that I want than to see Linux succeed. I want to see the day when the word “Linux” is not a good conversation starter, simply because it’ll be so common. But without total and complete unification, I don’t see how.
P.S. English is not my native tounge.
You raise an interesting point here. Part of me agrees that “Joe Desktop User” shouldn’t know how the underlying system works; things should just happen the way he wants.
However, I also believe that Linux (and the Linux community) is simply not ready yet to have their choice taken away. Evidence for this is the ongoing KDE/Gnome debate (although it appears to be dying down somewhat of late). Diehard users of their preferred DE won’t likely respond well to forcing another DE upon them.
On a more theoretical level, taking choices away from the user puts the technical decisions in the hands of software writers (experts) as opposed to “clueless” end-users. In many cases, this is a nice thing (e.g. Ubuntu’s option to automatically partition free space on a hard disk). However, this is a slippery slope. For example, the latest Ubuntu (Dapper) overwrites the MBR without confirmation during the LiveCD install. This is a serious bug in my opinion, and may leave users with (temporarilty?) unbootable operating systems if the Dapper install utility doesn’t recognize other OS’s sharing a hard drive.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that there are times when decisions should be left to developers, and times when decisions should be left to the user. Again, while I agree with the gist of what you said, I believe that decisions to limit the choice of users must be carefully thought out (and perhaps even voted on by the community) in order to avoid alienating the most ardent supporters of OSS.
I think the choices were supposed to be worked out largely by different distributions, so you’d end up with different distros of Linux looking more like distinct operating systems. It looks like this almost happened with Ubuntu, but then someone came along and said “I like Ubuntu, but I want KDE,” and open source just made it way too easy to comply. It seems like all the distros have as at least a somewhat high priority to be compatible with a broad range of FOSS applications and subsystems. People trying out a Linux distro certainly seem to like installing the full collection. I suppose it’s still better than the traditional way that Ubuntu split into two distinct, heavily customized base installations.
What I’d really like to see, though, is for someone to take the Linux kernel and make a product with a complete custom userspace, something completely devoid of the traditional X server approach, maybe not even supporting a command line mode. It’s not that I want to use such a system, but I think seeing something so different grow out of Linux would be a real proof of concept for free software.
Is this article available in single-page format?
Nop, as stated above TH makes these 500 page long articles to increase revenue on ads…
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/07/a_continuing_work_in_progres…
print.html is there for all their articles.
“…full of half-baked ideas and sharp edges. … Today, Linux has a sharper, more refined edge…”
If you can’t write well at least be concise and have something to say. The world doesn’t need anymore “and another thing I’ve noticed…” articles. They belong in blogs and blogs belong in /dev/null.
something completely devoid of the traditional X server approach, maybe not even supporting a command line mode
I think they are called embedded systems, one can find them in cell phones, PDAs, VDRs, etc
PCs, however, are multi purpose machines by design, so they need a more flexible way for user interaction, and currently this means commandline or GUI
when we realized that existence of both Gnome and KDE prevents either one from becoming a default Linux API for GUI and Desktop, we started a Project Portland.
However I think it will require a lot of cooperation from GUI people – including API changes to make things more similar between Gnome/KDE. Still I don’t understand how they intend to make a good desktop integration via a daemon that translates everything to GUI API. I’m just not convinced that it’s a right approach.
Still I don’t understand how they intend to make a good desktop integration via a daemon that translates everything to GUI API
Most of the integration tasks have very little to do with GUI, they are about accessing features or services offered by the desktop environments.
Some of those services are already implemented as separate session daemons or as helper processes, Portland Project efforts are mainly about specifying a unified way of accessing those.
Some features are not yet accessible through inter process communication because until now it was more convenient to access them through direct API calls.
At least the two big DEs, very likely the smaller ones as well, are moving their infrastructure to a more service oriented one anyway