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"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it.""Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it."Posted Aug 28, 2012 18:18 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)Parent article: Look and feel lawsuits, the second time around
And this drives me crazy. I hate all the Macbooks I see at random Linux and Free Software conferences. In one of my modest open-source projects, I put code in explicitly to discourage porting to Mac OS X. I was flamed for that decision, but I stand by it.
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"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 18:42 UTC (Tue) by JEFFREY (subscriber, #79095) [Link]
Thanks for reminding me.
Because of your request (and my desire to use your software), I changed my main computer from my Apple to a beige box, about 6 months ago. Now I'm considering disengaging from Apple altogether, between their Patent wars and their App store.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 18:53 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] It is somewhat disappointing that people don't want to acknowledge the nasty side of the provider of their shiny gadgets, certainly. On a related topic, I read "How Apple Killed the Linux Desktop and Why That Doesn’t Matter" today, where Miguel De Icaza, no less, blames the defection of developers to OS X on a lack of API compatibility in various projects including GNOME. Having recently waded through a stack of GNOME-related packages and their dependencies, with API breakage lurking in the background but fortunately avoided by a lucky grab of end-of-line 2.x-related packages - not everyone seems to know that
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 19:16 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] The reason there hasn't been a "year of the Linux desktop" and also that the by far most popular Linux systems aren't Unixy enough for the average geek were aptly explained by Joel Spolsky (a.k.a. "Joel on Software") quite a while back already.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 19:23 UTC (Tue) by JEFFREY (subscriber, #79095) [Link]
Just out of curiosity, why does there need to be a "Year of the Linux Desktop?" Will there *ever* be such a year?
When was the "Year of the Microsoft Desktop?"
When was the "Year of the Apple Desktop?"
No desktop system is perfected within a year to the point it receives widespread adoption.
Is it when a desktop surpasses another? There are still more people on MS Windows than OS X, but some would argue that OS X has already won the desktop wars and that market-share is a lagging indicator of supremacy.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 19:50 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> When was the "Year of the Microsoft Desktop?"
1995, pretty much.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 19:53 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
1995 was the Year of the Microsoft Desktop I would say. Before Windows 95 there was the possibility to run something else. There wasn't a lot of OS/2 around but there was some. Some people were still running DOS.
But after Windows 95, with its pretty good desktop and integrated TCP/IP, it seemed to be all Windows all the time.
By Windows 98 I didn't personally see anything but Windows on PCs.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 20:40 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]
I was using Linux and X11/TWM before Windows 95, and it rocked. The Linux desktop failed because of hardware compatibility. Same then, same now. Windows 95 didn't succeed because of built-in TCP/IP, it succeeded because of the built-in modem and SLIP/PPP setup. For the same reason, with the advent of "Win modems" Linux lost any chance it had of securing a foothold on the desktop.
I use a Macbook (after running Linux desktops till ~2002) because it has awesome hardware, and you don't have to spend countless hours researching which model of which vendor to buy. Apple is a one-stop-shop for best available features.
And no way in heck am I going to bother fiddling around with device drivers and all that junk to get Linux running on a brand new laptop, especially since I mostly use my Macbook as a glorified terminal, web browser, and TV (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon). I still use mutt for e-mail and tin for usenet, but I never want to go back to the days where I had to waste time trying to get a graphics card or network card to work properly. Linux support is about where it was in 1995/1996--because back then hardware was simple enough that it was easy to write drivers which Just Worked.
FWIW, Apple is POSIX compliant. I've submitted a few bug reports for POSIX compliance, with fixes, and so far Apple has had a solid track record of fixing the issues. Considering that low-level APIs like POSIX, and high-level APIs like HTML5, are still the most important interfaces for the vast majority of code, I really couldn't care less about the desktop wars.
That said, I have my mom using a Chromebook and she loves it. The Chromebook is one Linux desktop product I can sincerely recommend.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 20:51 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Come on. I remember (with horror) my attempts to set up modelines in XFree86Config on a perfectly SVGA-compatible graphics card (S3 Trio, IIRC). While Windows just worked.
Then there was font configuration setup, localization (бНОПНЯ strikes again!), then figuring out why LILO stopped booting Windows, etc.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 21:26 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Maybe in 1995 you had to fool around with modelines, etc. But now Linux tends to Just Work after installation the same as Windows, especially if you use something like Ubuntu. (I use Debian, not Ubuntu, but I can't recall having to tweak anything in the last 50+ desktop or laptop installs I've done.)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 21:51 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
But it's no longer _enough_ to JustWork(tm). That's a requirement now, not an optional feature.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 22:08 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] So what's your point? Linux meets the requirements. And it has features [Tons of free software; sane upgrade mechanisms; robustness; nice development environment] that are lacking in the alternatives, which is why I select it as my OS.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 7:14 UTC (Wed) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
Just works? Considering how broken the 6month upgrade cycle is for users, i doubt it.
'Oh you need spanky new webcam support?' Well you have to a) wait 3 months b) force upgrading everything else. Nice :)
But it's harsh, the model has other advantages but some really crappy downsides for 3rd party developers and hardware makers.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:46 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Considering how broken the 6month upgrade cycle is for users, i doubt it. What 6-month upgrade cycle are you referring to? Debian certainly does not have such a cycle. Maybe Ubuntu does, but even Ubuntu has LTS releases. 'Oh you need spanky new webcam support?' Well you have to a) wait 3 months b) force upgrading everything else. Nice :) That's never been an issue for me. It's true that one time I did buy a webcam that needed a newer kernel than what I was running, but it was pretty easy to make a Debian kernel package and upgrading the kernel affected absolutely nothing else on my system. (I'm typing this on a Squeeze box running kernel 3.4.4.)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 5:50 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
Perhaps amusingly, a 2007 IBM Thinkpad I have, equipped with an ATI 1300, only just got support for hardware GL acceleration in linux v3.4.2. I'm not sure what argument this fact might support.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 22:05 UTC (Fri) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]
The X1300 (a R500 card) has been supported by Mesa for years, since at least 2008, I think.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 1, 2012 14:38 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
Unless it's a (Microsoft-Only-vendor)-specific version of the card. Not that that's ever bit me with my Dell i8600 which had a broken vbios that I had to install Windows XP back on to apply the fix for. Aside from IIRC having slightly different PCI information and a different vbios, I don't know what the various vendor-specific "flavors" of the cards do.
The long-term solution is to stop buying hardware that's designed to only run Windows and tested *just* enough to pass WHQL and instead buy from a Linux vendor so that they can begin to get the ODMs to explicitly support Linux or at least stop producing hardware that breaks so badly.
Yes, your selection is going to be more limited. Does even Apple have the selection of Dell, Lenovo, Sony, HP, etc. put together? No. Instead, help the Linux vendors get a solid support base to begin to push back on the ODMs. You know, like how Apple can get their suppliers to produce hardware that Only Works with Apple. If the Linux vendors have enough customers, they begin to have the power to fix the Linux hardware situation. Until then, they or you have to pick and choose your hardware carefully and try to see if they can fix its brokenness (or work around its brokenness in software, s.a. System76's drivers).
The short-term bonus of buying from a Linux vendor is that they do the picking, choosing, and working around for you instead. So you win long and short-term at the cost of some selection.
I swear, the smartest thing Apple ever did was make OSX only run on Apple hardware. Otherwise, we’d be hearing about how OSX is crap on random Windows consumer hardware because sound is flaky and it can’t suspend and resume right (and sometimes it can’t even turn itself off!) while Apple tries to source hardware from the ODMs with a market share in the single thousands of customers. You know, like e.g. ZaReason and System76 are trying to do it.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 15:30 UTC (Wed) by macc (subscriber, #510) [Link]
in parallel linux ( actually mostly KDE ) has aquired some unpleasant bigbrotherknows best -isms.
The number of Don Quixotish windmill fights increases with each interation.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 20:08 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
How come? I am not aware of those.
> in parallel linux ( actually mostly KDE ) has aquired some unpleasant bigbrotherknows best -isms.
Off-topic Posted Aug 29, 2012 23:39 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Aw, come on. Top posting on LWN? What's next, OMG LOLisms?Sorry, couldn't resist :)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 1:46 UTC (Thu) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
Me neither. The nastiest affront to human dignity and the Unix philosophy on KDE is NetworkManager and that isn't a KDE thing, it's a Redhat abomination.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 2:20 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Sure, I fondly remember the WiFi and the endless Ethernet reconfiguring on the VAX-11 that was the first machine I admined back in '85... This whole "Unix philosophy" whining is total nonsense. What was (barely) good enough for bolted-to-the-floor machines, for which any hardware change meant powering down, probably reconfiguring hardware by diving into the inards of the machine and even compiling a new kernel, just isn't enough for today's mobile laptops with hot-plugged hardware. BTW, I did do my fair share of cursing at NetworkManager in its beginnings, a few iterations (and bugreports) later it Just Works (TM). Try it again some time.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 6:22 UTC (Thu) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]
Try innocently editing an ifcfg-ethX file while Network Manager is running. As soon as you save the file, Network Manager thinks you have deleted it and shuts down the interface. Unusually effective if it is the sole network interface on a colocated server somewhere.
Network Manager isn't just a bad idea on servers, it is hazardous to your health.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 6:58 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
I do that all the time (working with embedded devices that boot over Ethernet from my laptop). Works perfectly OK - NetworkManager doesn't touch manually managed interfaces.
Besides, why are you running it on server?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 10:14 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> Try innocently editing an ifcfg-ethX file while Network Manager is running.
Why would you do such a thing? You didn't know network-manager was running?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 17:04 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Because if you're working remotely you quite possibly have no other choice. Your ssh connection comes over that interface, and that's that.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 11:48 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
How exactly do you expect NetworkManager to interact with a distro-specific configuration mechanism? If you insist on usign NM on a server, you should remove the distro-specific stuff entirely. I wouldn't expect this to work any more than I'd expect configuring eth0 in both ifupdown and NM to work; or installing ifupdown on a RedHat machine and configuring eth0 in both ifcfg-eth0 and /etc/network/interfaces!
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 15:13 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
NetworkManager works -- most of the time.
But when it doesn't work, it's next to impossible to fix.
Sure, if I wanted to spend at least six hours on it, I could get into its C code and bend it to my will. But what a waste of time.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 9:53 UTC (Thu) by macc (subscriber, #510) [Link]
Things that pulled my tether recently:
network manager kdewallet interaction with network manager/ wifi connection and where to store the credentials. switching between dual and single screens. okular and its handling of forms ( you can check a ckeckbox but this is a oneway street ) . acroread dies unpleasantly when acessing an okular "formfilled" pdf. ( OK, acro* is shit anyway, but the people that get the formfilled pdf use acrobat )
essentially the karmawheel like activities that made me run away from win3.1 to linux have made their way over too.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 10:20 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> network manager
What happened with network manager?
> kdewallet interaction with network manager/ wifi connection and where to store the credentials.
> switching between dual and single screens.
> okular and its handling of forms ( you can check a ckeckbox but this is a oneway street ) . acroread dies unpleasantly when acessing an okular "formfilled" pdf. ( OK, acro* is shit anyway, but the people that get the formfilled pdf use acrobat )
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 21:56 UTC (Tue) by skx (subscriber, #14652) [Link] I did that too - but I remember the dark days of winmodems well. I'd run a desktop on Linux since Redhat 4.2 (or so) and while I hated the pain of the early setup the worst thing was that I couldn't help others. I had to choose hardware based on whether it would work. Friends? They might have liked real multitasking, real multi-user systems, but they couldn't switch to Linux unless or until they bought a new modem, a new sound-card, and etc. These days we're lucky that most middle of the road stuff "just works". I loved installing Squeeze last year on a generic box from a no-name manufacturer without even considering that it would fail, and without having to do any magical setup voodoo.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 21:28 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Apple is a one-stop-shop for best available features. By buying Apple products, you are financially supporting a corporation that abuses the US legal system to crush competitors. You're also promoting a vision of computing that would take away our freedom. Maybe you don't see it that way, or maybe you don't care, but that's what you're doing.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 8:37 UTC (Wed) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
And the choice is what? Buying a pre-installed Windows PC? Is MS any better than Apple?
I don't see how I have a choice :-(
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 23:21 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Is MS any better than Apple? Oh yeah. Microsoft is trying to be evil, but it does not really knows how. Apple is the original "evil company™", most underhanded tricks Microsoft have learned from Apple. In the end Microsoft is just a cheap imitator which in this case is good. Ok, maybe not good (incompetent evil is still evil), but at least it's better. Much better.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 18:22 UTC (Thu) by ThinkRob (subscriber, #64513) [Link]
Well you could build your own or purchase from a vendor that sells systems without Windows (they do exist). Or you could get a refund for your Windows license. Or you could purchase one generation behind the curve and get used hardware.
There are options.
But even if you do purchase something with Windows on it, you're still providing less money to a company that (as of 2012) many would argue is less "evil" than Apple. Maybe not historically, but IMHO in the last couple years Apple's been a lot more hostile in ways that harm more users than Microsoft has.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 1, 2012 14:42 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
There are Linux vendors, e.g. ZaReason, System76, R Squared. They're small and don't have nearly the influence with ODMs that Apple does, let alone Dell, HP, Lenovo, and the rest of the usual MS Windows vendors.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 9:55 UTC (Wed) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] By buying Apple products, you are financially supporting a corporation that abuses the US legal system to crush competitors. You're also promoting a vision of computing that would take away our freedom. Any for-profit corporation will try to maximize the profit, and of course they will use all legal means at their disposal to do so. It keeps amazing me that people seem offended by this. Samsung is one of those corporations, by the way, just like the evil empires of IBM, Dell and any other vendor out there. Of course, they won't all act the same way to reach the same goal. In this instance, Apple clearly must have thought they had a good case by enforcing their patents. It would however be silly to think that Samsung collects patents for any other reason than to prove ownership of some intellectual property, so they could do exactly the same. It seems so obvious that this is not about the behaviour of the players, but the rules of the game.
Personally, I don't care about the freedom that would allow me to go inside an iPhone or Galaxy S and change a perfectly fine tool for making phone calls into some half-broken word processor. I do care about the freedom that allowed Apple to take Free Software and put it in its operating system, so that I could do the things I want to do. That's the other thing that keeps amazing me: the narrow definitions of "freedom" that people entertain to describe what they think is "right".
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 10:13 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
> Any for-profit corporation will try to maximize the profit, and of course they will use all legal means at their disposal to do so. It keeps amazing me that people seem offended by this.
That isn't true. Or at least doesn't have to be. Regardless of what you may have been told, corporations are made up of people who follow their own agendas and codes of ethics. The corporate form may be somewhat grotesque in the USA at the moment, but expecting companies and their employees to rise no higher than "whatever gives the highest return on investment" is ridiculous (not to mention depressing.) We can and should expect much more.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 10:41 UTC (Wed) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] Of course it doesn't have to be. But it seems that that's the way it is.As a side note, you may find this interesting.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 12:48 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
The way it goes is that everyone can point the finger at everyone else. So, if a corporation does bad things, they can blame their shareholders who apparently demand big dividends and a continuously rising share price because to do the right thing would supposedly cost the company money and disappoint the shareholders. They can also blame the "consumer" for wanting products that are cheap.
Meanwhile, the shareholders - frequently institutions investing on behalf of others - can insist that they're merely demanding a "fair return" for their clients. I'm sure some of these people actually don't care that bad things are done in their name (for example, I once read once about shareholders shouting down critics of corporate policy at Nestlé shareholder meetings), but others would probably rather just not know. Some of these institutions operate pension funds and thus blame the average person for wanting a nice pension.
What we should be doing is denying these people the opportunity to do things in our name, whether as a customer or as a member of a pension scheme or other fund. That might mean that compromises have to be made, but it also means that the people playing the above games also have to clean up their act.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 18:24 UTC (Wed) by jackb (subscriber, #41909) [Link] Some of these institutions operate pension funds and thus blame the average person for wanting a nice pension. Close, but not quite. The "average person" in the US doesn't have a pension. A small minority of the population in the form of state and local government employees demand pension and health benefits which require mathematically-impossible rates of return to fund. The vocal shareholders which demand growth at any cost and force companies to focus exclusively on the next quarter's earnings report instead of long term viability are entities like CalPERS.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 13:08 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
Very well said. There is far too much making of excuses for unethical behaviour by corporations (which are in fact made up of people, who are responsible for that behaviour. Call them on it when you get the chance.) 'The law says we have to amoral scumbags' is both wrong, and unacceptable as an excuse.
People here might like Apple hardware (and software integration), but I can't believe any of us is denying that their current behaviour on look and feel is unethical. I'd like to think that most of us understand that their attempts to make all non-apple-approved modification of hardware or software impossible is also unethical.
Mind you, Microsoft's current attempt to make it impossible to boot an alternative OS on any Windows-running ARM-based device are just as bad. They had been looking a lot less evil recently.
I too am saddened by the number of geeks and Free Software hackers who make very little effort to dogfood in software or avoid the most egregious suppliers of hardware. I know it's annoying sometimes, but everyone who could have done something about it using Adobe's flash and PDF readers is one thing that has caused 10 years of damage to the open Web. We largely have ourselves to blame on that front. That's just one example. Take the same attitude with locked-down computing from Apple (and MS) and computing is likely to look correspondingly bleaker in another 10 years.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:51 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Any for-profit corporation will try to maximize the profit, and of course they will use all legal means at their disposal to do so. That's correct. Now let's move to your next sentence: It keeps amazing me that people seem offended by this. Getting offended by unethical behaviour and punishing corporations that use it is the only way to keep corporations even modestly ethical. If the only thing they try to do is to maximize their profit, then it is an absolute necessity to punish them financially when they do something unethical. That is, after all and by your own admission, the only leverage we have over them. Samsung is one of those corporations, by the way, just like the evil empires of IBM, Dell and any other vendor out there. Certainly. But specific situations demand specific action and in this specific situation, if consumers don't punish Apple then Apple will punish consumers. I don't care about the freedom that would allow me to go inside an iPhone or Galaxy S and change a perfectly fine tool for making phone calls into some half-broken word processor. Just because you don't care about a specific freedom doesn't mean you have the right to take it away from those who do care. I do care about the freedom that allowed Apple to take Free Software and put it in its operating system, so that I could do the things I want to do. If Apple follows the rules, then I'm perfectly fine with its using free software in its systems... that's not the issue.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 12:01 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] Getting offended by unethical behaviour and punishing corporations that use it is the only way to keep corporations even modestly ethical. My point was that the system needs to be reformed. Whether the kind of punishment you propose is going to accomplish that remains to be seen, but I think the point that Samsung would fill the void left by Apple is a valid one. The other point I was making, which I feel you didn't fully understand, is that both producers and consumers have freedoms, and that claiming that any of these outweighs another is not as obvious as some people make it seem. Ultimately, the rules we have come up with decide these matters, whether we like it or not. If what you say is right, and Apple violated these rules, then surely you can point me to a source that goes beyond "the rules are stupid so Apple is wrong". The rules ARE stupid, and that's why we need to change them.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 1:52 UTC (Thu) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link] Samsung is one of those corporations, by the wayIs it? All my interactions with Samsung have been pleasant and all my interactions with Apple have been unpleasant, going right back to 1984 (auspicious date, that). Maybe your experience is different.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 11:30 UTC (Thu) by regala (subscriber, #15745) [Link]
clearly, you have no clue
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 11:43 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] Please, educate me!
Freedom and the rabbit in the hat Posted Aug 30, 2012 13:45 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Personally, I don't care about the freedom that would allow me to go inside an iPhone or Galaxy S and change a perfectly fine tool for making phone calls into some half-broken word processor. I do care about the freedom that allowed Apple to take Free Software and put it in its operating system, so that I could do the things I want to do.Perhaps you will miss your freedom when the next Apple OS update supports only installing apps via the Apple store. It is perfectly legal to do such a thing (until proven otherwise), and Apple will not hesitate to abuse the legal system to prove it. Getting 30% off all Mac software purchases will make Apple shareholders happy, and most people will not care anyway, just as you; Apple will sell it to customers as an improvement in security, family safety and system cleanliness. Hey, we all win!
Freedom and the rabbit in the hat Posted Aug 30, 2012 19:22 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] Why would you think that I don't care about being able to freely install software on OS X? Because I make the distinction between a phone and an operating system?Perhaps I misunderstood, or perhaps I didn't explain properly what I meant. Or maybe you are simply jumping to conclusions. In any case, I think I have made my point and will politely bow out of this discussion.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 8:34 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
> Any for-profit corporation will try to maximize the profit, and of course they will use all legal means at their disposal to do so. It keeps amazing me that people seem offended by this.
It's the current state of affairs, yes, but it's a very recent development, it seems.
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/the_shareholder_fallacy/
"Historically, corporations were understood to be responsible to a complex web of constituencies, including employees, communities, society at large, suppliers and shareholders. But in the era of deregulation, the interests of shareholders began to trump all the others."
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 16:39 UTC (Thu) by aaron (subscriber, #282) [Link] By buying Apple products, you are financially supporting a corporation that abuses the US legal system to crush competitors. You're also promoting a vision of computing that would take away our freedom. So buy used hardware and run Linux. If you must, cover up the logo with a Tux sticker. Honestly, I haven't bought a new electronic gizmo in I don't know how many years. Which makes me wonder: is it morally better to buy stolen ideas from Apple and Microsoft than to buy stolen laptops from CraigsList?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 16:45 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
It can be argued that doing so props up the market for second-hand Apple hardware. If I know I can sell my Apple laptop at the end of its life for a reasonable price then I am more likely to put up with paying a higher price when I buy it new.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 22:08 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> Apple is a one-stop-shop for best available features.
This would only be true if everyone could agree on what "best features" are. For instance, I would not trade my ThinkPad keyboard for my daughter's MacBook Pro keyboard. Ever. I would also not trade my matte screen for her glossy one. Sure, her machine has a feature she likes a lot - it looks great - something I do not give a toss about. Etc.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 15:57 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
I recently got a used one from a coworker to test OS X compatibility. It seems as though there is NO way to get a macbook pro to not be suspended when the lid is closed if you don't have power (understandable), keyboard, mouse, *and* monitor plugged in. As if computers are useless without a display or input (an ethernet cable can satisfy all of those requirements). It's been sitting off to the side because I just don't have the desk space for it to be open all the time because of that. The plan is now to hoist it in a cradle under the desk and plug the peripherals in and just SSH into it.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 17:27 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Sure there is. You can either do it manually using pmset utility or install a nice GUI app like http://code.google.com/p/macosx-nosleep-extension/
(yeah, I've just switched to Mac OS X and that was one of the things I've installed first)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 17:35 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Heh, leave it to the Linux community to give better answers than the Mac community about stuff like this.
All Apple has is: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3131]
Thanks!
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 20:10 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
There is a nicely packaged free program called caffeine that does that job, too, IIRC. http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 9:30 UTC (Thu) by regala (subscriber, #15745) [Link]
"but I never want to go back to the days where I had to waste time trying to get a graphics card or network card to work properly. Linux support is about where it was in 1995/1996--because back then hardware was simple enough that it was easy to write drivers which Just Worked."
Trolling Bullshit. Whatever. Stay on your Macbook. (By the way, when first so-called Macbooks were released, this era of "configure-your-graphical-or-sound-card-on-linux' was finished since long)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 12:38 UTC (Thu) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
Whatever the value of the 1995 comment, surely you can't deny that there are still problems? The last Windows PC laptop I bought could not do the following when I loaded Linux on it:
1) show 3D without closed source driver, which of course ceased supporting the chipset in about 1 year period, causing significant loss of 3D functionality.
2) use wireless without closed-source driver (Broadcom wireless. Has open source driver, crashes machine in about 1 minute if used.)
3) battery doesn't last even half as long when running linux compared to windows because of some endless power-saving issues.
4) suspend/resume doesn't work. Maybe comes back half the time correctly, the rest of the time shows every indication of having crashed.
5) could not boot ubuntu 12.04 at all. Simply crashed on kernel load. I did not investigate, because I no longer care.
And it's a nice 14" HP Envy otherwise. It runs Windows because of the power-saving and suspend/resume problems which are most critical for me. The 5) is worrying, but it's not even the first time that new version of ubuntu doesn't boot on PC hardware where it used to work. *shrug*
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 18:33 UTC (Thu) by ThinkRob (subscriber, #64513) [Link]
So pick better hardware? That's a bit snide, true, but if you're planning on running Linux it's quite easy to select a box that uses hardware from manufacturers that support the community (e.g. Intel) rather than those that can't seem to figure out how to play nicely (e.g. Broadcom.)
The last laptop I bought was a ThinkPad T420. Under a then-current distro: 3D worked out of the box. Wireless worked out of the box. Battery life sucked until I enabled the various power-saving features that the hardware supports (takes about 2 minutes with laptop-mode-tools). Suspend/resume works flawlessly, although I don't use it for security reasons. The only trouble areas I found were from using distros that significantly predated the hardware -- which doesn't really strike me as a failure on anybody's part as much as what I'd expect to happen.
Just as if you plan on running OS X on a non-Apple laptop or a version of Windows other than the one preloaded by the vendor on some box: I'd say it's a pretty good idea to research your hardware before you buy it.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 20:40 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"Apple is a one-stop-shop for cognitive dissonance."
There, fixed that for you.
"FWIW, Apple is POSIX compliant."
Well, "WIW" is "not much". Those that espouse things like this generally don't get the point of why you might want something to behave like unix.
The Macintosh desktop, and, well, the entire system is almost totally divorced from the unix side of things. There is barely anything useful you can do with your day-to-day desktop environment from unix.
Macintoshes may as well just have a "unix emulator" strapped onto the side of them for all the good it does.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 21:33 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
WIW is enough. Macs run almost all of the POSIX-y software just fine. The biggest difference is in init system.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 1, 2012 13:03 UTC (Sat) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"Macs run almost all of the POSIX-y software just fine."
So that means it's about as useful as cygwin or even a linux virtual machine on windows.
You're ignoring my actual point that the two environments on a Mac barely interact in any useful way.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 1, 2012 15:14 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Or maybe GNOME in Linux? After all, it's not really connected with POSIX-y stuff.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 7, 2012 12:12 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
False - it absolutely is.
(I'm not a gnome user, so I'll talk about kde) Configuration can be managed through text files, many tools can be controlled very effectively through the commandline and generally where possible things are done the "unix way".
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 7, 2012 22:03 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] […] and generally where possible things are done the "unix way". Except the developers have apparently never heard about man pages. Even the official documentation often leaves a lot to be desired. Much of it confines itself to recapitulating the menu items of a program as in »Open file: This lets you open a file. Save file: This lets you save a file. Save file as …: …«. This is not what I would consider documentation. I have felt for a long time that the single most productive thing the KDE project could do to improve their offering is to stop writing code for 3 months and to use that time to actually document the thing properly ;^)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 21:59 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
The sea of Macs at Unixy Linux/JS/Ruby/etc dev conferences indicate that you're quite mistaken.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 1, 2012 13:06 UTC (Sat) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
Yes, essentially server stuff which barely interacts with the desktop. You have also ignored my actual point there, see my above reply.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 1, 2012 15:28 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
> the two environments on a Mac barely interact in any useful way.
This is your point? You really need to try developing on a Mac. The terminal experience is second to none (painful to admit). And POSIX is an integral part of it.
The stock terminal is beautiful and rock solid, even better than gnome-term. The finger feel is basically indistinguishable from other BSDs, and far better than Solaris-without-Gnu. I love that there's no control-key ambiguity. True, MacPorts/HomeBrew can be a PITA, but no more than xBSD ports or Gentoo. And XQuartz sux but I only need it for GnuBG. It really is a full Unix workstation.
I've only been using a Mac for a few months (thanks gnome+fedora), but I'm using POSIX, GCC, VIM, and all my favorite Unix tools every day. And it was trivial to set up. It's a great, tightly integrated experience that lets me work with zero drama.
There's a reason damn near every developer I know (and I know hundreds) uses a Mac.
You're ignoring the enemy. Better to recognize him, acknowledge his strengths and weaknesses, and then use that knowledge to crush him.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 1, 2012 18:48 UTC (Sat) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
I've used a mac from 2007 to 2009, in addition, of course, since only an idiot would limit himself to just one system, to linux and windows. I didn't find the OS X terminal to be anything special, compared to konsole. But then, I don't give a damn about the "finger-feel of the other BSD's".
It's kind of a full unix work station, but there's nothing at all in the OS X gui that makes me more productive than KDE; both are, of course, miles ahead of Windows. But the one thing I hated about OSX was the drama. The broken upgrades from one version to another. The vacillation between the preferred way of creating application installers. The ghastly developer documentation for both gui toolkits it shipped with. The drama from other mac users in my company who simply _had_ to tell me that I shouldn't be using four terminals at the same time, it wasn't the mac way. The horror that is x-code. Time machine disappearing my backups. The screen that broke after two years of usage.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 4, 2012 20:32 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> The stock terminal is beautiful and rock solid, even better than gnome-term.
While I agree with that (gnome-term stealing the Fx keys sucks until I get it to not do that), I still like my urxvt256cd with tmux much better. I ended up installing iTerm2, but since I'm now using it over SSH only (the desktop is foreign to my XMonad muscle memory and the Ctrl/Fn keys are in the wrong place), so that's a moot point now too.
> The finger feel is basically indistinguishable from other BSDs, and far better than Solaris-without-Gnu.
I've never really used Solaris too much, but the BSD tools are missing lots of nice things the GNU toolset has (find -name complaining about unsupported options when the directory is missing). Plus, for physical finger feel, the keyboards are not my style.
> I've only been using a Mac for a few months (thanks gnome+fedora), but I'm using POSIX, GCC, VIM, and all my favorite Unix tools every day.
Same here, but I used it for about 3 hours and wanted to throw it under my desk and use it via SSH because I just couldn't stand the software (window management or, rather, lack thereof and more) and hardware (keyboard, trackpad).
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 10:53 UTC (Thu) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
When Windows 95 came out, I decided that this was the same trash as windows 3.11 (mainly: DOS beneath), and switched to Linux.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 22:55 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
That Spolsky article just parrots the tired assertions that "Unix is for programmers" and that "programmers can't design user interfaces".
Strip away observations like "nobody has ever quite been able to agree on all the details of how the desktop UI should work" which more or less ignores the consensus you get within projects like GNOME and KDE that even developed frameworks for making consistent applications - I'd argue the latter was more successful than the former at this - and "for Aunt Marge it is very much not OK to have to use a different UI to cut and paste in one program than she uses in another" which was largely an old, solved problem already back in 2003, there's no real insight other than to believe mythological tales about a culture that arguably doesn't apply by someone who probably thinks hammers are the tool for every job.
The fact is that you have to develop something, believe in it, and then mercilessly refine and iterate until people stop complaining about it. That's what's missing, and it has nothing to do people liking text files for their settings and trivial distractions of that nature.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 1:55 UTC (Thu) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
Agreed, it's just fluff from a Microsoft retread.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 19:57 UTC (Tue) by davide.del.vento (guest, #59196) [Link]
Good point.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 20:05 UTC (Tue) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link]
<jk>Instead of getting crazy I am going remind them of how shiny, rounded and smooth their gadgets are, and that they can even come in black! Then I will politely ask if I can pinch or at least touch those fluffy toys.</jk>
Thanks for the suggestion, boycott is not enough. I am very new comparing to to your background, but in a really small project that I plan to open source I will borrow a similar method and link to your nice blog post.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 23:03 UTC (Tue) by rillian (subscriber, #11344) [Link]
As one of those macbook-carrying conference attendees, I'd like to know what the alternatives are. I look around Linux and Free Software conferences at the sea of thinkpads, and it drives me crazy. I've not found a way to buy a thinkpad without also buying a proprietary operating system from Microsoft. How is that more supportive of Free Software goals?
Personally I don't intend to buy another Apple laptop, for the reasons you cite and many others. But I'd like to see more actual linux laptops and not just laptops, like mine, which sometimes run linux.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 28, 2012 23:29 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I'd like to know what the alternatives are. There are plenty of alternatives. My daughter, for example, has a really nice Toshiba ultrabook that runs Linux perfectly. I've not found a way to buy a thinkpad without also buying a proprietary operating system from Microsoft. How is that more supportive of Free Software goals? That is a problem. However, Microsoft makes a lot less from the sale of a Windows license than Apple does from the sale of a Macbook. Furthermore, currently Microsoft is a bit less evil than Apple, so you pick the lesser of the two evils. There are some companies that sell actual Linux laptops (ZaReason, System76, Emperor Linux). I've bought from System76 in the past.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 3:54 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]
Zareason, Zareason, and Zareason. Can you tell I like them? No, I don't work for them, or any of that kind of thing. I just think they rock.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 12:51 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
System76 also.
The Linux community should support hardware vendors that support Linux.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 4:47 UTC (Fri) by rillian (subscriber, #11344) [Link]
> My daughter, for example, has a really nice Toshiba ultrabook that runs Linux perfectly.
That didn't come with a copy of Windows? That was the point I was making.
> Microsoft makes a lot less from the sale of a Windows license than Apple does from the sale of a Macbook.
That is a coherent argument, thanks. I'm not convinced that giving the balance of the difference to another company which refused support Linux (or even no OS) is that much better. But perhaps I'm just old; I still carry as much of a grudge against Windows as Apple.
I had seen that system76 will sell to Canada now, so perhaps I'll give them a try.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 20:22 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"However, Microsoft makes a lot less from the sale of a Windows license than Apple does from the sale of a Macbook."
On top of this, having a macbook means you spend your life going round as a walking Apple advert. Even if you're running linux on it.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 0:04 UTC (Wed) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
>I've not found a way to buy a thinkpad without also buying a proprietary operating system from Microsoft. How is that more supportive of Free Software goals?
Microsoft subsidizes Lenovo in exchange for shipping Windows on every machine, so by buying a thinkpad you are sending only ~$40 to MS (which you can get back, I hear, if you're really offended by it). I bought my thinkpad back when Vista was the rage, so I grabbed Vista Basic, and probably gave even less.
So, it's not very good, but it's 20 or 30 times less than what you'd pay Apple if you bought one of their computers. Certainly, Microsoft could not run a business if these OEM sales were their only revenue.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 12:56 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Lenovo models are quite popular amongst vendors/resellers offering other operating systems pre-installed. I have the impression that this is because the resellers have access to the distribution chain, and maybe they can then get the systems before the Microsoft bundling is applied.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 1:18 UTC (Wed) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
"I've not found a way to buy a thinkpad without also buying a proprietary operating system from Microsoft."
So you are saying that you found a way to buy a macbook without also buying a proprietary operating system from Apple?
I would have expected that to be even harder.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 1:22 UTC (Wed) by paravoid (subscriber, #32869) [Link]
I have a Dell that I built to order it and never came with Windows. It's called the "n series", althought it's not a particular series, I've had a bunch of desktops & laptops like that. Amusingly, it comes with a FreeDOS CD :)
That's pretty standard and that's not because of Linux: there are companies (even small companies) that have Volume Keys for Windows and don't need to buy a Windows license with every laptop of theirs.
Note that at least Dell (and I think HP too) also sells laptops with Linux preinstalled. I've never found one that I liked, but it certainly is possible.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 2:12 UTC (Wed) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link] Emporer Linux, ZaReason, System76.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 12:53 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] Some more vendors, some pre-installing a Free Software distribution, others just allowing you to buy a machine without an operating system.
OT: ThinkPad without OS Posted Aug 29, 2012 9:02 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]
I bought three ThinkPad x220i for my company and for my private use last year, all without OS. Debian runs fine on them, however for running stable you need the kernel from backports.
In fact, only three computers I ever bought came with OS: Atari ST came with its OS in its ROM, a EEE PC had a horrible variant of Linux installed, and another Asus Netbook was infected with Windows7. I refused to accept the EULA and deleted it.
OT: ThinkPad without OS Posted Aug 29, 2012 16:24 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> Asus Netbook was infected with Windows7. I refused to accept the EULA and deleted it.
I remember I missed the boot menu twice when nuking WIndows from my ASUS. Windows was quite confused the second time after I had three-finger saluted it during the "setup" phase even before the EULA.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 10:43 UTC (Wed) by pedrocr (subscriber, #57415) [Link]
Have you found a way to buy a Macbook without a proprietary operating system from Apple?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 11:55 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Once every seven Lunar epicycles, the link at http://dell.com/ubuntu functions and will allow you to purchase a reasonably well made laptop at a low price. I've bought a few and have been happy with the results. Sadly at the moment the stars are not aligned correctly, and it just redirects to a Windows 7 advertisement.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 6:29 UTC (Fri) by speedster1 (subscriber, #8143) [Link]
> Once every seven Lunar epicycles, the link at http://dell.com/ubuntu functions and will allow you to purchase a reasonably well made laptop at a low price. I've bought a few and have been happy with the results. Sadly at the moment the stars are not aligned correctly, and it just redirects to a Windows 7 advertisement.
Hopefully my Dell Inspiron 1420N laptop will last at least 2 more years then, because I bought it 5 years ago during one of those opportune moments and it has been a terrific portable workstation. Rarely booted to ubuntu, but the original ubuntu install was observed for driver selection giving me a head start in selecting the proper drivers for my gentoo kernels.
I eagerly read reports of Dell's Sputnik project, hoping that the initial ultrabook offering will be a smashing success so that the line can be expanded to include additional laptop models by the time I need a successor to this current gem of a laptop.
ZaReason would probably be my fallback, since I have used them for desktops which have also been very satisfactory. At the moment they don't have any laptops that are quite right for my needs (want matte display, non-ultrabook, non-Nvidia graphics).
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 6:15 UTC (Thu) by HybridAU (subscriber, #85157) [Link]
System76 is a good alternative, even if Ubuntu is not your cup of tea at least it's FLOSS.
It's not a lot of help now but when I was buying my X220 they had an offer where you could buy a laptop with no OS, http://shop.lenovo.com/us/landing_pages/promos/thinkpad/t... it's not available now but I think it will be back it seems to come and go from time to time.
That said I ended up getting the one with Windows because for the exact same spec the Windows one was $200(US) cheaper. I almost bought it any way just to send a message that there is demand for no OS laptops. But in the end I decided that paying >20% more to *not* get something was not worth it.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 8:15 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
While I agree with you that Apple behaves unethically, especially on the mobile side, many people just want to get work done. Macs are darn fine UNIX workstations (both in hardware and in software) that also supports some commonly used commercial software (Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite).
I switched to OS X on the desktop in 2007, after using Linux from 1994. Sure, it has its problems (e.g. Apple replacing Spaces in OS X Lion). But every time I retry current Linux distributions on the desktop, I am reminded just how broken Linux is on the desktop. It's usually a mix of broken hardware support (e.g. Wifi cards that worked fine in older Ubuntu versions), the lack in consistency of keyboard shortcuts, unpolished applications, non-evolutionary changes to the desktop environment, lack of proprietary application support (the open source replacements for Adobe Lightroom, Garmin Basecamp, 1Password, Adobe CS don't work for me).
I am pretty sure that this wel be rebutted by lots of 'my hardware works fine' and 'The GIMP is better than Photoshop'. But the empirical evidence does not really support that this is true for a large group of users. OS X usage grew significantly, Linux (desktop) usage pretty much stayed constant. Many of my developer friends switched from Linux to OS X on their desktop. Even during Microsoft's worst moments (Vista impopularity), Linux did not manage to capture the minds of people.
The reasons for Linux' failure on the desktop are pretty clear (and put forward by others in this thread): balkanization (of distributions and software), the lack of API stability, the lack of a stable driver ABI/API, the lack of distribution mechanisms for proprietary software, big desktop experiments, and ideology over practicality (the general public does not are about free software).
That's not to say that Linux is a failure. It's probably the most popular server, embedded, and smartphone operating system. The fact that Google succeeded with Android shows that the reduction of fragmentation and providing a stable API is the key to success.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 9:53 UTC (Wed) by bosyber (subscriber, #84963) [Link]
I think you forget a factor called marketing power too. That has a large effect. And I don't just mean marketing to consumers, but to OEMS/resellers - Google got carries interested in their OS, Microsoft has all the OEMs working with them, Apple has a name for itself that allows it to dictate terms on what hardware. That makes sure these companies have a budget to make hardware work.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 11:18 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
Good point. Though I guess that Canonical also attempts to do this. Of course, their means are far more modest.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 10:07 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
> The fact that Google succeeded with Android shows that the reduction of fragmentation and providing a stable API is the key to success.
If success means having lots of proprietary software available, you may be correct. But I'm not convinced that that's a good goal for us to be pushing towards.
Diversity of approaches is a wonderful element of free software. I love that I can run any number of weird and wonderful window managers. My housemate, who has a Mac, feels pretty frustrated by the lack of options for workflow there.
If you're a developer who is active in free software, I really think that spending a few hours reporting, fixing (where possible), and chasing any showstopper bugs for you in a distribution is basically a responsibility. Of course it varies between projects, but providing you can write a good bug report, I've found that real bugs don't stay around long at all.
Give a distribution another go, stick with it for a few weeks chasing any bugs you find, and see how you go.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 11:42 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
> If success means having lots of proprietary software available, you may be correct. But I'm not convinced that that's a good goal for us to be pushing towards.
Do you see something with the complexity and breadth as, say AutoCAD, being developed and maintained by the free software community?
> Diversity of approaches is a wonderful element of free software. I love that I can run any number of weird and wonderful window managers. My housemate, who has a Mac, feels pretty frustrated by the lack of options for workflow there.
Great. My mom doesn't know what a window manager is, she knows how to touch icons on an iOS device. She will even be confused as hell if you'd give her an Android tablet or phone. My dad is more computer-savvy, he switched from Windows to OS X three years ago. Changing from the Windows UI to OS X took him some weeks to get used to. He doesn't want to switch a window manager. In fact, 99% of the population does not care about this stuff.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 11:59 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
> Do you see something with the complexity and breadth as, say AutoCAD, being developed and maintained by the free software community?
Something like a kernel ? Or an optimizing c compiler ? Yeah, there aren't any with such a complexity.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:48 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
> Something like a kernel ?
And then look at the list of kernel contributors, and realize how many of them are employed by companies to which it is collectively worth billions of dollars, because it sells them hardware.
This model translates to a high-end CAD program how?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 14:34 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]
Then you forgot to exclude people employed by companies from the free software community.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 16:10 UTC (Wed) by andrel (subscriber, #5166) [Link]
Much like the kernel, a high-end CAD program is software that enables one to sell billions of dollars worth of hardware.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 15:26 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
AutoCAD has more lines of code than the kernel AND gcc taken together. Projects of this size simply don't happen without large companies backing them.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 20:06 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
I find it hard to believe that AutoCAD has more than ten million lines of code, that is how many lines the linux kernel has. The complete KDE desktop, with a web browser, PIM suite, network infrastructure, multimedia manipulation programs, etc., has six million lines, and it does have more function-points than AutoCAD. The six million lines figures is, incidentally, the approximated size of the gcc suite with all the architectures and languages.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 21:02 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
LibreOffice is 12MLOC, and it still has only a fraction of MS Office's functionality.
And Photoshop and AutoCAD are about twice that size. Each.
Yes, proprietary programs are THAT big. Good luck in getting community to recreate them.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 22:07 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
> Yes, proprietary programs are THAT big. Good luck in getting community to recreate them.
Before we get too carried away, let's not forget that having small, well designed programs, is a wonderful thing. I don't doubt that AutoCAD has many useful features, but I do doubt that it could possibly need that magnitude of code to do what it does well. It's been a long time since lines of code was considered a measure of greatness (I hope). Would you say that the newest version of LibreOffice was worse than OpenOffice a year or two ago, since they've been removing and refactoring code?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 22:59 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Yeah, sure. GIMP is fine for casual photography and image processing. However, when you need AutoCAD then you really NEED it. Quite often with other proprietary tools built on it.
Amount of code is not an indicator of quality by itself, but it's a good indicator of project's scope. Consider LibreOffice, for example. Even all the recent refactorings and code removals haven't made a dent in its size.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 13:55 UTC (Fri) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
A good fraction of AutoCAD users would find that FreeCAD was sufficient for their needs. Big programs like this are sustained by a lot of history and vendor and ecosystem lock-in. Not least the close control of the DWG format by AutoDesk in that case. It's hard to break that sort of control network in much the same way that's it hard to get $everybody off their Windows desktops due to powerful default effects and network effects. If a critical mass is achieved then it would be perfectly possible to maintain good CAD/BIM software _and_ it would be cheaper and more flexible for everyone involved. I am still hopeful that that will happen one day, but it's true that it's _much_ more likely with helpful corporate input.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 20:28 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"Yes, proprietary programs are THAT big."
Um, why are you convinced that's a good thing?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 21:33 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Because of lots of functionality?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 1, 2012 12:58 UTC (Sat) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
Take a look at Blender then (no, I'm not saying it does the same thing as AutoCAD).
Blender is a _seriously_ competitive piece of 3d software which includes advanced 3d modelling & sculpting, powerful nonlinear animation features, a complete video editor, compositor, more than one very capable renderer, a game engine, various physics simulations...and so on... and the development community doesn't even seem to be breaking a sweat. Very little "big company" presence in the development either.
I call out your nonsense about large complex projects, the open source community and line counts.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:04 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
> Great. My mom doesn't know what a window manager is, she knows how to touch icons on an iOS device. She will even be confused as hell if you'd give her an Android tablet or phone. My dad is more computer-savvy, he switched from Windows to OS X three years ago. Changing from the Windows UI to OS X took him some weeks to get used to. He doesn't want to switch a window manager. In fact, 99% of the population does not care about this stuff.
My comment was targetted at you, as an interested developer.
As for those who don't know or care about stuff below the surface, that's why we have things like Gnome, KDE, and XFCE. And more importantly distributions to tie everything together nicely. It has been my impression that they're generally doing a better job of doing this than your experience, for the few 'end users' I help out with such things. But I freely admit it isn't an area I'm as familiar with.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:17 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
> My comment was targetted at you, as an interested developer.
Sorry for misunderstanding. Indeed, for developers I agree, some choice is good. And I do like Xmonad more during programming than Aqua (or whatever OS X's window manager is called ;)).
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 16:14 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Great. My mom doesn't know what a window manager is, Nor mine. Yet she happily runs XFCE on Debian Squeeze without knowing what a window manager is.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 17:04 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I assume you maintain the box for her? Like, if she buys a printer or a webcam, or runs out of disk space?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 18:03 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I set up the box and I do maybe 10 minutes of system administration every couple of months, mostly consisting of "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" My mother is completely incapable of doing any sort of system administration on a Linux box. However, she's equally incapable of maintaining a Windows or a Mac OS box, so there's really no difference for her between Linux and The Others.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 18:46 UTC (Thu) by ThinkRob (subscriber, #64513) [Link]
My mother's got a similar setup, so I can answer this:
> I assume you maintain the box for her? Like, if she buys a printer or a webcam, or runs out of disk space?
If she buys a printer or a webcam she does what she did when she had a MacBook: she calls me and says "How do I set this up?". I suspect this is what many parents do with their technically-adept children.
(Actually, in my mother's case I didn't have to do any of that when my parents got a new printer. The printer supported ZeroConf, her laptop automatically found it and printed with no configuration. But that's not a typical example, since I doubt most printers are networked...)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 16:32 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> My mom doesn't know what a window manager is, she knows how to touch icons on an iOS device. She will even be confused as hell if you'd give her an Android tablet or phone.
Have you tested this? It's not like the Android UI is some alien setup (like my XMonad setup); it's still a "click what you want" kind of deal. From what I could tell, the icons were different, but everyone seems to like naming (default) apps generically (Mail, Browser, Messenger, Phone, etc.).
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 17:06 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
> Have you tested this? It's not like the Android UI is some alien setup
My dad has some other touch devices, including an Android tablet. She couldn't really use it, probably only after repeated instruction. She's smart, but it's a combination of lack of experience and impatience. We have tried to teach her Windows and Linux before, but it she lost interest quickly. It was only after we gave her an iPod Touch that she started using e-mail and the web.
> From what I could tell, the icons were different, but everyone seems to like naming (default) apps generically (Mail, Browser, Messenger, Phone, etc.).
Surprisingly, she doesn't look at the text underneath the icons at all, just at the icons. Besides that, the home screen would probably not be the biggest problem, it's the layout of the apps she is used to.
I think that Android and iOS are on par wrt user-friendliness. It's just that for some people a switch is not as for us ;). Despite all the downsides of smartphones and tablets (locked bootloaders, no keyboard, etc.), it does make computing a lot safer and easier for many people.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 17:16 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
I suppose it's more of the "computers are black magic and I can't possibly hope to understand them" mentality that blinds many other people. I wonder how much the One True Way(s) that come from Redmond and Cupertino cause this effect.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 22:30 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> Do you see something with the complexity and breadth as, say AutoCAD, being developed and maintained by the free software community?
The real point being: how to attract Autodesk to port AutoCAD to a Linux desktop? Or Adobe to do the same with Photoshop? Etc.
If a serious company like Red Hat would do with Linux desktop what they did with Linux server, then there would be a chance. Of course, the same subscription recipe probably won't work on the desktop. So, a system like Microsoft's, where OEMs and ISVs are directly courted is probably the way to go. These people need to have stationary targets (support, API/ABI, etc.) for significant amounts of time, or they won't come on board.
Of course, before any of that is done, a serious attempt at desktop defragmentation is required. Current situation there Gnome is going on tablet tangents and causing even more fragmentation will only hurt such an effort.
Somehow, Linux kernel guys are successfully navigating re-merging of many side projects back into mainline. No such luck on the desktop yet...
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 23:19 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I think the key difference is that the Kernel developers see their job as providing a service, and they are Ok with there being many ways to use the service (and will tolerate there being multiple ways to provide what is essentially the same service if there are legacy users)
But the desktop people see their job as providing an "experience" and so when they need to build/brand every application with their stamp, and expect that everything needs to be integrated into their toolset.
Microsoft and Apple don't try to provide every app the user will ever need, why do Gnome and KDE think that they need to do so?
Users accept that some windows apps will look a bit different from other windows apps (especially when they are from different companies), but Linux "experts" proclaim that the slightest difference in how an app looks (and therefor what graphics toolkit was used to build th app) is critical and requires that the entire app be re-written
Linux Desktop people need to figure out how to do less in their Desktop Environment, not more. Identify those things that really must be integrated, and then carve off all the other apps to let them develop (or fail) on their own. The fact that each DE has it's "official" browser is silly. Nobody uses it, they all use either Firefox or Chrome (or possibly Opera). E-mail clients are in the same category. They should not be part of the DE, they should be separate apps (possibly developed by some of the same people), and if they are good, people will use them, even on different desktops. If they aren't good, they will die and people will use good ones.
If we started treating the desktop this way, the idea that some of the apps may be proprietary software would be less of a drastic change. People would be used to running apps from different sources on their desktop.
And since developers would be used to having apps run on different desktops, we would have fewer people running around in a panic over how 'hard' it is to have one app that will run in many places.
the sad reality is that most users actually work this way right now. They are running apps from many different sources today, and many of these apps are NOT 'integrated' into their desktops. Many people are using proprietary apps on their systems (especially in corporate settings), and the biggest problem with using a different distro is not "it doesn't work on that distro", but is instead "we're afraid to try it on that distro as it's not listed as being supported"
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 23:49 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
From your mouth into desktop developers ears. Hopefully!
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 6:51 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
"Microsoft and Apple don't try to provide every app the user will ever need, why do Gnome and KDE think that they need to do so?"
Because when KDE was started, there were no apps that could properly work together, that would obey desktop-wide settings and so on. These days, some of those projects have died (often to the displeasure of their users), others are going strong and are going many places.
These days, projects that don't use the kde libaries are part of the KDE community, like necessitas and tomahawk. And that's great -- what KDE tries to provide these days is a community and infrastructure for creating applications for users.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 11:36 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] Linux Desktop people need to figure out how to do less in their Desktop Environment, not more. Identify those things that really must be integrated, and then carve off all the other apps to let them develop (or fail) on their own. The fact that each DE has it's "official" browser is silly. Nobody uses it, they all use either Firefox or Chrome (or possibly Opera). E-mail clients are in the same category. They should not be part of the DE, they should be separate apps (possibly developed by some of the same people), and if they are good, people will use them, even on different desktops. I only partially agree with this. People shouldn't write applications just to uphold some community brand - it's like stuff like KOffice back in the days of KDE 1 through 3 where tracts of functionality just didn't get the quality assurance attention it needed for people to be able to rely on it - but then again, people shouldn't just bundle stuff together and pretend it offers a complete solution, either - that's like GNOME Office or, apparently, WordPerfect Office back in the day - because although some of the applications may function well, combining them may end up being a frustrating exercise. This latter situation indicates what is really needed: the capability to integrate applications and provide common services. Indeed, the Free Software desktop would have been, and has been in part, the ideal venue to realise a component-based desktop without people wanting to throw infrastructure overboard in order to assert their own application's branding. I recently discovered that Digikam on a KDE 4 system couldn't access a camera (only giving an unhelpful message about Solid on standard error, which obviously isn't by any means sufficient or useful) whereas Gwenview would happily import pictures using its own dialogue, and Dolphin would also show the virtual filesystem for the camera (once the location bar had been revealed and persuaded to actually function properly). But really, we should have moved beyond application-specific menu options a long time ago - people shouldn't be forced to go to a specific application to do something associated with a physical device - and if there really remains a need to expose such functionality as an application operation, the applications should be using common services in the same way. All this having been said, I appreciate applications like Kontact in KDE 3 and the decision to develop them as part of a desktop project. Frequently, the alternative is something like Thunderbird which has a somewhat patchy reliability record and whose future is cast into doubt every time the weather changes, despite lots of organisations supposedly finding it "indispensable". An e-mail client fits into a wider vision of providing a usable desktop and if no-one is stepping up to provide something good enough, then it's understandable and justifiable that a desktop project would undertake the effort to deliver one.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 18:40 UTC (Thu) by ThinkRob (subscriber, #64513) [Link]
> Great. My mom doesn't know what a window manager is, she knows how to touch icons on an iOS device. She will even be confused as hell if you'd give her an Android tablet or phone.
Your mother know how to touch icons on an iOS device, but does not understand how to touch icons on an Android device?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 10:18 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
I'm getting a bit -- no, make that thoroughly -- pissed off with people calling Linux on the desktop a failure. It's not a failure, it's a huge, huge success, especially if you look at the enormous obstacles that we had to overcome, and that we have overcome. And there's still plenty to do, and that work is being done.
Linux is used by millions of people every day, in many different situations for many different purposes. They, too, _just_ get work done. Whether they are working on GI Joe, coding a web application or writing a paper for school or university. Or they are facebooking, which means they don't get work done, but if that's what they want to waste their time on, fine. Get a linux laptop from a vendor like Hettes (http://hettes.nl/), boot it up and start work.
Every platform has its shitty corners, but at least on Linux, we're working all the time to fix them. Gimp might not work as a photoshop replacement for you, but there are plenty of artists who earn their money working on Linux with Gimp, MyPaint and Krita. Heck, these tools are apparently attractive enough that Windows users clamour for them and that OSX users are really pissed off with me for not providing them with a Krita build.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 11:36 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
I respect your work. I don't deny that great work is being done and that Linux is currently useful to approximately 1% of desktop computer owners. For many years I used and advocated Linux, wrote an introductary book, and worked on two Linux distributions (paid on Libranet, as a volunteer on CentOS). I wanted Linux and free software to succeed.
But I have lost hope, because of the attitude that is also manifest in your reaction: the community in general does not want to hear what problems users have. This leads to things such as: completely replacing desktop paradigms from one version to another, offering no reasonable, widely software distribution mechanism outside the current repositories (as someone said: you buy a webcam, need a new kernel, which implies a new userland), replacing sound servers when the new version is not ready, and the list goes on.
Ingo Molnar summarizes many of these issues better than I could:
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:07 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
First off, your "1%" is wrong. It's impossible to be sure, but it's more that that. Way more. Especially if you look world-wide. And whether it's 1%, 3% or 5%, it is still _millions_ of users who don't have to dance to the puppet strings of a company that breaks features in its OS with every release.
Second off, you tell me that saying "We achieved more than anyone could have expected of us, but there's still plenty to do, and that work is being done." is an attitude that makes you lose hope, an attitude that tells you "the community in general does not want to hear what problems users have",
Well, that there is an attitude problem in this discussion, that's certain.
But it's _your_ attitude that's the problem, not mime. You seem to refuse to admit that people are working, all the time, on fixing problems users have. That developers are listening, all the time, to the needs and problems of users and working on that. Whether those developer are volunteers or are paid for it.
The attitude that sucks is the attitude that says "we've lost, we'd better give in, let's admit defeat, and by the way, it's not my fault that we lost, it's your fault". You've given up; well, I haven't.
I've used Linux for longer than you, and I've used Windows since 1.something, and I've used OSX on powerpc and on intel, and I know that no system is free of problems. And I know that all these systems can be used to just get work done. But for two of them you need to be pretty rich and pretty privileged to be allowed in. And there's only one system that can be improved by the people who are experiencing those problems. And that's the free system.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:28 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]
So, where is the standardized infrastructure for installing applications, regardless of the distribution? Where is the stable API and ABI? When do distributions stop replacing a perfectly working desktop environment by one that is not yet ready? When do distributions stop shipping audio servers when they are not ready?
Again, I do respect all the work that is done. It's just that with a few tweaks that are technically simple (e.g. standalone software packages have been done over and over, as well as fat binaries, etc.) the Linux desktop could be such much better for a wider audience.
The problem is that it is hard to do socially. Without some outside force, entropy increases continuously. One can only hope that Canonical, Red Hat, or Google pursues that path, like Apple did before, but with free software.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:56 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
> When do distributions stop replacing a perfectly working desktop environment by one that is not yet ready? When do distributions stop shipping audio servers when they are not ready?
In fairness, not all distributions have been quick to pick up Gnome 3, Unity, or Pulseaudio (as I presume you're referring to). I believe Fedora and Ubuntu are the main players who have shipped some of these before many thought they were ready.
A large part of Fedora's purpose is shipping things slightly early to work out the kinks effectively. So that's fine. Use RHEL or a derivative if you want something Fedora-ish, without occasional breakage like that.
Ubuntu have a reputation of being a bit cavalier sometimes, but I think this is mainly because they're keen to push the desktop in new directions particularly excitedly. And their relative popularity as a distribution lends itself to the conclusion that they often do right by a number of users (plus of course have better marketting and a very welcoming community.) Again, if stability is more your goal, Debian fits well there.
I've probably left out heaps of counterexamples. Sorry about that ;)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 17:16 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Everything you say is 100% correct but unfortunately doesn't answer the quoted question.
A data point for illustration... A Windows friend told me about trying to install Ubuntu a year ago. He found out-of-date tutorials for different distros, sudoing stuff he didn't understand, and wedged himself in a few hours. This was just trying to get Flash, DVDs, and MP3 playback. He's a smart guy and very computer-savvy, but he just didn't have the experience to know what internet advice to follow and what's obsolete.
For whatever reason, and you listed a few, Linux appears to still be moving too fast for more people to hop on.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 0:06 UTC (Thu) by fjf33 (subscriber, #5768) [Link]
Sure and I have another friend whose computer got a virus and he bought a new one because he couldn't get windows working right from the DELL restore CD.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 9:46 UTC (Thu) by Tjebbe (subscriber, #34055) [Link]
Windows has always been hard to install; hardly any hardware support out of the box, a weird and VERY dangerous 'partitioning' tool, all software needs to be downloaded/installed from discs again. The reason people think it is easy is because most people never actually do it; you either get your smart neighbour's kid to do it, or you just buy a new machine.
I guess you'll need to compare to installing a fresh OS X these days, but since I've never done any, I wouldn't know.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 10:26 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
OSX in an Apple machine -> all goodness, simple to install, click click click.
OSX in an non-Apple machine -> forum posts search, EFI bootloader install, kext-download hell until you get it right, and then it's click click click please do not upgrade OSX to next release until you have heard it's 100% safe.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 19:36 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> OSX in an non-Apple machine
not to mention illegal according to Apple
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 21:04 UTC (Thu) by Tjebbe (subscriber, #34055) [Link]
everything that is not directly sending money their way is illegal according to apple.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 22:56 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
remember that that they have already won a lawsuit against a company that was paying them for OSX and then installing it on non-apple hardware.
and to make it worse they had a lot of people cheering them on.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 20:58 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> So, where is the standardized infrastructure for installing applications, regardless of the distribution?
Are you implying that Windows and OSX have those? Hint: they don't have "different distributions". Even if you count .msi/.pkg/.mpkg files as "using standard infrastructure to install programs", many programs are installed via .dmg/.exe without using that infrastructure.
> Where is the stable API and ABI?
Again, Mountain Lion makes lots of older OSX programs not work. Ditto for Vista and Win7. And don't get me started with device drivers.
> When do distributions stop replacing a perfectly working desktop environment by one that is not yet ready?
Don't use *those* distributions.
> When do distributions stop shipping audio servers when they are not ready?
Ditto.
I use Kubuntu for the last 4 years, and before that I used mostly Debian. Never had a sound problem, nor an incompatible desktop overwriting mine. One year ago I had to reconfigure network-manager for some reason after an update -- but the network config here at work is unconventional anyway.
I don't have to resort to "commandline hacking" for administrative tasks in my work system. It all just works, and it's all configurable in the lovely, if OSX-inspired, control panel.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 31, 2012 21:19 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
"So, where is the standardized infrastructure for installing applications, regardless of the distribution? Where is the stable API and ABI?"
Living happily with all the other red herrings.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 8:42 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
> You seem to refuse to admit that people are working, all the time, on
> fixing problems users have. That developers are listening, all the time, > to the needs and problems of users and working on that.
That they are working all the time is true. That they focus on user problems is unfortunately false. They live in fantasy land with simulated users that happen to agree with their great plans unlike annoying real people (case in point: GNOME 3, supposed to target touch input no current user asks for, optimised in fact for the developer keyboard entry prefs, terrible for mouse entry, which is the primary interaction mode of most desktop users nowadays)
And just as LOCs is not a good indication of software quality, working all the time is not a good indication of effectiveness. The *nix desktop guys are all too prone to release half solutions and then dump them when they realise the missing part is hard, instead of working incrementally as all the successful commercial (windows, osx, android) environments are (and the most successful part of Linux is the kernel, and guess what Linux thinks about interface-breaking rewrites).
They mocked the quirks of historical *nix software, but this software still builds today, the associated documentation still applies today, and people have managed to write extensions and more complex software on top of it (witness the success of Linux server-side when it was marginal in 2000 – it only took of after the .com crash). In the meanwhile all the 'better' more 'modern' software written desktop-side has been continuously rebooted without significant feature of market wins.
The exceptions like LibreOffice bring incremental improvements that do not follow any great plan except fixing user-reported problems. And despite targeting 'legacy' needs and being butt-ugly LibreOffice is steadily increasing its market-share.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 8:57 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
I grant you that the gnome developers are out of touch with reality and would do better to concede the game and fold. But they don't represent the entirety of the people working on the Linux desktop.
So, since Gnome isn't the Linux desktop, my point still stands. While we've made mistakes, and will make more mistakes no doubt, the KDE community is working all the time to provide improvements to the plasma desktop and the KDE applications, as well as improving its way of interacting with users.
(Of course, we get enough shit these days for not being innovative all the time, but you can't please everyone all the time, and I, for one, am really happy with all the effort going on to make the transition from Qt4 to Qt5 pretty nearly painless for application developers.)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 10, 2012 11:09 UTC (Mon) by rdale (guest, #70788) [Link] I grant you that the gnome developers are out of touch with reality and would do better to concede the game and fold. But they don't represent the entirety of the people working on the Linux desktop.
I agree with all Boudewijn has been saying on this thread up to this point, but I feel this sentence about the Gnome project is uncalled for. If Gnome folds it won't make XFCE or KDE more successful; instead it we make us all weaker. Those Gnome developers who have nothing to do after Gnome folds, won't suddenly join the KDE project. KDE won't suddenly have more users and contributors because Gnome has folded. I would say the Gnome project has a higher proportion of 'design guys' than KDE, although KDE's Nuno and others do a great job. I wish we could share design innovations together for desktop and touch devices without be banned from doing so by big company bullies like Apple.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 10, 2012 14:26 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> If Gnome folds it won't make XFCE or KDE more successful; instead it we make us all weaker. Those Gnome developers who have nothing to do after Gnome folds, won't suddenly join the KDE project. KDE won't suddenly have more users and contributors because Gnome has folded.
I couldn't agree more. Diversity is one of our strengths, and keeps a subset of FLOSS always in the ecosystem.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 10, 2012 16:11 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] If Gnome folds it won't make XFCE or KDE more successful […] KDE won't suddenly have more users and contributors because Gnome has folded. I don't think that makes actual sense. If GNOME goes away and Linux users are looking to use (or contribute to) a desktop environment, what else are they going to pick? OS X?
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 10, 2012 17:51 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> If GNOME goes away and Linux users are looking to use (or contribute to) a desktop environment, what else are they going to pick? OS X?
Yes. Many will migrate to OSX. Many will migrate to W7. Many will migrate to W8. It's not as if their desktop will suddently stop working; but eventually they will upgrade, and without an upgrade, a migration can consider equally OSX, W7, and W8 as alternatives to KDE, LXDE, &c.
ESPECIALLY because the perception of GNOME as an evolutionary dead-end will taint the other Linux DEs, while OSX and W7/8 won't have that taint.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 10, 2012 19:11 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] I'd guess many people are using GNOME because they want to use Linux, not using Linux because they want to use GNOME – so it would make more sense to move to another Linux-based environment rather than a completely different one. After all, many programs run just as well on a KDE or LXDE desktop as they will on a GNOME desktop. It's not as if the other platforms didn't have their evolutionary dead ends, as users of PowerPC Macs – or, arguably, the classic Windows desktop once Windows 9 comes around – will be able to attest. If GNOME does go away, with KDE at least you get to keep most of the rest of your system.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 10, 2012 22:17 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> I'd guess many people are using GNOME because they want to use Linux, not using Linux because they want to use GNOME
This is not true since the dawn of Ubuntu. It's a real, viable platform with its perks and quirks in the eyes of end users everywhere.
> so it would make more sense to move to another Linux-based environment rather than a completely different one. After all, many programs run just as well on a KDE or LXDE desktop as they will on a GNOME desktop.
(this is technically true, but Qt/KDE programs often look displaced in a GNOME/LXDE desktop and vice-versa)
> It's not as if the other platforms didn't have their evolutionary dead ends, as users of PowerPC Macs – or, arguably, the classic Windows desktop once Windows 9 comes around – will be able to attest.
Windows 9? PowerPC Macs had their platforms continued thru the judicious (and well-done) use of emulation in form of Rosetta.
> If GNOME does go away, with KDE at least you get to keep most of the rest of your system.
LibreOffice runs on Windows and Macs too. So do Firefox, Chrome and VLC. Actually, many GNOME/GTK (and KDE/Qt) programs run on Windows and Macs. Lots of files are in the cloud. There is little incentive to stay in one single platform these days but "The Platform Just Works, Exactly The Way The User Likes, It And Keeps Working Better And Better Each Upgrade." That is why I am personally stuck to KDE up to this day.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 29, 2012 13:23 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] If and when I can conveniently buy a Linux laptop at retail in London or Birmingham, I might consider doing so. Mail-order is a non-starter because I wouldn't buy a monitor or a keyboard without having experienced them first, so why would I buy a not-usefully-separable monitor-and-keyboard without experiencing the combination first? (And even if I would, buying a laptop entails dealing with courier firms.)
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Aug 30, 2012 3:36 UTC (Thu) by gfa (subscriber, #53331) [Link]
> Every platform has its shitty corners, but at least on Linux, we're
> working all the time to fix them.
when i get frustrated with something, linux related,
i don't see a justification to carry a computer with a non-free OS on a linux/foss conference. i recall an anecdote from Andrew Tridgell who was banned from an apple conference (he was invited to give an speech or something) for using suse on his laptop.
"Indeed, we enthusiastically buy their hardware and port our systems to it." Posted Sep 2, 2012 14:29 UTC (Sun) by thoeme (subscriber, #2871) [Link]
Seconded. I am using Linux desktop (KDE, Xfce) on my home and - when allowed by company policy - on my work computers. Bad things can be said about any DE (including Windows and OSX!), but I can live quite happily with Linux-on-the-desktop.
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