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Some changes needed...Some changes needed...Posted Nov 28, 2012 12:35 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)In reply to: Some changes needed... by Zack Parent article: Langasek: Upstart in Debian
> In my opinion the only way to ever reach such ubiquity is if one particular distribution gets Apple or MS size marketing behind it
Think about this again. Do you really believe that most people (the 99%, you know) could be convinced to _replace_ the OS that's already installed in their machines?
I believe that they cannot be bothered, as long as it keeps working, more or less (it's unbelievable how much pain users can endure before fixing stuff).
No, the only way is to convince device _sellers_ to preload Linux, and then provide them with a version that can do whatever they want to do, with a minimum of fuss. That implies technical excellence, of course.
Remember netbooks? The very first ones that sold with Linux? Some claimed they were being returned because they didn't run MS Office. Today I don't see anybody returning their iPads because they cannot run Office, so odds are that this was not the real problem. Maybe the reason was that the Linux inside those machines was not exactly "excellent".
> Technical excellence will only get an OS so far, and any tweaking in the margins -- by shaving yet another few seconds off booting or having a standardised init system -- isn't going to make a platform more popular.
Maybe, or maybe not. Picture yourself having a dual booting machine, say a laptop or a tablet. You could chose to boot Windows 8 in a couple of minutes or Linux almost instantly (say, less than 10 seconds). Which one would you boot more often?
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Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 13:49 UTC (Wed) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link]
>Think about this again. Do you really believe that most people (the 99%, you know) could be convinced to _replace_ the OS that's already installed in their machines?
I don't think we're disagreeing. When I mention "Apple or MS size marketing", I also include strongarming OEMs into shipping the OS, having "<manufacturer> recommends Deborah ME edition" advertised when buying machines online, having yound succesful people holding that life changing device and smiling at you from the poster at the busstop, the works. So,
Since we can't yet tend to the masses, we might as well tend to our own. I guess that's the only real point of contention: where some see linux-based systems as "our own", and some see the term in a different context.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 14:13 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
As a note, Windows 7 feels very fast at boot, shutdown, suspend (which I believe is always a hybrid suspend/hibernate), and resume. From what I read, Microsoft was working on improving that for 8. Granted, boot/login is sort of cheating since control is handed over before things are actually ready to use (though I remember KDE (< ~4.5) having similar behavior), but it's still a nice psychological effect.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 17:31 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Picture yourself having a dual booting machine, say a laptop or a tablet. >You could chose to boot Windows 8 in a couple of minutes or Linux almost >instantly (say, less than 10 seconds). Which one would you boot more often?
One of the things that really upsets me about LWN, and most Linux-related forums in general, is the obstinate refusal to consider minor points like 'facts', preferring to make up random nonsense trashing other platforms rather than ever bothering to make a fair comparison. It's like many people can't think of any ways in which Linux is *actually better*, so they have to make some up.
It's tiresome and childish, and it makes FOSS advocates look bad.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 17:56 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
I think this falls to Hanlon's Razor (s/stupidity/extrapolated ignorance/). Windows before 7 *did* have horrible boot performance (ISTR Vista being particularly bad on my school laptop, but maybe that's memories of it souring over time). Once you're under 5–10 seconds, it's really in the "who cares?" realm. Hell, it takes 3 seconds for the cable box my family has to get the picture on the screen after switching channels at home and no one complains. Video game console starting animations can take longer. Five seconds from switch to useful would probably be generally accepted. Windows 7 is there on my work machines (modulo the limbo where services and such are starting up after I log in and whether updates need to be finished installing). CentOS 5 is not by any means. Fedora Rawhide is getting there with systemd (17 seconds from when journald starts logging to my user being logged in at a TTY with manual entry). The best I had seen on my machines before was a ~35 second internet to internet reboot (manual login and ifup wlan0) on an eee900 netbook (either Fedora 13 or 14?).
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 19:18 UTC (Wed) by reedstrm (guest, #8467) [Link]
My laptop makes it from cold start to gdm login screen in 9~10 sec, running bog standard Ubuntu 12.04, by virtue of replacing the system disc w/ an SSD.
Add another 3-4 sec for initial login. Yes, even bloated desktop login is acceptable w/ faster disc IO.
Not that I find boot time that interesting anymore: sleep/resume has been solved, I almost never actually shut down anymore.
My biggest issue is NetworkManager taking its time to decide where I am and getting the appropriate WiFi up.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 18:06 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>It's like many people can't think of any ways in which Linux is *actually better*, so they have to make some up.
NB. I'm not saying there aren't any, just that the most commonly quoted reasons which basically boil down to performance and stability are manifestly untrue in the majority of cases, like this boot time example.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 22:18 UTC (Wed) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
Lots of these examples (particularly with regards to stability/crashiness) are really about Windows 95/98/XP, which are the last versions of Windows that many Linux users ran/remember. My first Linux install was done immediately after Word crashed 10-12 times in a single *hour* during a paper I was writing at school. Now I use Word 8-10 hours a day and I can't recall 8-12 crashes in total in the past three *years.* It is really unfortunate that most of us don't realize what we're competing against - it is a very bad bubble to be living/thinking in.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 29, 2012 14:42 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
It was just a supposition to make a point. Would you feel any better should I had mentioned OS X instead? What's all the fuss about?
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