Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 22, 2009 11:27 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)
In reply to: Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld) by macson_g
Parent article: Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Yes, some stuff is not perfect. Maybe that's the reason we keep working on it instead of being on the beach or skying, don't you think?

What is bad is going to become better, and what is good may become excellent. There are many areas where Linux is already excellent. It's not a question of faith, It's the process! Openness and collaboration. Millions of people working on it (developing, testing, designing, discussing or simply evangelizing).

But in the end it won't matter if its Linux, GNU or BSD, what will win World domination is openness (and freedom). Try to put that genie back in the bottle!

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Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 22, 2009 15:10 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (8 responses)

What is bad is going to become better, and what is good may become excellent.

If only that would be true... The pulseaudio-fiasco shows that "what works, doesn't work after an OS upgrade". Unfortunately I don't really see the "Linux on desktop" thing in any better shape than in 1999. Ten years, no progress, it still in the "on carefully selected hardware most features might work" state.

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 22, 2009 18:59 UTC (Fri) by lenov (guest, #15428) [Link] (7 responses)

I am sorry, but this is totally untrue, close to gross disinformation actually.

I moved entirely to Linux in 1998 (after years of Windows for Desktop and DEC for actual work). At that time:

1) Almost no dedicated hardware worked. Desktop, laptop, that did not matter. You could only use basic computing devices.

2) The productivity tools were almost inexistent. Remember, StarOffice was not OSS. Inkscape did not exist etc. I did not care much because I became a TeX zealot at the time.

3) You had to be *very* knowledgeable to configure your machine (xfree86 ...). But even after, it was absolutely impossible to work efficiently without the console.

What is the situation today?

1) You can install any of the distributions on a desktop painlessly. Ubuntu supports an amazing diversity of hardware (EVERYTHING worked on the my last upgrade, including webcam, microphone, ACPI etc. and I have a f@&%$ Thinkpad)

2) My entire lab is working solely under Linux. From programming to writing thesis, drawing figures, building animations etc. Thunderbird/Firefox/OpenOffice/TheGimp/Inkscape and bob's your uncle.

3) The new undergraduate kids arriving fresh from university, who never saw anything else than Windows XP and Vista log-on and go. They don't need a console or anything "funny". They are at home.

So, there is a problem of market share. But it is not solely due to the capacity of the OS. Linux distribs got better and better. While Vista was a total nightmare. Many users had more problems than with Linux (I witnessed that first hand). The problem has nothing to do with technology. It is political and societal. I am working in a place packed with computer scientists. The most illiterate of the staff eat and breathe bits. Despite the fact that Linux is everywhere, desktops, laptops and servers, the institute ***buys a license for Windows and a license for MS Office ON EACH MACHINE!***

And the problem is not even limited to Linux or OSS. In scientific publishing, a new business model appeared about a decade ago, the Open Access publishing. Despite all scientists admitting it is largely better, for authors and readers, it is stuck at a few percents of market shares ...

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 22, 2009 19:40 UTC (Fri) by JoeF (guest, #4486) [Link]

"Despite the fact that Linux is everywhere, desktops, laptops and servers, the institute ***buys a license for Windows and a license for MS Office ON EACH MACHINE!***"

Would probably be cheaper to have a site license...
But anyway, I agree with you. I bought an Eee PC, with XP Home pre-installed. I installed EasyPeasy on it (Ubuntu-based), and it is slick. Normal users never have to open a console. Everything just works.
A big difference from years ago, when getting Linux to run on a laptop really was for experts.

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 22, 2009 21:05 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (4 responses)

In 1998 Linux supported my (limited) hardware. Some 2D VGA card, a SoundBlaster, a TV-card and it fit into the available memory nicely. I could watch TV on full screen and could browse the net over a dialup link.

In 2008 the 3D support didn't work with my video card. Even 2D support was buggy, so I couldn't watch TV in fullscreen mode (with the same TV-card it worked 10 years ago). Then pulseaudio broke the sound support, so I went back to Windows.

At work I still use Linux desktop (the development is done on Linux). A process called gnome-panel eats up 512MB of the available RAM, so the damn thing swaps(!) with 2GB RAM. Recently I put an audio CD into the computer but I wasn't able to play it (the default audio player application simply crashed, xmms wanted some directory(?) name but in the udev-hotplug-enabled world how the hell am I supposed to know which device is the CD-ROM?), so I listened to the CD at home.

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 23, 2009 9:43 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

In the udev/hotplug-enabled world, your cdrom should be /dev/cdrom,
always, automatically. If it isn't, something is wrong.

Much better than the mess we had before.

(Regarding the video thing, I'd say we're better off now than we ever
were. You still have to exercise some caution, but these days you can be
sure of good function *now* if you buy Intel, and *soon* if you buy ATI.
The old morass of complex everchanging rules which used to boil down
to 'use whatever the X devs are personally using' has turned into 'don't
buy nvidia' (a good idea on the motherboard front as well, shudder). I'd
call that an improvement.)

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 25, 2009 10:02 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

*Currently* ATIs are not well supported, you don't recommend NVidia, so actually we're back at the "use whatever the X devs are personally using" (which is Intel) stage...

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 26, 2009 9:59 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

And don't forget that the Intel drivers are still slow, buggy , and unstable. Realistically your least bad choice is probably the Nvidia proprietary driver if you want fast, stable, relatively bug-free video.

This situation actually really is worse than it was ten years ago for the hardware I own. As is the audio situation, which seems to have regressed to around 1995. Xorg configuration has the potential to be better now, except that distributions no longer seem to come with a sample that you can edit, and they've been doing away with the configuration tools - you need to configure less, but it's harder to do so.

And let's not forget that Mandrake had supermount by around 2000, which provided exactly the CDROM behaviour everyone wanted but wasn't considered the 'right thing', so we *still* have the worst automounting of any desktop OS.

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 26, 2009 9:39 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

A process called gnome-panel eats up 512MB of the available RAM, so the damn thing swaps(!) with 2GB RAM.

It is well known that gnome-panel is a memory hog, but 512MB is of course not normal. It is very likely that you have way too many items on your panel(s), or that you are running a version that has a memory leak. Quite easy to fix, I guess.

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 25, 2009 8:34 UTC (Mon) by MTecknology (guest, #57596) [Link]

I do really wish there were an accurate way to measure the REAL number of Linux users. Windows and Mac can both take an estimate from their updates. Linux on the other hand really can't do that. Especially with so many distributions able to quickly and easily create a single system within a building that hundreds of others can pull their updates from. (Update Proxy)

I like http://counter.li.org/ but it's obviously only going to cover a small percent of actual Linux users. While we're on this subject, when is the last time a Windows system ran for 4.24 years. (http://counter.li.org/reports/uptimestats.php)

Someday, I hope there is a nice way to measure Linux users. Then I'm sure we'll see this so called "5%" jump up to 20% or higher. Linux isn't exactly small fry, but it's lack of forcing users to do things does make it hard to count.

I'm excited to see the day when users are given a real choice over what OS they will use and understand the difference.

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 22, 2009 18:36 UTC (Fri) by xilun (guest, #50638) [Link] (6 responses)

"What is bad is going to become better"

Seems unjustified coueism to me.

Maybe in the bells and whistles world of Gnome, KDE and the others this is the case -- and its probably mostly true for Linux as well, but my personal feeling, being a Debian user for 10 years, is that too often very basic tools and legacy software that used to just work tend to break because of inconsiderate changes in the environment -- for example try to use OOo under Window Maker : used to work 3 versions of Debian ago. Not anymore. Even "new" fashion tools are sometimes completely broken (beyond repair?) (thinking of NetworkManager for example -- or I once took a look at almost every famous graphical music players and managed to make half of them crash in less than 3 minutes by just using my mouse, while the other half needed a PhD to understand their interfaces... we used to have xmms several years ago -- now there is nothing usable and stable resembling to that and xmms is not packaged anymore)

Another example : right now I'm experiencing delays that look like random in the order of 0 to 1000ms when using "less" or "mc" through ssh on a Etch server using a Lenny client (with rxvt terminals under Window Maker). Never saw anything like that before, and do not even know where to start investigating to fix this stupid behaviour. I'm not yet annoyed to the point I really care about it (I have a lot of other things to do -- including long rants to write on LWN :P ) but it is still a very frustrating experience, especially because I never saw a such utterly broken behaviour before. So it feels like (and I don't know if this really is the case or not) somebody has cluelessly broken something in ssh or in less or in rxvt or in X window or in the X protocol or somewhere else in the string of components that should be robust I'm using.

All of this is a pretty dark picture -- passing under silence brighter points of GNU/Linux and associated graphical environments -- but working all the time under such a system I begin to be a little tired of people that just think that it is either good or will be. It is sometimes not. It is sometimes even very bad -- and it sometimes even become worse. So in my experience the bad is not always becoming better -- and I'm far from being sure that the "process" that lots of packages adopt and even some popular distributions can help ; too often the "process" is simplified to : mix bugfix and new buggy features, then ship the whole thing to the world for testing, then start over -- I don't see the point where stable software can emerge from such a process, indeed even if you remove the "add new buggy features" part you will still fail to produce something of decent quality for big packages without at least proper regression testing, which is seen far too rarely.

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 22, 2009 19:43 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm using OOo occasionally under IceWM and I see no such issues. Could you please be more specific? Bug numbers could also help.

> right now I'm experiencing delays that look like random in
> the order of 0 to 1000ms when using "less" or "mc" through
> ssh on a Etch server using a Lenny client (with rxvt terminals
> under Window Maker). Never saw anything like that before, and
> do not even know where to start investigating to fix this
> stupid behaviour.

strace is your friend. Either an interactive trace, or a trace to a file with timestamps (-t -o somefile) .

You may need to use -p to attach to a specific PID and/or -f to follow subprocesses as well.

BTW: do you actually have an Etch system to compare with? Does the same happen on a fresh Lenny install?

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 23, 2009 9:35 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Wireshark may also be useful (less doesn't do DNS lookups, but delays of
that magnitude say 'network problems' to me, perhaps in the underlying
networked filesystem or in something path-searching is traversing).

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 23, 2009 6:00 UTC (Sat) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (2 responses)

The heir to the xmms legacy is Audacious, btw. My wife uses it and it seems quite stable and usable for her. (I personally can't stand it, but everyone's experience depends on their perspective. I find that while there are certainly plenty of things that annoy me about software -- after all, I'm a hacker -- the Linux ecosystem remains substantially better for everything I want to do than any of the alternatives, and continues to improve substantially over time. Perhaps this just means there are more people who are more like me doing the hacking these days.)

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 23, 2009 16:29 UTC (Sat) by aleXXX (guest, #2742) [Link] (1 responses)

> The heir to the xmms legacy is Audacious, btw. My wife uses it and it
> seems quite stable and usable for her.

I've been using xmms since I think 1997 (x11amp back then) and switched
to audacious last year with the upgrade to Slackware 12.1 (xmms not
packaged anymore).
How to put it: xmms was simple working better.
Audacious crashes from time to time, and there is some lag in the replay,
i.e. when I press pause it takes a moment until it actually stops.
Maybe it uses some fancy soundserver. I don't want to fiddle around to
find this out. xmms has been working without problems for me for years,
and now something that basic, where I didn't have problems with back in
1997, has problems ?
Maybe we should just forget about user-space soundservers altogether...

Alex

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 24, 2009 2:29 UTC (Sun) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

...switched to audacious last year with the upgrade to Slackware 12.1 (xmms not packaged anymore).

Xmms is back in Slackware 12.2 (and I'm happy about it!).

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 25, 2009 8:15 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

>"What is bad is going to become better"

>Seems unjustified coueism to me.

Why? Did I said Linux was perfect? It's not. All complex software has glitches, but I can tell you (I'm a professional software developer) your typical Linux system has _very_few_ glitches for it's size. And when you take into account the complexity and pace of development it's just astonishing.

The fact is, Linux *is* improving in capabilities, usefulness, user-friendliness, quality, speed, broadness of applicability... and all at the same time! And the only reason is the love many of it's developers put in what they do. And this is not self-delusion, it's pure and verifiable facts.