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

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

Posted May 22, 2009 15:10 UTC (Fri) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld) by dgm
Parent article: Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

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.

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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.