Submitted by “It may be a brave opinion but I predict that Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista are going to be the two operating systems that will take over the largest chunk of the desktop OS market during the next couple of years. This comparison is based on my experience with both systems during the last couple of weeks on two different computers.”
Ubuntu is getting better with every release but I feel it is not there yet. Some tasks still require going to the command-line. Non-tech people should *never* have to see command-line.
Also need to improve support for off the shelf printers and scanners in a plug-n-play sort of way. I know some devices work out of the box but others need some tweaking and then there are some bad ones that do not work at all.
People are not happy when they have a hardware they spent money for and it won’t work anymore.
For me its getting worse. one release ago it stopped working on my desktop workstation, and in the latest it stopped working on my laptop in addition to still not working on my desktop.
But seriously…Ubuntu still has some rough edges that really needs to be fixed before it can take on windows.
Ubuntu has been fixing rough edges since it started – sorry, but I wouldn’t trust it to finish that anytime soon. Meanwhile, other projects are trying to actually advance the state of the free desktop 😉
What a load of crap.
Ubuntu is the FIRST Linux desktop in the last 10 years to provide a stable, usable desktop experience for the masses.
While it’s still not ready for gamers, etc. It’s way ahead of all the others.
PCLinuxOS was the first, and is still ahead of Ubuntu in terms of user-friendliness.
I have also heard good things said about Mandriva 2008 in this regard, but I haven’t tried that myself.
Ubuntu is reasonable, but it is not the best. If you go to Ubuntu forums, you will still see a lot of “howto” descriptions where things are done via command-line. This is not necessarily the ONLY way to do thses things, but new users can sometimes get the mistaken impression that it is, and that they will be forced to use the command-line on Ubuntu.
Oh, BTW – Linux is perfectly OK for gamers. It is rather just that games companies have not yet ported their products to Linux. So you got the “actor” the wrong way around.
Ubuntu has an advantage, it’s a household name. PCLinuxOS while it may be OK, I don’t know anyone I mean ANYONE that’s either heard of it or used it. I agree that Linux is capable of being a good OS for gaming, however it wasn’t until this month that ATI finally released a driver that wasn’t crap and that’s even up in the air based on my testing.
Sure, there are a lot of how-tos on the Ubuntu forums. That means it’s getting adopted. The more the better.
UbuntuGuide can’t be beat either:
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Gutsy
As for Mandrivia, does it even have a user base at all anymore?
I wish PCLinuxOS all the best, but with a name like that it’ll never become a household name like Ubuntu could.
Edit: Checking their website and finding the how-tos I don’t see how it’s any different from Ubuntu. Example: ndiswrapper.
http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/200712/page03.html
“PCLinuxOS was the first”
Impossible, unless you consider a beta OS was ready for the masses (which counters your argument that it was the first by being a beta). It’s first production (1.0) release wasn’t until May 2007.
Sorry.
Edited 2007-12-04 23:42
I haven’t used Ubuntu for a year now, so things might have changed (using Arch now), but as far as I can remember a majority of CLI tasks listed in the Ubuntu forums were “power user” tasks. Stuff like getting Beryl/Compiz working before it was officially supported and such.
>>What a load of crap.
Ubuntu is the FIRST Linux desktop in the last 10 years to provide a stable, usable desktop experience for the masses.<<
Sorry but that’s bullshit: on my PC I couldn’t install Ubuntu (display garbled, that’s hard to troubleshoot!) but Mandriva worked for example.
This is strange as all Linux distrib package the same software.. But in this case Mandriva made something correctly that Ubuntu didn’t, so Ubuntu wasn’t “way ahead all the others”.
//But in this case Mandriva made something correctly that Ubuntu didn’t, so Ubuntu wasn’t “way ahead all the others”.//
Yup. In *that* case. In *my* case Ubuntu installed perfectly, everything (including wireless) was working OOTB.
So. Does it rule? Does it suck? Or somewhere in-between?
Take a guess.
That’s crap. There were several n00b-friendly distributions around before Ubuntu. Ubuntu is nothing special in that regard. The special about Ubuntu is the marketing (sending cd’s gratis to all places of the world – you don’t find many Fedora install-CD’s around).
Ubuntu suffers from the same crap that most other binary distributions suffer from: Dependencititis. Try to remove one package and you’ll end up with virtually no packages on the system. Fedora is no better. An ubuntu based on Arch Linux would be much better. Or put differently. A noob-friendly Arch Linux.
If we could get the decentralized installation framework from Windows and Mac OS X with the clean logical NeXTSTEP-thinking and the openness of Linux as well as the centralized package management from Linux. Now that would be quite a system.
PS: Add to this a Desktop with the object oriented nature of OS/2 WPS. Oooh… That’ll be a killer OS.
Surely you can’t blame Ubuntu or Linux for that! If you want to blame somebody, blame the hardware vendors for not supporting the Linux OS! Every time you buy new hardware like a printer, you get Windows drivers and sometimes Mac OS X drivers, but *never* Linux drivers. The Open Source community has been brilliant in creating their own drivers.
I still think Linux supports more hardware out-of-the-box after a new install, than Windows (before you load Windows full of 3rdParty drivers).
Wacom tablets have a very good open source driver, and it worked in Feisty. The problem with Gutsy and Wacom tablets is definitely an Ubuntu choice.
There was also the whole usb_suspend fiaso in Feisty, which saw many scanners not working anymore, just because *ONE* dev (you know who you are) decided to enable a feature that was considered unstable by Linux kernel devs. When one person decides that it’s ok to mess people’s office for the sake of experimenting possible small battery improvements for laptops, then something is quite wrong (Mark was aware of the problem, but decided it was ok not to do anything about it, and it didn’t show up in the release notes). Then Gutsy went back to a sane configuration.
You got me on that one
My Wacom tablet wasn’t working in Feisty, and is working on Gutsy. In fact, because of my tablet not working in Feisty, I try some other distribution, with no luck. Until I found out that there was a bug in Wacom support in kernel from 2.6.19 to 2.6.21.
And I am afraid those kind of regression are going to keep happening, and you can’t blame distributions for those regressions. The linux kernel is moving too fast, I do think that they should go back to the previous development model, with a stable branch with driver improvement and bug fixes, and an unstable branch with all the subsystem changes.
Yes you can in these both cases, because :
– the wacom problem in Gutsy is that someone commented out wacom configuration in xorg.conf, so you have to manually edit the file to remove the comments. If your wacom system wasn’t working in feisty but is working in gutsy, it’s either because you upgraded, or because you got a serial one (or a tablet PC, since these function like serial tablets);
– the usb_suspend fiasco was due to a deliberate choice from Ubuntu, even though kernel developers warned about the code not being ready for inclusion in the kernel (but the Ubuntu dev went out and included it). You seem to have misunderstood : that code was NOT included in the kernel, it was in an experimental branch.
I only picked out case that were :
– the fault of the distribution ;
– deliberate choices instead of errors.
In these case the developers knew exactly what they were doing and decided it was ok to play and mess up with user’s setup.
You can find other numerous regression when it is indeed the fault of Ubuntu, some are unintentional, some are. Saying that it’s the fault of hardware makers or of the linux kernel moving too fast is often used as a way to hide their shortcomings, which is not a courageous choice, nor is it going to improve things.
Well I BLAME LINUX when it comes to hardware.
Why ? Here is latest example from experiences of mine:
Recently I managed to get Nokia 6610 GSM phone to be recognised by Ubuntu via some no-name IrDA interface and third party software.
Transfering files from and to phone works ok. But when I tried to use it as an “emergency Internet connection” it failed to connect via GPRS, despite of other people used the same scripts successfully and with the same GSM network as I tried.
By the way – as far as I remember way of connecting to Internet using Windows 3.1 and dial-up modem (software was called “trumpet winsock” or something) it was much easier than under Ubuntu and GPRS nowadays.
The problem with support for any hardware at all on Linux and other non-monopoly operating systems can usually be attributed to one or both of the following:
1. Lack of the hardware manufacturer’s desire to write drivers for and/or support those OSes and
2. Lack of any open source developers interested enough in the particular hardware to write an OSS driver worth installing.
When both issues are present at once, usually with obscure but neccessary hardware, you end up with next to no support at all. Attitudes need to change on both sides of the fence before we get really good drivers, whether binary and manufacturer-supported or OSS and community-supported. Of course, what we really want is for the manufacturers to not only provide native OSS drivers but also to support said drivers. That very rarely happens but when it does (example: HP printers) it’s a wonderful thing.
I long for the day when a big-name manufacturer will step up there and provide fully open-source friendly laptops and desktops that are 100% supported by Linux. Dell has come close with its Ubuntu offerings, but they are nothing more than their “Designed for Windows Vista” systems that are the most compatible with Linux. When it comes down to it, the various components that make up the PCs as a whole, each from a different manufacturer (mainboard, wifi card, video adapter, etc.), cause a significant roadblock to the above stated goal of 100% OSS compatibility. Even Apple computers have parts made by several different manufacturers, and are simply assembled under the Apple name and supported by Apple at the end of the production timeline.
Lenovo will sell you such a machine, and so will HP.
But really, all you need to do is look for certain chipsets.
For example, I found out that an Acer laptop I was looking at had an Intel graphics accelerator, and an Intel wireless chipset … so I was pretty confident that it would support Linux 100% out-of-the-box including 3D graphics acceleration, and I was not mistaken.
I recommended this laptop to a friend who was looking to build up a Linux setup, and I told that friend to also get a bog-standard wireless router (I think it was d-link) & ADSL modem combined, and also to buy an HP inkjet printer (they chose a Photosmart).
The result – 100% Linux compatible laptop with printer and Internet and full application suite – all installed out-of-the-box from a single liveCD – at less than half the cost of an equivalent Windows setup to do the exact same tasks.
ATI graphics is also on the way to becoming open source, so perhaps by next year these cards also will have 100% 3D graphics support out-of-the-box.
If you are wondering if a given wireless chipset has an open-source driver, this list may help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_wireless_dri…
Edited 2007-12-05 11:59
You are exactly right in that, with a little research, a computer that is fully supported by Linux can be found. My own laptop, with the exception of the wireless card and the ATI video chip, is supported from a fresh install in Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, and even plain vanilla Debian. Changing my wireless card and waiting for the open source ATI drivers will make it 100%, and a couple of mouse clicks on my part gets those two items working in a binary-only fashion today.
However, what I want, and I suspect a lot of OSS advocates also want, is for a major manufacturer to take that giant extra step and assertively offer such support from the ground up. I want Dell or HP or Lenovo to design and build a system or series of systems for the consumer that have 100% Linux compatibility, come with it preinstalled, AND have the same level of customer and technical support as their Vista-based brethren. That, I think, will be the turning point for Linux as a home desktop and mobile computing platform en masse.
Indeed, it started with the above named companies listening to their customers and venturing into these uncharted waters. I’m not complaining at all that they didn’t go “all the way” immediately, I’m just patiently awaiting the day that they do while I silently thank them for what they have done already.
Either buy direct from here, or buy one of the models this dealer sells:
http://www.system76.com/
http://system76.com/index.php?cPath=28
http://system76.com/index.php?cPath=27
http://system76.com/index.php?cPath=29
That way, you don’t even have to do the little bit of research, or indeed if you want you don’t even have to get the liveCD & install the system.
And you can get support:
http://system76.com/articles.php?tPath=5
http://system76.com/article_info.php?articles_id=24
More & more people, somewhat to their surprise apparently, are finding that it is actually typically trouble-free:
http://bluesuncorp.co.uk/2007/12/04/five-days-of-ubuntu-linux
Edited 2007-12-05 12:44
With all due respect, I think you are still blatantly (perhaps intentionally?) missing my point. I know that there are already small companies out there who offer Linux based systems and even support those systems. I’m not arguing against that at all. My point is, for Linux to truly become a household name, even so much as OSX is, will require at least one of the major, well-known manufacturers to take that extra step and start actively supporting Linux from the ground up. Go to a restaurant and take a survey of the guests, how many do you think have heard of System76 or Everex? Now, ask if they’ve heard of Dell, or HP, or IBM (now Lenovo of course) and I guarantee that most if not all will have at least heard the names. It’s going to take a big move by one of the top tier brands to make this happen.
For you and me, who are already Linux enthusiasts, System76 and similar small outfits are the way to go at this moment in time. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly believe in the power of word-of-mouth campaigns especially in the OSS world, but there are times when it takes a leap of faith by a powerful entity to really get the ball moving in the right direction. When, not if, this happens, I just hope they do it right and stay true to the message and philosophy of Free computing. For the OSS concept to become mainstream will take a mainstream player in the game, period.
Dell does:http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=1…
And Linux is at fault here because… Oh wait, it’s not. Nokia refuses to document the inner workings of their phones and the protocols they use so Linux devs need to reverse engineer them. You should not be able to do anything with a Nokia phone on Linux. The fact that you’re able to do something is remarcable.
You either enjoy being tortured or your memory’s not what it used to be in your old age. Because I remember that setting that up was a complete nightmare.
But tell you what, why don’t you go back to using Windows 3.1 if you like it better than Ubuntu 7.10?
Edited 2007-12-05 22:58
How is blaming the hardware company going to solve the problem? The customer doesn’t care for your excuses, they just want the damn hardware supported, and they wanted it supported yesterday.
As a customer I don’t care what excuses you give me for why hardware doesn’t work – all I care about is whether it works or not. If it doesn’t work, you won’t get me as a customer.
Same goes for third party commercial applications, we as customers don’t care for your excuses – unless the application we want are available on your platform, we don’t care how good those replacements are, they aren’t the ones we’re used to it.
Get used to it, this is the marketplace – where customer is king, if you can’t step up and meet the challenge, relegate yourself to a niche.
“How is blaming the hardware company going to solve the problem?”
Works for Vista users…although it does seem that a lot of these things are done already, and large companies like Intel/Ati etc etc are now advertising the work they have done in the kernel.
The Odd thing is he mentions printers, now why should an Apple supporter like you have heard of Cups
“Same goes for third party commercial applications”
You mean like Firefoz, MySQL etc. Unless you didn’t mean commercial…but another word maybe binary!?
“this is the marketplace – where customer is king” And yet Apple
and Vista both implement DRM which no customer wants. I wonder what you mean. Currently customers bend over for Vista…I was going to make a joke about Vista capable but for those users who where robbed its no joke.
No it doesn’t. Windows users froth at the mouth when their hardware isn’t supported – and who gets the blame? not Nvidia, not ATI, but Microsoft. Microsoft will get blamed for everything from their hardware not being supported to their cat being hit by a car.
What is so difficult to understand about third party commercial software. Where are the Adobes, Quicken’s, the numerous games companies producing boxed software for Linux?
Again, people don’t give a sh*t about the excuses, they want their applications; I’m not going to move Linux until there are quantifiable improvements over Mac OS X and all my software is available for Linux.
That is the case for ALL end users; I’ve been hearing the same pissing and moaning form the Linux quarter for 10 damn years, and yet, in 10 years no one has yet come up with an office suite which isn’t slow and bloated, a Photo editing application which doesn’t royally suck, or many of the numerous tools out there which are properly developed and MAINTAINED for the long term.
Take inkscape, no improvement forward in months. Passparout is now dead. Pan, again, dead. Pidgin? too bothered about chucking code out because of political arguments rather than adding features when code is made available – anyone remember the video support fiasco?
Bullcrap. Apple is growing in the high double digits – yet, people are forced to run Apple Mac’s *rolls eyes* stop trying to make up bullshit, because it won’t float here.
Vista been a failure – where? all sales figures so far, both retail and OEM have actually been pretty good! so again, stop trying to generate bullshit to prop up your anti-Apple and anti-Microsoft agenda.
How about instead of spreading lies, you actually spend some time fixing the deficiencies in your operating system – then maybe people might voluntarily move to it.
Edited 2007-12-04 23:55
“”and who gets the blame? not Nvidia, not ATI, but Microsoft.””
:O clearly your new to this forum, and others I’ll be willing to pull 100 quotes out for you.
“”third party commercial software”” GNU has third party commercial software, Firefoz, MySQL etc
“Take inkscape, no improvement forward in months.”
http://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/inkscape/
last update 16seconds ago
“Passparout is now dead” never heard of it. although a release was out well just two months ago
“Pan” seems quite active http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/pan-devel/
“Pidgin” and yet over the last few months its released
all these versions with all these changes http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ChangeLog
Not only are you lazy your also a liar
“Apple is growing in the high double digits”
lol not even by Apples accurate figures
“Vista been a failure – where? all sales figures so far, both retail and OEM have actually been pretty good!”
Erm no, thats what hardware companies are having to sack people, and even a year only 80 million is looking kinda lackluster….the good news is though revenue is at an all time high
“spreading lies”
That brought a tear of joy to my eye check my references above to enjoy the irony, for every single statement I am more that willing to point out 10 articles, I expect a full apology XXX
Edited 2007-12-05 00:11
Mate, are you really this obtuse or do you work hard at it?
How does that answer his question about commercial software? He’s talking about software like Quicken and Adobe Photoshop, and you keep banging on about Firefox and MySQL? If you walk into PC World, Fry’s, Wal-mart, etc. how likely is it that boxed software that you pick up is going to run on Linux?
ZOMG, real user names are now shown in the system log! Seriously, how does anything of what you’ve posted counter the points kaiwai raised? Those “changes” are barely new features. We’re still waiting for Pidgin to support video and this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Seriously mate, take your anti-MS anti-Apple nonsense elsewhere. We’re heard it all before.
Well kaiwai, for once I strongly agree with what you have wrote. At the end of the day there needs to be support for these applications, and companies like Adobe, Autodesk, etc.. are not going to port to another platform unless they absolutely 110% are forced to. Look at what has happened with gaming and Apple, it becomes closer to non-existent each year. Is this an indicator of the quality of the OS or hardware? Absolutely NOT!. In fact for many years Apple computers had higher performing graphic cards standard than came with most PCs. The shift was the explosion of consoles and the market share of Windows. The gaming companies had absolutely no more reason to support Apple OS, when they figured if someone want to game they could either buy a PC or better yet buy a console. Hence now why most games come out in both PC and console.
Does OSX have some serious limitation as to why Autodesk does not port over? No, not at all. Autodesk does not port AutoCAD simply because they have no reason to, no reason to add to their cost. Most of their users are already on Windows, or will simply move to Windows to use this application. For years I never really even saw Apple as targeting the same consumers as the PC, nor do I necessarily believe they can at this point unless radical changes are done in their business model. But then again Apple has always been happy and proud of it’s targeted market and never felt the absolute need to expand. Now with iTunes and others they have no reason to, they have excellent revenue stream from multiple sources.
With that said, if anyone is capable of competing with Windows it would be Apple, and not Linux (speaking strictly of the desktop). With that said I would mention that 95% of Microsoft targeting Linux has nothing to do with desktop Linux, it is not even on their freakin radar for good reason. When they market against Linux this is solely the server space, where Microsoft has for years competed with Unix/Solaris. Since proprietary Unix is moving to Linux, obviously Microsoft now targets Linux as a competitor. But seriously people, and I am thinking of two in particular, get back to reality.
“”Adobe, Autodesk, etc.. are not going to port to another platform unless they absolutely 110% are forced to.””
Ignoring that these product have alternatives
and are niche applications. I suspect very likely that Microsoft. (Should we play guess the technology google_ninja goes on about it a*all* the time). is in the process of kicking these companies very hard to either be merged with a larger stronger company or open-source. I suspect a mixture of both.
Edited 2007-12-05 00:33
Well, there are still no real Excel alternative under Linux (see numerous issues with tables and graphs in OO’s Calc, and those are only examples!), so I can not see the point of talking about alternatives of something so advanced like Autodesk software.
OO’s calc doesn’t even do datedif. Seriously, wtf?
What is datedif?
PS: answering my own question:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/datedif.aspx
“datedif … is documented in the help file only for Excel 2000. For some reason, Microsoft has decided not to document this function in any other versions. DATEDIF is treated as the drunk cousin of the Formula family. Excel knows it lives a happy and useful life, but will not speak of it in polite conversation.”
Not ever having run Excel 2000, I didn’t know about datedif.
OK, it is apparently a “drunk cousin” undocumented function. Like, I should really rely on that.
In OO calc, if I have one cell with a date, and another cell with an earlier date, and I simply subtract the second cell value from the first, the answer I get is the number of days between those dates.
Isn’t that what you want? Why would you need a special function for it? What exactly is wrong with simple subtraction?
OO calc handles dates way better than Excel, or OOXML in general.
In order to be compliant with OOXML, for example, you may not have any date before 1900.
Here is a shortened list of the aspects that OO calc handles far better than Excel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula#OpenFormula_Attributes
Imagine that … getting mathematicians involved in designing the way that formulas worked. Imagine making a test suite so that you can check if your application is getting the right answers.
Who would have thought of that?
Certainly not Microsoft, apparently:
http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9784577-39.html
Edited 2007-12-05 11:21
Even if you take out specialised applications like AutoCad, there are software titles like Photoshop Elements which customers use, Quicken, MYOB, Corel and numerous other consumer applications.
I disagree they’re non-existent by virtue of a lack of dominance in gaming; Most people don’t use their computers for games. Games are a non-issue. Those who are hard core gamers are a very small percentage of the overall user base.
Apple’s hardware sales are increasing at double digit rates, they’re not sitting at 2 million per quarter; I don’t know about you, but thats pretty good considering they sell not a single computer to the enterprise market – which is where a large number of PC’s are sold.
Anyway, anyone who purchases a computer for games need their brain examine. Get a console for games, a MacBook for a laptop, and voila, nirvana.
The lack of solidworks is also a nuisance as well. Hope that one of them pull their head out of their ass given the rapid rise in the number of people in the engineering field using Mac’s. Just go to the engineering department at Canterbury (which is what it is famous for – the Hamilton Water Jet), its Apple central.
Apple also knows what it wants. It isn’t beholden to the corporates, it doesn’t have to constantly compromise development to simply keep some sparmy corporates happy – the same sparmy scum that demands Microsoft to keep stupid amounts of backwards compatibility at the detriment of development, security and reliability.
Edited 2007-12-05 00:53
On a sidenote, you are honestly the first person I have ever heard speaking of “apple central” in the engineering department at a university. Here at Illinois, where the engineering student population is one of the largest in the United States(It is also the birthplace of the web browser and the home university of the father of the transistor and the theory of superconductivity) we have not one apple computer in our department. We have XP and RHEL 5 workstations(also some solaris 8 sparc woorkstations which they are phasing out). While some quality engineering software refuses to be ported to linux(solidworks and autodesk mainly) there is a fair amount that has(matlab,maple,mathematica,Pro/Engineer CAD, Ansys etc)
How about asking Adobe etc. about that? For the life of me I can’t understand why you would blame Linux for this. Or for not supporting hardware that the manufacturer refuses to document.
So it’s a showstopper for your use of Linux. Who cares? You’re not a customer. You’re a wannabe user. You’re not owed anything. If you want to and are able to use Linux, fine. If you can’t, double fine.
Because if you don’t contribute anything, you don’t exist. You won’t be missed. The Linux and FOSS world are a meritocracy, not a vendor-customer relationship. There is no “marketshare”, there’s only contributors and developers. The advance is slow but steady and it doesn’t actually need non-contributing people in order to survive. It survives on people doing things for themselves first and foremost, and that means to stop bitching, take it as it is and if you want it to be better you have to start doing something yourself.
That’s the big catch. You have no right to make demands of free software. That software and its developers are there to empower you, not to serve you. If you think it’s the kind of relation where you say “here’s a ten, get my bags” you’re sorely mistaken.
I don’t know about the cat being hit by a car, but I do know people have to pay hilarious amounts of money to get a Windows license. The least you can expect is Microsoft to support your hardware – and you know what: They don’t. They rely heavily on third party support, and in those cases people more often blame nVidia or ATI rather than Microsoft. And even then complaining about Microsoft wouldn’t be unreasonable since it is the responsibility of Microsoft to make sure all hardware is supported. Either that or they cannot charge for their OS. Charging for OS == support for ALL hardware ever in existence.
In that case the customer can damn straight pay for that support.
Using a gratis OS and demanding support like you had paid 500$, while you are sitting in the corner and whining about the evil non-paid developers that don’t have time for you right now because they have a life outside your computer problems, just isn’t fair.
Contribute or shut up.
“”Non-tech people should *never* have to see command-line. “”
Give examples
//Give examples//
My neighbour, my dad, my sister, my wife, my co-workers, my …. lots of non-tech people.
.. Which most likely have a friend/relative/IT man that does the heavy lifting for them.
I’ve yet to see a single joe-Windows-user that managed to solve a major problem (broken installation/missing DLL/missing driver with no CD/etc) on its own.
– Gilboa
– using a Wacom tablet now requires to edit xorg.conf;
– screen rotation (for LCD with panning support) still needs you to edit xorg.conf, then you can install the gnome applet and it will work;
– as usual, if you want to input any language using scim (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc…) but you’re in an “occidental” locale, you also have to edit some files in addition to using System>Language settings. It’s been like that since they broke it from Hoary to Breezy, and even though there’s long and documented bug reports in Launchpad, nobody cared about it, except the users – I did set up a wiki to help people like me, but you still have to DIY (see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SCIM).
I love Ubuntu, but these problem have been going on for *years*, have been documented by users, bug report filled and solvable by main devs whenever they’d like to solve them.
However, Ubuntu release notes *never* pointed them, even when they were definite regression and would mess user’s system (especially the whole scim fiasco). Reviews (even OSNews reviews) don’t talk about them either, even though one is a showstopper (scim) for many people, and one a serious issue (wacom).
Edited 2007-12-04 21:39
Canonical broke the vesa framebuffer in 7.10. Luckily I’m not the first one to have noticed this, so there was a thread about it in the forums. I’m starting to get the impression that Canonical doesn’t build on releases. They seem to start out at square zero then see how far they can get on each release.
I don’t think many reviewers live with the system for a long time. I suspect that most of them just install a OS under a VM, like VMware or VirtualBox, then write a review after playing with it for five minutes.
I think tech-journalism needs to have more long term reviews of OSes. Living with them day in and out on real hardware brings up a lot more faults. The high level fly-bys that pass as in dept reviews are just crap, and they do nothing for those of use who actually want to further our understanding of the OS.
A few command line related observations:
1) as someone already mentioned the command line is the easiest howto you can give, because you don’t have to explain anything to a user about complex work that they have to do. Compare a windows howto to an ubuntu howto. Simple networking howtos on windows are pages long, filled with dozens of screenshots of config windows that all looks almost identical. A Linux howto is generally one page culminating in a few CLI commands with instructions “Open a console, and copy-paste” Can it get much simpler or more straightforward then copy-paste?
2. While people have already brought up the cli vs regedit argument, I prefer to reference the mac os 10.5. In a post earlier this week in the “mac osx10.5 is the new vista, the “3d” dock issue was brought up by many people. This was quickly trivialized by mac users with a simple fix:
“To make dock 2D go to terminal and type the following:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock
To make dock 3D
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO
killall Dock
Granted it should be a preference item, but why does everyone whine so much about this?”
So apparently, it’s no big deal to use the CLI is MacOS when setting “Power User” settings, but in Linux using the CLI for anything is immediately viewed as absurd. It’s somewhat hypocritical, in that the mac cli, which is just a UNIX cli anyways, is seen as a feature that makes OSX more useful, flexible, and powerful, but the linux cli gets such a bad rap.
Edited 2007-12-05 19:31
The same can be said of vista, and xp, and macos…
There is hardware that worked in xp which doesnt work in vista.
There was hardware that worked in 98 that didn’t work in xp.
There are things on windows for which you need to manually edit the registry, which is even harder than the command line and easier to break.
Many things are simply easier on the command line, especially from the perspective of an experienced user telling someone inexperienced how to do things, consider the following contrived example:
Type: “sudo apt-get install tcpdump” and enter your password when asked
Click on the package management program, once it loads find and click on the “select new packages” option, once that loads find the subsection called network tools and click on the little triangle next to it, make sure the triangle is now pointing downwards and you should see a new list of things underneath it which are slightly indented, look in that list for something entitled “tcpdump”, when you’ve found it click on the little square to the right of the word tcpdump so that there is a tick displayed inside it, then find the install button at the bottom of the window and click on it.
People are not happy when they have a hardware they spent money for and it won’t work anymore.
Well, this kind of observation is really poinless.
If you want to run an operating system, just go and buy hardware that work with it!
You do the same with Vista, OS X and all the other OS: before buying something you check that it works with your Operating System and the rest of your hardware, so, why should it be different with Linux?
You are a bit confused there, buddy. You have got it the wrong way around.
Ubuntu works with far more “off the shelf printers and scanners in a plug-n-play sort of way” than Vista does.
If you have an older printer or scanner, and you plug it in to your new Vista box, it is quite likely Vista won’t recognise it and that the drivers that came on the CD with your printer or scanner are XP drivers that won’t work with Vista.
http://vistaincompatible.com/forums/YaBB.pl?board=hardware
“Non-tech people should *never* have to see command-line. ”
Nor should they have to use regedit, or know things like sysoc.inf to remove stuff like windows messenger from their desktops, but they need to.
No, installing MORE software to tweak their computers isn’t right either because it requires knowing basic troubleshooting which they shouldn’t have to know either.
Wait, to use Windows they DO need to know that.
If they don’t they pay service fees to folks that do.
No matter what the OS is there is always a need to get under the hood. To discredit an OS for providing flexibility is silly.
There’s a difference between providing flexibility and requiring specialized technical knowledge from non-technical users in order to accomplish something that *should* be simple.
As you pointed out, Windows has plenty of problems in that department too – but that doesn’t negate the areas where Ubuntu and other distos need improvement. Windows isn’t really a great metric to use in terms of usability – it doesn’t set the bar terribly high.
I wasn’t trying to imply that it doesn’t need to improve, only that there will always be value in having the capability available.
Sometimes it’s the easiest, and fastest way to accomplish something in any OS. That was the point I was trying to make. 😀
I don’t contest the value in having the capability available, just that non-technical users shouldn’t have to deal with the lower-level stuff if they don’t want to. Complex tools are a given when a user is performing complex tasks, but they shouldn’t be necessary for simple stuff.
I totally agree with you on the second point, though. The key is balancing the two goals IMHO and I think it is possible to accommodate both the casual and the hardcore users.
Hey, it’s just like Windows!
Considering the fact that I just fixed a network problem (packet drop) in my parent’s XP by using the netsh shell, I doubt that -any- OS is truly tech-free (by your standards)
Plus, what makes you think that using a very complicated GUI (regedit) is easier then using the command line?
– Gilboa
kubuntu is the best i think but this last release was the worst ever. There are still so many bugs it is not funny. I’m also amazed how they can take some tested and true app like konqueror and make it as buggy as it is. If you use it in another Linux it works fine. But I would still use it over MS.
“Ubuntu is getting better with every release but I feel it is not there yet. Some tasks still require going to the command-line. Non-tech people should *never* have to see command-line.”
To work for avg win and mac users this is true… thankfully, pretty much any hardware and system config tasks of avg users can be done with a gui in both Mandriva and Opensuse. Mandriva having the easier to use control center interface, and suse one being a little more powerful, though not as intuitive as the Mandriva one. I personally think the Mandy Control Center is better than either the Windows or Mac one. Ubuntu still has a long way to go there, though is doing better in a few areas, mainly style, community and PR.
I usually like the polishlinux.org stuff, but this is just some serious flamebait. IMHO the desktop battle of the upcoming years is going to once again be Apple and MS, but that wont even be a serious “battle” until apple hits 30% marketshare. Competition in the market is good for everyone, and I am looking forward to see what happens in the next few years.
As for the article, I have been hearing about the year of the linux desktop for almost a decade now. I’ll believe it when I see it.
“””As for the article, I have been hearing about the year of the linux desktop for almost a decade now. I’ll believe it when I see it.”””
I’ve been discussing this recently, my conclusion is that we’ll know xxxx (or no specific year) was the year of linux on the desktop years after the fact.
for example, maybe we’ll say in 2020 “yeah you remember, feature the evolution we saw in in 2008 really made the curve make a significant bend, and adoption started to rise dramitically”.
will it be the focus on polish (that ubuntu now has, but fedora isn’t much worse), will it be some sort of marketing drive, will it be the press, will it be this year or next year or will it ever be?
we’ll only know it after it happened
//”yeah you remember, feature the evolution we saw in in 2008 really made the curve make a significant bend, and adoption started to rise dramitically”.//
Uh … come again?
This “Year of the linux desktop” you speak of, i’ve got news for you, linux has been on the desktop for many years now.
Linux IS a serious threat to Windows thats why Microsoft is throwing every bit of FUD at it. Once Linux lifts off in the OEM market proper Apple will be chocking on it’s smoke.
Same here, and its name has been either Debian or SuSE/SUSE/openSUSE.
Never Ubuntu.
“”Apple and MS, but that wont even be a serious “battle”””
I belive that Apple were at a full 14% at there height, although its interesting that their current sights are not really on the large market share…its not even a battle they are fighting.
It the short term its either a missed opportunity for apple, or a shrewd business decision. Although nothing is going to be little is to be gained from playing safe.
“linux desktop for almost a decade now.”
Have you…good for you. Although I am not sure what you mean by this statement, The functional Desktop has been in place for several years, Superior Desktop alternatives have been available for two. OEM offering boxes in real numbers is getting there…what do you mean. Is GNU a real desktop alternative the answer has been yes for some time…or any of these times.
If you mean growth in market share GNU is the fastest growing OS currently, and this trend is set to continue.
Although I’m sure your talking about majority market share. Now thats an interesting predication. 5 years 10 years…never, and patents haven’t even started hotting up.
I was making a reference to the puff pieces that the tech media likes to put out on slow news days. They have been implying a mass exodus from windows to linux for almost a decade now. AFAIK linux is at ~1% of the desktop market atm.
For the more technically inclined, I would agree with you. It has been easy enough to work with that a geeky user could get going with it for at least a few years now. For the general population, I don’t agree with you. Gutsy comes damn close though. bulletproof X is going to help alot, I would give it one or two more versions though.
Something to keep in mind is that market reality and OS quality don’t always go hand in hand. BeOS and Amiga were both best in class in their respective time frames.
IMHO this will hit a peak. Where it will be remains to be seen.
I really doubt that. In my dream world, what I would love to see happen is linux take over in the business though, and have MS ditch windows and offer solutions on linux. OSX could have the home and creative markets, and due to its unix base we could have fantastic interop across the board. I doubt that would ever happen, but it would be cool.
“I was making a reference to the puff pieces that the tech media likes to put out on slow news days. They have been implying a mass exodus from windows to linux for almost a decade now. AFAIK linux is at ~1% of the desktop market atm. ”
Prove it! It wouldn’t surprise me but prove it!
“I would give it one or two more versions though.” A year!? thats a blink of an eye, and thats 4 versions of Linux 2 of X, maybe even some OpenOffice goodness etc etc. Oh and in a year Vista will be 2 years old
“BeOS and Amiga were both best in class in their respective time frames. ” And Amiga only worked on its own hardware, and BeOS is nowhere near as popular as GNU…..or as open.
“IMHO this will hit a peak.” …and even the most conservative estimates put its growth at 14% in one month….this one, and why should it *ever* hit its peak
“I really doubt that. In my dream world, what I would love to see happen is linux take over in the business though, and have MS ditch windows and offer solutions on linux. OSX could have the home and creative markets, and due to its unix base we could have fantastic interop across the board. I doubt that would ever happen”
lol, yes because focusing on separate markets has really worked well from a competition point of view…oh wait no it doesn’t people want the same at home as they do at work, thats without familiarity working well on the server for both Microsoft and GNU…Now what happened to Unix
Edited 2007-12-04 23:15
“”Competition in the market is good for everyone””
😉 It would be nice if some Vista Users remember that when they are defending the more obscene Monopolistic abuses.
…can I use that as a quote from you
You can definately use that as a quote from me. I have never defended “monopolistic” abuses, especially “obscene” ones.
<ot rant>
In any argument I have had with you about DRM, I have been arguing about the idea, not the implementation. I don’t have a problem with DRM, I do however have a problem with AACS, and refuse to buy HD-DVDs because of it. It is naive to say that there should be no protection at all on media under no circumstance. It is just as naive to go to the level the MPAA has with ACSS, since people will crack it no matter what they do. All they do is hurt their legitimate paying customers. Same deal with windows activation, people will always find a way to hack it. That doesnt mean MS should just let them do whatever they want, but they should keep that fact in mind when developing protection against it.
</ot rant>
“”You can definately use that as a quote from me. I have never defended “monopolistic” abuses, especially “obscene” ones.””
is this you on OOXML
“MS Office uses it by default. Since it has more market share then everything else put together, I would say that it has long since hit critical mass, and you really need to come up with good reasons NOT to use it, since it is what the rest of the world operates on.”
“Granted, it is a move in the right direction, and simple documents will be easy to parse by third partys.”
Not exactly chastising them is one.
.
Oh year and then you take a pot shot at apple for there *loose* DRM as opposed to Vista’s Orwellian DRM. Hows that spyware working out for you.
OOXML isnt an abuse of their monopoly, it is a switch in formats (and a move in the right direction). Adding hidden APIs to the operating system for use only in microsoft products, or pressuring hardware venders to not offer alternative operating systems pre-installed are anti-competitive.
In that post, I was responding to somebody saying that OOXML is only used by Office, ODF is used by everything else. What I was saying is that point is moot, since office alone is MORE then everything else put together.
I wasn’t taking potshots at apple for their DRM, I was pointing out that apple and vendor lock-in go together like peanut butter and chocolate. As someone who happily uses apples various product stacks, I can say that personally I don’t care. If I remember right, I was arguing that “lock-in” only sucks when you have to use bits that you don’t want to. By tightly coupling a stack, venders are free to provide integration that you wouldn’t otherwise see.
You want to use OSX? You are buying a computer from apple, that will be bundled with software covering most creative areas. Their music software is tightly integrated into their music store, and to their portable mp3 player. Their OS is integrated with their .mac online service. Do mac users care? Nope. By contrast, but just bundling WMP with windows, the EU goes up in flames. Imagine if you had to have a Zune to access files you bought in their music store.
Actually, really well. The more I use ASP.net, the more I love it. I am able to deliver more, faster then I would have ever been able to with J2EE. I still chuckle to myself whenever I do something in a line or two of code that would have taken hours to do in java.
“”OOXML isnt an abuse of their monopoly,””
I couldn’t stop laughing
“”I was pointing out that apple and vendor lock-in go together like peanut butter and chocolate””
What has that to do with crippling the OS/Hardware/Soft-resests/Hardware costs for everyone/Long Driver Development time/Spyware….oh nothing
“”Actually, really well””
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Forget-about-the-WGA-20-Windows-Vist…
Its a bit like cancer really, you don’t spot it till its too late.
“”Imagine if you had to have a Zune to access files you bought in their music store. “”
Imagine open-formats, where hardware is not tied to the music it plays.
Pffffft.
OOXML is riddled with references to Microsoft-proprietary APIs.
It is explicitly designed to be able to implemented fully only by Microsoft, and it is explicitly designed to be able to be run fully only on Windows platforms.
It is ABSOLUTELY an abuse of Microsoft’s near-monopoly.
If Microsoft truly believed (as their OOXML spin claims) that “competing formats are good, let the market decide” then why do they not provide native file open & save support for the ODF format within MS Office, so that their locked-in market is able to decide?
If it were such an issue, the said company would download and install the Sun ODF plugin to Microsoft Office, which would allow end users to save their files in ODF format.
But hey, you keep bashing Microsoft – you seem to have a lot of fun doing it.
“”Install the Sun ODF plugin to Microsoft Office, which would allow end users to save their files in ODF format. “”
I read…re-read that so many times, I can’t even be bothered telling you what is so wrong with that statement.
Although I’m sure that Microsoft could have will use you in there next anti-trust defense. At least having IE explorer on the Desktop made it faster(sic).
Failure to tell me what is wrong is admission on your part that I am correct.
Thank you for playing “who wants to be a moron”.
“”wrong is admission on your part that I am correct.””
I think the parts where I quote you and provide references to how very wrong you are is the bit I;m focusing on, but seriously I am continually shocked at how naive you are.
http://www.google.com/help/basics.html
Does this help
“Apple’s hardware sales are increasing at double digit rates”
Proof! Its vague enough. Over 2 years its about 40% I remember when they had 14% of the market.
Compared to Linux which hit 14% growth this month its a little poor.
Ok, you want to be an idiot:
ODF Microsoft Plugin:
http://javashoplm.sun.com/ECom/docs/Welcome.jsp?StoreId=8&PartDetai…
As for Linux – their growth is solely in the server market. It is also only a $3billion market, getting 14% growth is fairly easy to achieve.
ps. That includes consultancy, which is pretty difficult to tally given it could include mixed environments.
Edited 2007-12-05 01:09
Btw, every-time I hear someone like the previous poster complain about ‘being unfair’, I visualise this as the quintessential linux user:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSu2dzu–TE
That link is the “Sun ODF Plugin 1.1 for Microsoft Office ” … it is NOT a “ODF Microsoft Plugin” since it is not Microsoft software at all.
Note that it says:
… not for Office 2007. Did you ever wonder why?
BTW, you still haven’t got anywhere close to answering the original question, to whit:
Edited 2007-12-05 03:22
That Sun plugin isn’t written by Microsoft (der), and Microsoft have managed to this very day to have still kept some parts of the document-in-memory format and their file formats (and the translation between the two) as trade secrets. So the Sun plugin does not convert documents to and from MS Office memory to the full fidelity of the ODF specification. There will be data loss.
Further, Microsoft “accidentally” introduced a “bug” in Office 2007 so that even if a suitable plugin is installed and the user attempts to open a file with an extension that indicates it is formatted for that plugin to handle, MS Office 2007 still uses its own internal format filters to try to read in that document. So it turns out that you cannot install any plugin for reading ODF via the “file open” command on MS Office 2007, no matter what you do or how good your plugin is.
Since MS Office 2007 cannot be made to read in an ODF document via the “file open” in MS Office 2007, it turns out that you cannot set MS Office 2007 as the default format for ODF files and have them open properly if you double-click on an ODF document in the file manager. In turn, this means that you cannot handle ODF files properly using sharepoint. Of course, the MS-sponsored CleverAge ODF converter is also useless in this respect.
Funny about that. Such a shame that you can’t use those Sun plugins to their full potential.
<sarcasm>What a nasty and regrettable bug to have crept in to Office 2007 at the very last minute, hey! I’ll bet Microsoft programmers are really really nose-to-the-grindstone fixing this one, hey! Round-the-clock efforts at Redmond here, no doubt. The pressure to ship it must be enormous.</sarcasm>
Edited 2007-12-05 03:09
I can’t believe how easy it is to get modded up here. Think about what you wrote
How in the world is MS changing their own internal file format anti-competitive? How is opening the majority of it up to the public abuse? Sure, not all of it is open, but how is that worse then NONE of it being open?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OASIS_%28organization%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
“The OpenDocument standard was developed by a Technical Committee (TC) under the OASIS industry consortium. The ODF-TC has members from a diverse set of companies and individuals. … The standardization process involved the developers of many office suites or related document systems. The first official ODF-TC meeting to discuss the standard was December 16, 2002”
OK, that is the first point. There was a demand (mainly coming from governments) for an open, future-proof, consensus industry standard for electronic document storage. Microsoft was on this committee, from day 1. Even Microsoft agreed that existing obscure binary formats had to go, and be replaced by an XML-based document format. Here was the god-given opportunity for industry-wide interoperability on this.
Microsoft attended every meeting, and said not one word the whole time.
“; OASIS approved OpenDocument as an OASIS Standard on May 1, 2005. OASIS submitted the ODF specification to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) on November 16, 2005, under Publicly Available Specification (PAS) rules.”
Not fast-track rules, but PAS rules. Harder to get passed, and it took longer …
“After a six-month review period, on May 3, 2006 OpenDocument unanimously passed its six-month DIS ballot in JTC1, with broad participation, after which the OpenDocument specification was “approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard” under the name ISO/IEC 26300:2006.”
… but pass it did. Unanimously. No unanswered objections. Industry consensus reached.
Microsoft at this point simply said “but we are not going to do it”. They also claimed (at that time) “there is no demand for ODF”.
Then they produced their own bastard-child XML specification for a document format, requiring as many dependencies on Microsoft-only technologies as they could think of, and essentially mandating that any compliant application had to be written to run on a Windows platform and no other.
If there was no demand, why did Microsoft produce OOXML?
Microsoft changed their tune. They now claimed that “ODF was not designed to support the information in billions of legacy documents”.
If that was so, tell us exactly were the deficiency lies? And why did they not speak up before, at any time during the four-year “consensus” development process they attended?
OOXML is worse than none of it being open, because it is written to explicitly undermine the ISO-standard for electronic document formats by PRETENDING to be open, and PRETENDING to be an alternative.
Give it up Microsoft. Just go with the ODF standard that you yourself agreed to.
Ok, I understand where you are coming from now. A few points:
1) Being part of a committee doesn’t mean you must adopt the standard, or that the “official” standard will become adopted. You say MS didn’t speak up at all, I would like to see some links saying that, but even if it is true it isn’t exactly damning. These comittees tend to be very political, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other members blocked MS out of spite, or if MS tried to take it over, and failing that went their own route. A good example of that kind of nonsense is how IBM has been trying to steal java from SUN, and how SUN made some stupid design decisions just to spite them for it.
2) OOXML is not as closed as many people imply. Backwards compatibility is in binary format, but it would have been that way if MS had gone ODF. DRM is binary, but again, it would have been that way if MS had gone ODF. Graphics are binary, but honestly, MS has good reason to stick with their in house format here. SVG sucks, and there isn’t anybody even in the open source world who fully implements the spec. (including OO.o) Windows metafiles aren’t included, but the information is available in other places.
If it was impossible to implement text formatting, or tables, or formulas, you would have a point. But we are talking about a very few features that most people never even use.
By contrast, ODF is far less complete then OOXML. For example, ODF has 4 pages on spreadsheet formulas, which is nowhere near enough to build a spreadsheet app. Ironically, the 325 pages dealing with formulas (out of 1090 for spreadsheet processing) in the OOXML spec is one of the places one would have to go to get that information.
Technical merit of the two specs is kind of a side issue in this discussion, but I did want to point that out. OASIS has been on a misinformation campaign of their own. Neither OOXML or ODF are where they need to be to be good specs.
3) I do understand what you are saying, MS should have taken a leadership role in ODF instead of launching a competing format. MS should also release the .net library sources under a liscence mono can use. It should also publish specs for smb, active directory, and exchange. While we are at it, apple should stop suing bloggers with insider information, should provide ways for third parties to work with their DRM, and remove the TCP aspects of their hardware to allow their os to be installed wherever it can. Xgl shouldn’t have been written behind closed doors, forcing redhat to do AIGLX. CentOS shouldn’t repackage Redhats enterprise class distro and give it away for free, abiding by the letter, but not the spirit of the GPL.
As soon as you put money into the mix, corporations act like, well, corporations. There are a lot of politics involved in the ODF vs OOXML thing. MS should have played nice with OASIS, but ISO should never have passed ODF in its current state. If you look at the big picture, we are seeing MS actually making some gestures at interop for the first time ever. Sure, it is on their terms, but IMHO interop on their terms is better then no interop at all. MS adopting ODF would have been nice, but it doesn’t make sense for them to give control of their office formats away to what is essentially their competition. The real problem is that OOXML takes away the most compelling reason to go with an open office suite. Miguel DeIcaza put it really eloquently in his blog.
Anyways, all that to say that I was wrong. You do have a valid point. I don’t fully agree with it, but OOXML could be seen as anti-competitive if you look at it from a certain point of view. Regardless, that post was the single most concise and intelligent argument for ODF I have seen so far. Really, I have a very pessimistic set of expectations when it comes to dealing with any corporations, even ones I like (such as Google or Apple) It is great when they do something altruistic, but I would rather be pleasantly surprised then shocked and angry. OOXML could have been much worse then it is.
Alleluia! I must admit to being pleasantly surprised by your response here. Kudos to you for a reasoned discussion on this. It is great to hear for once, at long last, coming from the MS side.
Regarding your points:
No, they said not one word. Through four years of attending meetings, knowing full well that the entire objective was a consensus format for electronically-stored office documents, and for interoperability, they sat at the table as the largest “player” in Office application market for four years, noting everything that was said, and had not one word to say themselves.
Then they voted in favour of it becoming an international standard … then they said “but we aren’t going to do it” … claiming a lack of demand.
They changed their tune as soon as it became apparent that there was, in fact, demand. They changed it to “we are doing our own, because the standard one doesn’t “support legacy documents” (read … match our current lock-in methods).
Of course, if there really was a problem with ODF not supporting something in their formats … they could have just said so. But they didn’t … and they still haven’t. This is therefore just an unsupported ambit claim from MS.
But the really damning thing was that they changed their tune. Twice.
It makes references to things like ActiveX and VBA, as just two examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_for_Applications
Those things aren’t part of OOXML … but the platform on which an OOXML-compliant application must run must support those things. ActiveX and VBA are both highly-proprietary to Microsoft … both closely kept trade secrets. Implementation of things such as platform support for VBA and ActiveX in order to support the running of any application that is intended to implement OOXML is specifically excluded from coverage by Microsoft’s Open Specification promise:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx
OOXML is closed all right.
I think you are very soon about to be out-of-date on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula
OpenFormula is far longer than just 4 pages, and it is what all of the ODF applications actually use. It is backwards compatible – it does not actually violate the “4 pages” in ODF 1.0 standard, it just defines everything far more precisely. OpenFormula will be included in ODF version 1.2.
Nope. ODF has already got a far better spec for formulas, thankyou all the same. One that doesn’t, for example, mandate getting the date deliberately wrong, or insist that a weekend occurs on Saturday & Sunday in every place in the world.
**cough** **cough** **Splutter** Sure. SSSSSuuuuuuurrrrreeeeee.
Can you say “industry consensus”. Can you say “unanimous”?
Again … WTF?
Sorry …. but do understand that that code which Centos repackages is not written by RedHat. Centos and RedHat both are in full compliance with the letter and the spirit of the GPL.
No, we are not seeing anything of the kind. Interop is easily achieved by MS if they just properly implement ODF in MS Office. There are even test suites for compliance, so that MS could ensure that they had got it correct. Then … no-one would have to “steal” MS IP by reverse-engineering it, MS could offer their customers ISO standards compliance and interop, and no-one would have to sue anyone.
As long as MS continue down the path of attempting to maintain lock-in and monopoly control, then more and more it will become attractive to escape them.
Part of the whole reason that MS ever became popular in the first place was the appeal of “escaping” from the control of big business proprietary interest … escape form IBM and OS/2 was part of it, but escape from big UNIX and big VMS was alos part of it. Now, MS software is becoming the thing to escape from.
OK, fair enough. We can almost see each other’s POV from where we seem to be standing now. You just need to be a bit clearer-thinking on some points.
Edited 2007-12-05 10:11
Keep in mind that Microsoft does not directly battle Apple, but does so through the OEMs such as HP, IBM/Lenovo, Dell, Gateway, etc. So while Apple may have a good marketing campaign as they do now against Vista, they still have to contend with HP, in other words they go up against a double edge sword. As good as Apple can do, they will always be limited in their decision to lock the OS onto their hardware only. At the end of the day it is hard for Apple to compete with HP workstations, desktops, etc.. that are hundreds of dollars less. When Apple had their “own” CPU it was one thing, but to now use Intel PCs makes it much more difficult for them to justify the cost differential.
As for this Linux vs. Vista debate. I just am so tired of these and find these childish and silly. But allow me to point out something that needs to be said. There is a whole industry from applications to gaming that support the Windows OS, and as such will not be particularly interested in seeing Windows lose market share. As much as people would love to see software written for multiple OSs, it just will not happen as this obviously gives rise to development and support cost. No need to drag out the economic dynamics of this as I am sure most of you understand these basic principles. The same can also be said of hardware MFRs. Supporting multiple OSs on a limited basis is one thing, but to give general support across all channels is another.
To put it in a basic sense, HP may offer a limited line of workstations with Suse, put the costs of offering Suse alongside Windows on all desktops, including consumer is just not economical for them. Most importantly HP is a Microsoft reseller, as such they would stand to lose revenue from the sale of the OS. Dell has done this on a limited basis, but did so in a way as to knowingly target an audience that would buy these computers simply because it had Linux. Therefore they were able to price these as not very competitive offerings, but this would not translate across the board.
One last topic that really gets heated: DRM. The one aspect that people just simply look over is that the entertainment industry are the ones behind DRM, not Microsoft or Apple. When you put out a consumer product such as XP or Vista, you have a choice to support DRM and allow HD playback, or not to support DRM and have no HD. The media industry would still continue with DRM regardless of whether an OS would support it, simply because set top boxes would. The market share of media PCs is still so small as to force any changes on this. So when Microsoft enabled DRM, while this gave excellent ammo to Microsoft haters, they did so knowing that the vast majority of their customers would have demanded this, or more specifically would have demanded the ability to play HD movies and content. Keep in mind please that the majority of consumers, say what you want about them, do little about DRM but would know that their HD movie is not playable on their new laptop.
The problem for Linux is that not supporting DRM limits the ability of the OS to be widely accepted. Unless DRM can be done away with completely, which it may very well be soon
, everyone from consumers to the OEMs will not want to deal with Linux on a broad scale.
Ubuntu, more than any other distro has a good chance at building some user base, it is just that for years to come they will not be able to garner any decent market share simply because their are non-Microsoft forces that will equally be dead set against adopting this OS.
“”The one aspect that people just simply look over is that the entertainment industry are the ones behind DRM, not Microsoft or Apple.””
Its worth noting that Apple is larger thatn the entire Music industry worldwide
, I’m absolutely certain that the even the record industry wants Apple’s monopoly through there implementation to go away. As for Microsoft *giggle* I’m sure they got bullied by those nasty Music.Movie people. have an intimate working with the OS, or both aren’t looking to earn Billions for the arrangement.
“”Microsoft does not directly battle Apple,””
Playforsure (sorry) I mean Zune vs Apple.
“”Linux is that not supporting DRM limits the ability of the OS to be widely accepted.””
I think we will see a lot more of this argument, and I suspect we will see it with the added twist word choice…although I suspect that this is a complex argument. I also suspect that if the choice is Draconian DRM vs Faster more stable PC at the expense of various content suppliers it will be an interesting future. In reality it depends on whether the consumer can stomach DRM.
I’m on a linux box now but if you think sudo operating systesm are ready for people who dont like vista cause its too different from XP than you got a blown gasket. People are returning vista cause its too different from what they’re use to and you think ubuntu is closer to XP than vista?
Not to mention MAC is gaining share rapidly. Im sorry but this is just meant to be a 200 comment thread about nothing.
I can’t agree with his rating on Vista vs. Ubuntu software management. In Windows if the maker of an application releases a new version, you download it, install it, and you’re done. In Ubuntu, you hope the new release gets backported (it usually isn’t) or wait six months and upgrade your ENTIRE system to the next Ubuntu release in order to be able to use the new version of your application. Very, very clumsy in my opinion.
You are exactly right about that. In Ubuntu there is no well established alternative to using the Ubuntu repos to grab your software. There should be an easy to follow, even windows-esque way to download software from a random site, and have it install for just your user.
You can do that now. You can download a copy of Firefox, or Songbird or Wine or whatever, and install that into your Home folder. But it’s not a well defined normal way to do things in Ubuntu – nor is it easy to find an explanation about how or why that can be done, and seems to be actively discouraged.
Placing a simple Applications folder in the Home directory and having the devs acknowledge that they just can’t keep up with every piece of software that users might want to use, could go a long way to helping with this issue. Adding a way to install low privilege applications (and files for that matter, like music and photos) that everyone on the system can access would go even further (my other pet peeve with Ubuntu so far).
If nothing else, they should at least have an unsupported backports repository that automatically backports all Ubuntu Release +1 packages.
Klik might be a solution to the problems you mention. It runs fine on Kubuntu, dunno about Ubuntu but I guess by installing a proper FOSS stack (eg adding Qt and the KDElibs) you should be able to use it.
I agree with you. Not having a central repository of MS blessed apps has never been a problem with Windows. A central place that checks for app updates would be nice though.
What you’re proposing is exactly the way that Mac OS X handles applications. All the installed apps are in an Application folder, and the user never sees the rest of the filesystem.
[q]Adding a way to install low privilege applications (and files for that matter, like music and photos) that everyone on the system can access would go even further (my other pet peeve with Ubuntu so far).[q]
That is just a matter of permissions. It could be solved by having one group, users, that everyone belongs to, and have resources that need to be shared be under that’s group umbrella. This could be accomplished by symlinking a folder called “shared photos”, or something like that, in all of the user profiles. This problem really is just an account setup problem that can be solved easily.
Sooner or later OSs are going to have to ditch the current concept of a “filesystem with folders” and move to a system where folders are nothing but live queries that rely on metadata.
Can’t agree with you.
Download the .deb file and save it somewhere. Double-click on it in the file manager. (Equivalent to what you would do for Windows).
In Ubuntu … gdebi runs & manages the package installation. It has been this way since dapper drake.
Gdebi is a GUI installer for locally stored .deb files (ie, not packages that are in on-line repositories). If the .deb file has any uninstalled dependencies, gdebi will get them & install them from repositories in the same way that apt does.
Yeah that’s a way out of it, until it comes time to upgrade and then you’re royally screwed
Anyone that added anything not blessed by the Ubuntu gods to Feisty got a real good reaming when trying to upgrade to Gutsy. Now I know why they picked that name, you need balls bigger than Ben Hur to attempt such a thing!
In windows, you have to install the same piece of software through a ridiculously complex procedure again and again. On linux, you install it once, and its up-to-date forever.
In windows, you just have to hope the site or person who sold you the software you installed can be trusted – there is nobody checking up on that. On linux, every piece of software you install is checked on stability and security before it entered the software repository you use, and you can be sure of this fact because each and every package is signed by its packagers personal security key.
If the writer of the software you installed on windows decides to quit, you’re stuck with the current version – no bugs will ever be fixed, you will have a hard time getting your data out of the proprietary fileformats into some other app – and you will be forced to go through that pain because a newer version of windows might not run your application anymore. In linux, every person who wants to can improve and fix the application you use, and you’ll never have to be without it.
So you get easier-to-maintain, fully checked and certified software you can use forever for free on linux, and you have to maintain your own, expensive, potentially dangerous software with a limited warranty on Windows. One must be pretty stubborn (or ignorant) to stay on MS, don’t you think?
//One must be pretty stubborn (or ignorant) to stay on MS, don’t you think?//
Either that, or they need to use apps that are only written for Windows, and would rather not use emulation/virtualization.
>>In windows, you just have to hope the site or person who sold you the software you installed can be trusted – there is nobody checking up on that….If the writer of the software you installed on windows decides to quit, you’re stuck with the current version – no bugs will ever be fixed, you will have a hard time getting your data out of the proprietary fileformats into some other app – and you will be forced to go through that pain because a newer version of windows might not run your application anymore.
>>>
Not at all. I use most of the same applications on Windows as I do on Linux. To date I have not paid a single cent for any piece of software on my personal Windows machine. Openoffice, Pidgin, Gimp, etc, they’ll all fare equally well on Linux and Windows in the unforeseeable future. And all three of them are currently outdated on Ubuntu Gutsy with no obvious way to upgrade…..
And you know what the saddest thing is? They work better in Windows – Sad but true
I have been using Ubuntu since Warty as my primary desktop and one thing that has always stuck in my mind is why does the same software I use in Ubuntu and windows work better on windows? I’ve always blamed the writers of the software, but now I’m leaning to Linux being the problem. Firefox in particular, runs much better in Windows, why do you think that is?
Edited 2007-12-05 10:05
I don’t think so.
Actually, I’ve noticed the opposite. FireFox runs much better on my Ubuntu machine, as does it on my openSuse laptop, than it does on Windows.
The same here. I don’t install a lot of extensions so that may be why it works without issue for me, but it works well on Ubuntu without any crashes at all. In Vista it crashes randomly when I try to watch a quicktime video. it may be apples fault, who knows, but even if it didn’t crash on vista, it runs much slower than it does in Ubuntu, imo.
I do have to point out that not everything in the Ubuntu repos is guaranteed to work, especially with the Universe repo. There are a couple of errant apps that don’t work at all and are buggy and crash a lot, sometimes this is due to being older than current released packages or it may be due to conflicts in libs but it does happen and I wish they would pay more attention to apps in Universe. An example is amule which crashes every time you try to download the server list in gutsy. Getting the latest version from amule themselves fixes this but most users will not know to do this they will assume that the one in the repos works. There are other examples I won’t get into, but things like this do happen.
“why do you think that is?”
Your Ubuntu install is borked. Simple really.
>>In windows, you just have to hope the site or person who sold you the software you installed can be trusted – there is nobody checking up on that….If the writer of the software you installed on windows decides to quit, you’re stuck with the current version – no bugs will ever be fixed, you will have a hard time getting your data out of the proprietary fileformats into some other app – and you will be forced to go through that pain because a newer version of windows might not run your application anymore.
>>>
Not at all. I use most of the same applications on Windows as I do on Linux. To date I have not paid a single cent for any piece of software on my personal Windows machine. Openoffice, Pidgin, Gimp, etc, they’ll all fare equally well on Linux and Windows in the unforeseeable future. And all three of them are currently outdated on Ubuntu Gutsy with no obvious way to upgrade…..
I use most of the same applications on Windows as I do on Linux. To date I have not paid a single cent for any piece of software on my personal Windows machine. Openoffice, Pidgin, Gimp, etc, they’ll all fare equally well on Linux and Windows in the unforeseeable future. And all three of them are currently outdated on Ubuntu Gutsy with no obvious way to upgrade…..
Yes, I feel the same way. It may be that a solution will only come once Linux is more popular. Either the makers of the software will release packages for the most popular distros at the same time as the source and Windows packages are released (Which has already started happening somewhat). Or distros will have so many people ‘working’ for them that updated packages will show up almost immediately after the software source is released.
Edited 2007-12-04 22:09
your post should have come with a warning “FUD!!!”.
sorry UD Uncertainty and Doubt , but no Fear. I am sure others have jumped to shoot down certain myths and assumptions about Linux.
1.” On linux, you install it once, and its up-to-date forever. ”
No, it’s old until your distro updates/upgrades and even then it’s STILL old ! ( you have getdeb.net for Ubuntu – which can sometimes be a lifesaver, but not often )
2.” On linux, every piece of software you install is checked on stability and security before it entered the software repository you use”
How might I ask, by the package maintainer? right… because that’s what they do, they check the code for malicious intent… nah mate !
3. “no bugs will ever be fixed, you will have a hard time getting your data out of the proprietary fileformats into some other app”
Would you like to give examples. and if a linux coder quits, youre stuck with your data in propriety /non standard formats until someone else picks up the project, which doesn’t happen very often – take a look at sf.net , vaporware central. ( e.g take graphics software , if gimp suddenly stopped, you are at the mercy of the goodwill of programmers who would want to convert your gimp project to another app … come on!!!)
I think the worst we can do to potential users is to oversell Linux on things that it doesn’t necessarily do. Linux is a good thing, but it is not the pancea for all computing woes, it never will be… it can’t be ,can it?
Typically, software on Windows systems is far older (and updated less often) than software on Linux systems.
Even with Ubuntu, there is always “change the repositories to the newer release name, then apt-get update && apt-get upgrade”. That will keep any Ubuntu system far, far “fresher” than any Windows system out there.
The mechanism is as follows:
There are the approximate equivalent of 1.5 million full-time FOSS developers working right now on open source software. They can all read all of the code and see if it contains malicious intent … and they end up using that software themselves. Package maintainers (and many, many end users) verify that the source code that the developers are seeing and using produces the binaries that are placed into repositories … this is auditable.
Ergo … there is nothing malicious in any code you install from a FOSS repository. Guaranteed.
gimp does not use proprietary, closed formats. Edit your files in another raster graphics editor application if you want to … such as krita.
http://www.koffice.org/krita/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita
In any event … you have the source code for gimp … how can you be at anyone’s mercy? You could get it compiled for any platform you want … and away you go at its current capability level. There is just no way that any of your data is at anyone’s mercy … if you have the source code for the application that manipulates that data.
http://www.gimp.org/windows/
Edited 2007-12-04 23:52
There are alternative to using the built-in software repos. For one you can add a third party repo(there are countless of them) or you can fetch the .deb of the package that you want from a site like getdeb. Nonetheless I understand why there is no built in documentation to do this on Ubuntu. The third party repos and packages aren’t subject to the same security, stability, and compatibility checking that the official ones are.(You can even get “dependency hell” on testing release packages) As a result these should be used at your own risk. However this requires some linux savvy and Ubuntu is targeted at a new user base. The problem would arise for Ubuntu when testing software and outside packages begin to break. On windows, if you download and install software that turns out to be buggy, or filled with viruses/malware, or destroys your system, it is accepted that it’s your own fault for installing bad software and windows itself has nothing to do with it. However on Ubuntu, new adopters would be quick to blame Ubuntu for “breaking itself” and “crashing all the time”. The method Ubuntu uses is geared to by default only allow stable and safe software to be installed while at the same time it is flexible enough to allow more experienced users(the one who by that point may know how to resolve the messes they cause) to go out and experiment with the newest cutting edge stuff.
This is the one thing that annoys me the most with Ubuntu. It’s lame, annoying and down right bloody stupid. But I guess that’s the price you pay for free software.
Personally, I think Ubuntu has seen its glory, now I’ll await another with greater vision to come along and carry Linux a little further, though I’m getting older faster. I wonder if it will happen in my life time?
Ah dreams, they come just as cheap as Linux
You’ve never even used ubuntu, have you? If you want to upgrade one app you upgrade just that one app, not the entire system. You can do it either using synaptic (it takes a couple of muose clicks) or the command line (a 1-line instruction).
Get a clue.
The problem with the crappy approach is that with 150+ installed applications you have a terrible hard and boring job maintaining all these programs, and making sure they are up-to-date. Many of the applications are filled with security holes and you won’t know that unless you keep visiting these sites or near-daily basis.
And when you have to update the applications you have to double-click and click click click click for each package. That’ll soon annoy you.
Linux suffers from lack of decentralized installation frameworks and Windows (and OS X) suffers from lack of centralized package management.
My laptop should be fully supported in Linux. That’s what I would expect, at least. That’s why I’m not buying from NVidia or Lexmark. Still it failed to do things Vista had no problem with. I was not impressed.
Nvidia got best FREE drivers for Linux,BSD,Windows or you are forced to pay? ALL computers got proprietary BIOSes- why not ban every single one and bash computer manufacturers. Use abacus dude.
1:0 Vista won…
As bad as it may seem I still think that, for the next couple of years, the battle will be about Microsoft (Windows Vista) versus Microsoft (Windows XP).
Not that linux can’t take Windows XP on a technology point of view. I can’t understand why some people would prefer using XP instead of Linux, but that is probably just because I like Linux better.
I’m just saying that the non-tech folk will rather have their cozy and familiar windows XP system before jumping into the Linux Wagon for quite some time still… perhaps in 4 or 5 years we’ll see that change for real (and I mean linux having 10% of market share) but I don’t think we’re up to a battle yet in the mind-share camp.
Let’s just keep improving our software and our solutions, get better hardware support and one day we’ll get it… not in the next coulpe years, though.
Personally I like XP better because Tux Racer and Nibbles start to get old after playing them for the past 10+ years.
Serious gamers play on consoles nowadays.
“Serious gamers play on consoles nowadays.”
I could not disagree more with this statement, if anything the emergence of consoles (which have always been around, just not as hyped as they are now) has separated hardcore gamers from the casual. Take a look at the most recent Call of Duty 4 release, both on console and PC. There the most dedicated to the game have the PC version for a reason, because of the limitations that will always exist for consoles. Most of the servers are run by clans or organizations that are 110% PC only for good reasons. Consoles do not allow you to run customized mods, conversions, and maps. The people that will still be around playing this game in a few years will be the hardcore PC fans, the console players will have to move on to whatever latest greatest title exists.
Let us not forget that some classic games such as Blizzard’s Diablo 2 which is still played by millions is PC only, as are numerous other titles. If you go to any community run website for a game, everything is geared towards the PC only. Hereos of M&M, COD series, Battlefield series, etc..
Most game titles out there are far more rich in their PC offering. I know that COD4 in a short time online will offer tons of new features that you simply can not get for the console. Not too mention the fact that consoles do not allow you generally to run expansions.
And let us not forget that little program called Steam…which is PC only. In short consoles are and will not be in the near future an option for hardcore gamers period. Consoles are for younger people or more casual gamers who simply can move on to the next game more frequently, where as PC users can have a game’s life extended for years through customization. I don’t know if a console version of COD1 and UO came out, but I am 110% certain that the number of PC users far exceedes that of the console users simply because the game as it is now is NOTHING like when it was released due to customization that can only be done for the PC.
Edited 2007-12-05 20:05
The *only* genres where PC gaming still survives is First-Person Shooters and Real-Time Strategy – and even then, there are fewer PC exclusives in these genres as time goes by. Just look at charts for the console and PC versions of Call of Duty 4 – sales are much higher for the former than the latter. Also, don’t forget that you can now download content for consoles as well, so don’t expect much more features for the PC version of COD4.
Now, look at all the hot exclusives that are available on consoles but don’t have PC ports (or have PC ports that come out waaaay after console versions). And we’re not just talking Mario or Pokemon, here – the Xbox360 has attracted *huge* amounts of hardcore gamers with its excellent game catalog.
The sentence is misleading: while there are more kids playing on consoles, there is also a very large proportion of hardcore gamers. The PC stalwarts you mention are a relatively small number when compared to the total number of gamers out there.
Thank God for that. Steam is the worst concept ever designed by a game publisher. Meanwhile, Half-Life 2 was released on consoles and make a killing.
I seriously think your perception of the game industry is tainted by your own personal bias. Take it from an insider who pores over sales charts and talks with game publishers on a regular basis: the PC gaming industry has been dwarfed by the console industry for *years* now, and the trend isn’t likely to change anytime soon.
That’s not to say that there still aren’t any good or successful PC games (I can’t believe you failed to mention World of Warcraft), only that these are few and far between when you compare numbers with consoles – and that it’s very possible for a real hardcore gamer to have, say, Linux or Mac OSX on their PC and get their gaming fix on their Xbox360 or PS3 (well, as soon as the latter’s catalog grow a little…)
Yes, there are plenty of First Person Shooters on Consoles now, but they just aren’t fun, not even a little. You have the choice of playing them with a Gamepad, which means, either every enemy in the game will stand around like a drunk monkey and fails to hit you from 5 meters away or you have autoaiming and watch the game play itself or you could get an Wii, where the First Person Shooters look like Quake 1 Mods and you still require lot of autoaiming, which feels like watching someone else playing. Not to forget that with a joypad you walk around like a drunk sailor on vacation.
I don’t like Beat Em Ups except for Street Fighter 2 and i don’t like Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero and all those crappy typical console games.
Until i can play console games with Mouse and Keyboard i’m not tempted.
Poppycock. Playing First-Person Shooters on consoles is just a matter of getting used to the different control scheme. Halo *was* fun. The various Call of Duty *were* fun.
I see there’s quite a few mouse-and-keyboard snobs here. Cool, that’s your right. Still, that doesn’t change the central argument: “hardcore” gaming doesn’t requite a Windows PC.
Yeah, because those are the only types of games you have on consoles. *rolls eyes*
By the way, even Microsoft is privileging consoles over PC for gaming. They make more money with Xbox360 games (around 10% of retail price, I believe) than with Windows games (a big fat 0% of retail price). They can also control the quality of games better.
Your characterization that consoles are for casual gamers and PCs are for hardcore gamers hasn’t been valid for at least a good three years, the watershed moment being the release of Halo 2. How long did PC gamers have to wait until they could play this? Yeah, I thought so.
It’s not like I’ve met any PC gamer in real life or on the internet who was actually impressed with Halo1/2. It’s a fairly medicore shooter compared to the usual offerings on the PC. The hype around Halo is from the perspective of a PC gamer, well, curious and hard to understand. Plus, I thought the Halo games where XBox exclusives *shrug*. They can keep their medicore offerings as far as I care.
It also really depends on which kind of games you regard as “hardcore”. Games like Fallout, Torment or newer titles like Eschalon or Space Rangers have low production values but offers a gameplay experience you’ll be hard pressed to find on any console (not talking about quality here) while consoles seem to be more aimed at the casual player who likes games that look and sound good and are easy to get into.
Edited 2007-12-06 08:00
The fact that something is easy to get into doesn’t mean it’s not hardcore. Quake was easy to get into, and yet was hardcore (at the time).
Also, most Japanese RPGs are just as complicated as games like Torment or Fallout. What about Mass Effect? It’s an Xbox360 title, and yet it offers as much depth as those games used to.
I’m not saying this criticism was never true – it was, five years ago. Things have changed since then.
Halo 2 was more like an XBox exclusive. Who would want that thing, it couldn’t even compete with third market games that you get for a 10th of it’s price when it came out. You know, it is not like their aren’t more interesting PC exclusives, like Sam and Max, Jack Keane and Ankh and you would never find unusual games like Darwinia on any Console.
A big Budget doesn’t mean a good game… often the small budget games are much more interesting. It is like the Film industry… PI almost had no budget, while Episode 1 had a huge budget, yet PI is a gorgeous movie while Episode 1 is two hours of crappy boredom.
Halo 2 was okay, but you’re missing the point. The PC game market is increasingly an afterthought for game publishers.
Sam and Max? Can we talk about games that aren’t 14 years old? The industry has changed, my friend: today a game like Sam and Max would be coming out on consoles, and not on PCs.
That has absolutely *nothing* to do with what we’re talking about. Did I mention budget a *single* time? No, I didn’t. Also, your comparisons is faulty: big and small budgets compete on the same screens, be it theaters or TVs; PC and Console games, on the other hand, are different (if similar) medium altogether. You have big-budget console games and small-budget console games, and you have big-budget PC games and small-budget PC games.
Also, remember that one can just pick up a camera and make a movie, and it could be genius. You can make a good movie with very low production value for 20,000$, or you can have a 100 million$ super-production. For 3D games, the spread is much narrower: you don’t have games that cost much more than 20 million$, but it’s hard to make a commercial-quality 3D game for less than a million (you know, if you actually want to pay the people who make it – unless you think programmers, 3D artists and designers don’t deserve to eat).
Not only is this getting waaay off-topic, but your arguments have now lost the little relevance they had to what I originally said.
The fact still stands: in 2007, you can be as hardcore on a console as on a PC, therefore serious gamers don’t *need* Windows PCs. Even Microsoft has recognized this fact – hell, they’ve helped it come about with the Xbox360 library…
Uhhh, there are new Sam and Max Episodes (in 3d) for PC and strangely… they aren’t on consoles. In fact, i don’t know any recent Adventures on any console, but there are plenty on PC right now.
If by “Adventure” you mean “Point and click”, then you are right, however I think that’s a rather limiting definition of the genre. It is true that lines between various genres have been blurred over the last decade. Are
and
adventure games, for example? The umbrella term “Action/Adventure” is often used to differentiate console adventure games from the more traditional point-and-click fare that were big in the 80s and 90s. Also, I doubt most people would consider Adventure games to be “hardcore”…but then again, that depends on one’s definition.
However, you have to realize that “pure” adventure games are a very, very small market these days. That doesn’t mean they can’t be fun, on the contrary; it simply means that, in the context of this discussion, they can hardly be said to be a selling point for Windows-based gaming (especially since many modern point-and-click adventures are now Flash-based, and therefore highly portable).
There are flashbased adventures? Care to point some out to me? I didn’t know that and so far i thought every big flashgame suffers bad from size limitations (big flashfiles seem to get a lot of problems). Also i believe you think too much early nineties. When i talk about modern Adventures i talk about games like Jack Keane, big living 3D world, fluid animation… i don’t think you can do that in flash. I like adventures (and i don’t count Beyond good and Evil into Adventures, because it constantly forces me to mindless torture a Joypad with random key presses to beat up strange monsters) and the kind i like doesn’t seem to be available on consoles.
In general, when i have a look at console games there doesn’t seem to be the range of games available that a PC offers.
Hm, are you sure you played it? Because there’s no mindless button mashing in BG&E’s combat sequences. It’s pretty simple, as far as combat systems go. On the other hand, you have fetch quests, a detailed storyline, puzzles barring the way, are all hallmarks of the adventure genre.
You seem very focused on the actual control method (i.e. mouse and keyboard). These controllers were not *meant* for games (though they were used pretty early for such); console controllers are ergonomic and intuitive, and with the Wii can also be used for pointing/looking.
For *you*, but you don’t represent the typical gamer. I like adventure games, and I wish the genre was as popular as it was. I like diversity, and I personally would love to work on an adventure game instead of a platformer or beat’em up, but the fact is they’ve become increasingly marginalized as far as sales of units go – because they’re so tied to the PC, and the bulk of the money now goes to producing console games, with the occasional PC tie-in. That’s sad, because I do think it’s possible to have a good control schemes for such games on consoles, but that’s the market for you (or at least, the publisher’s perception of it).
In any case, I don’t particularly consider that adventure games are typically “hardcore”, so this is even getting even more off-topic.
Well, it is what is keeping me with pc gaming so i don’t think that is off topic. I don’t really think Hardcore gamer is a very well defined word and of course i can’t really say what is keeping other gamers with Windows.
To me a Hardcore gamer is someone who doesn’t want to play shallow games and does not fear some learning to handle a game… someone who likes complex games which have depth. That isn’t what comes to my mind when i think of consoles where even most RPGs are rather shallow and there isn’t even one single decent Simulation.
Of course Mouse and Keyboard wasn’t meant for playing games, but they work better than anything else on many types of games, especially everything that is first person. Joypads simply are to slow and unprecise for that, which is not a surprise since they never where meant for first person types of games as well.
If the PC games market was to die (and i do not believe that… here in germany the pc games market is still bigger than the console games market) i would simply stop playing, except if the console market would start to make the kind of games i like to play with the type of controls i want, but i don’t see any indication of that.
Also, i don’t quite understand this deep obsession of some alternative Operating System users with consoles… even if you would talk those “Hardcore Gamers” out of Windows and into using consoles… these aren’t the people who would have any use for a pc then. They wouldn’t switch to Mac or Linux, they simply wouldn’t own anything but their Console, which is already enough for their webbrowsing and email needs.
That’s a pretty good definition – but that would apply to many console gamers. You have some really hardcore Soul Calibur or Tekken players, who know all of the dozens of combos for *each* character (and beat me silly whenever I dare try to play against them).
I disagree about games like Final Fantasy or Grandia being shallow, although it’s true there aren’t that many simulations on consoles (except for sports simulators). Simulations blur the line between entertainment and education, and as such have been shunned by console game publishers, who focus on entertainment only.
Well, controllers *have* improved a lot, and FPS have adapted their gameplay for consoles, so they can be quite enjoyable on that medium as well. It’s mostly a matter of getting used to the new control method.
I never said the PC market was going to die, but the trend is for it to continue to lose ground to the console market. Last time I checked, console games outsold PC games worldwide by a ration of about 6:1, and the trend didn’t show any signs of reversing.
Well, you *can* plug USB mice and keyboards in all of the new consoles (Xbox360, PS3 and Wii), so it’s conceivable that you could have alternate mouse+keyboard controls for some games – if the demand makes it worthwhile. We’ll see…
You’re kidding, right? Browsing on a console – especially if you don’t have a HDTV – is definitely *not* as user-friendly as on a computer. Consoles are meant for gaming, not general purpose-stuff. How about Word Processing? How about spreadsheets, or photo editing, burning CD-ROMs? Why would I want to do any of these on a console? Hardcore gamers do more than just play games, you know.
I’ll pretend you didn’t just say that, as it completely undermines your whole argument.
Well, i know some console gamers and they don’t own an pc now. Granted, they are rather working class guys, but not a single one of them ever did a single spreadsheet, gives a shit about photo editing, cares about wordprocessors and get their cds copied from their “nerdy friends” (like me). They wouldn’t dream of spending money on a expansive Mac and think of Linux as “that nerd toy” (if they ever heard of Linux, which is an exception as well). So even if they *would* get an PC (which they don’t show any signs of interest in), they would get an discount Windows PC and likely not tinker with that to get Linux running.
I don’t know if they are very representative of the potential console buyer but every console gamer i met was like that and i haven’t seen an anything convincing me of the opposite. Webbrowsing might not be as convenient, but why would they care as long as they are able to watch people light up their farts on youtube.
No, they’re not.
In other words, you admit your opinion is tainted by sample bias. Fortunately, there are plenty of information available out there on the demographics of console game owners. I think you’ll find that the majority of them also own at least one computer, and that very few of them browse the Internet on their console.
No wonder you have such a low opinion of console games if that’s your only exposition to them…
A few data items: at the end of 2006, 74% of US houselholds had at least one computer, and 41% had a video game console. You can bet the overlap between the two is sizeable.
Really? I thought it was only the seriously disturbed that think consoles will replace PC gaming.
While Linux is -not- a gaming OS, my current (development) workstation has: (with 4x250GB/R5 I’ve got room to spare)
X2.
X3 beta. /* yey! */
UT2K4. (+modifications)
HL2. (Wine)
TF2. (Wine)
Quake3. (+modifications)
Doom3.
Quake4.
WolfET.
ETQW.
.. And UT3 on pre-order. (Waiting for the Linux binaries)
… Don’t know much about you, but I can enjoy 2008 just fine with UT3, ETQW and X3 (and without Crysis)
– Gilboa
Hey, your Windows counter parts are still playing ET, HL1/HL2 WOW which are the most popular online games, yet we in linux can play them.
Linux has the superior framework for gaming in regards to OS X and nvidia support linux, we have ports of ETQW and UT3 coming and dont need to pay extra. BTW Farcry in WINE run awesome.
Gaming is really the last obstacle left for me and totally switching to a distro. Now that the video driver situation has all but been put to bed, solid applications are all that’s left between me and the Penguin.
Here’s to hoping everyone gets off the DirectX bandwagon.
It may be a brave opinion but I predict that Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista are going to be the two operating systems that will take over the largest chunk of the desktop OS market during the next couple of years
And I predict that the above sentence is half right!
“””
And I predict that the above sentence is half right!
“””
Come on. Vista may be off to a slow start. But I think it will eventually gain significant market share. 😉
“”
Come on. Vista may be off to a slow start. But I think it will eventually gain significant market share. 😉
“”
Linux hater is this becuase it is installed as OEM. Its strange that its a year later and is still unpopular.
“””
“””
Certainly it has gotten a lackluster reception. But, as you say, OEM installation pretty much ensures its eventual market success… which is what my previous tongue-in-cheek post alluded to.
As to the “Linux Hater” part… and as I have said before… I live and breathe Linux and OSS. But I simply refuse to follow the Piper Song of Stallman into La La Land. Seems like we might have gotten past that point, agreeing to disagree, by now. Guess not.
Edited 2007-12-04 23:46
“”OEM installation pretty much ensures its eventual market success””
It seems on certain hardware that there is an advantage to OEM’s of having Linux as an alternative. Better profit margins…consistent product releases, and less lock-in for those. Its looking rosier all the time…although I hope the time of those anti-competitive emails has gone.
“Linux Hater”
Did I stutter.
“”Piper Song of Stallman””
I’m glad you brought up Stallman its like tradition, or somthing…Its a bit like that half bag of solidified cement in the shed, its always there.
Although I’m glad that you brought up Stallman; Eric; Linus; Alan and the boys who without there continued effort Linux GNU whatever you choose to call it wouldn’t, be where is is today, and Microsoft Users really would be at the will of inelastic inflation, and an even poorer copy of Vista.
Wow. I can’t find anything in that post to disagree with! 😉
I think this assessment is premature. Ubuntu, although the most integrated offering on Linux, remains ‘not quite done’. In that sense, any number of Linux distribution derivatives could become dominant in its place.
Moreover, as we can see from the EEPC, OLPC, Everex gPC, hardware vendors shipping popular hardware are actually trending towards custom solution rather than comprehensive offerings like Ubuntu (none of the above is even a derivative of Ubuntu).
]{
the EEPC just uses Xandros with a small custom gui, nothing special… OLPC is indeed special, but that Everex, it seems to use some KDE based distribution (judging the site screenshots), not sure it’s anything special…
gPC is based on Ubuntu.
http://www.thinkgos.com/technology.html
The Everex gPC uses gOS.
http://www.thinkgos.com/
gOS is a derivative of Ubuntu 7.10, but it uses Enlightenment 17 rather than GNOME as the desktop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOS_(Linux_distribution)
EeePC uses Xandros, which in turn is Debian-based. I believe that there is a “hack” somewhere to run Ubuntu on EeePC.
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewforum.php?id=15
Edited 2007-12-04 23:10
As a long time windows user. (i.e. since version 2). Linux will NOT take over the desktop. Maybe for geeks and nerds yes, but for *real* people. The only choices are Windows and Mac OSX.
personally speaking (as a geek) my next pc will be an Apple box. OSX does *just work*, it’s usuable, functional, visually pleasing and isn’t the pile of steaming sh*te that Vista is.
//it’s usuable, functional, visually pleasing//
That’s fine, so long as you capitulate to the “Overlords of Cupertino”, and use their OS the way they want you to.
Others of us would rather not be locked-in.
XP versus Vista – the only battle for the next couple of years.
I use Linux on the desktop and can access almost all my necessary Windows applications with a combonation of Wine and rdesktop (RDP client), with the Fontis seamless window patches.
But I agree, Linux is only ready for desktop use by at least an intermediate audience; not that is any trouble for us. I can use Linux as easily as Windows but I’m not a beginner.
There is still a need for the command line and in some cases config files. There are a vast range of GUI front-ends–that edit config files for you–but the more advanced things like configuring SSH, VPN, and some Wireless cards, require the command line and/or editing files.
Edited 2007-12-04 20:22
surely you’re kidding. Have you ever tried setting up an ssh or svn server on Windows. Or even tried to setup the ssh client to use keyauthentification? This is a breeze on almost any linux distribution I’ve ever encountered, you’re right sometimes you do have to use the cli, although most linux distribution set everything up so it works for the simple use case. But compared to windows where it doesn’t work half the time, you have to also edit obscure text files, and then it still does not work. BTW why do you use ssh when you don’t want to use the commandline?
If Linux wants to be taken seriously in the entrenched market, then they need to get WINE fully compatible with Windows XP, to the point where Novell and Red Hat will start certifying Windows applications for it. They can shirk Vista for a while. This lull in adoption will give them a chance to catch up.
But there’s really no reason why IT markets in developing nations would particularly want to choose Windows XP or Vista over say, Ubuntu. I guess that’s where the bribes come in.
Edited 2007-12-04 20:57
“If Linux wants to be taken seriously in the entrenched market, then they need to get WINE fully compatible with Windows XP, to the point where Novell and Red Hat will start certifying Windows applications for it. They can shirk Vista for a while. This lull in adoption will give them a chance to catch up. ”
Why wine, even Linux and Eric don’t agree with that assesment. Wine at best allows you to use legacy applications. It would be better to focus on recreating necessary *functionality* that a windows applications possibly have; open formats allowing none lock in…or you get the gist.
In fact in interests where binary *anything* has been an option these are the areas where GNU is at its weakest.
Because there are so many Windows applications that don’t have an OpenSource alternative (or an closed source alternative that runs on Linux). I’d love to completely ditch Windows and use Ubuntu exclusively but there are so many Apps that i use which require Windows or Mac.
I don’t believe Wine is going to resolve this issue though. Apart from really trivial Programs nothing i ever tried worked on Wine… not even those Apps from the AppDB Platinum list.
If there only at least was a parallels equivalent on Linux (Hardware accelerated 3d+good integration).
Didn’t the case lost by Microsoft against the European commission forced them to publish the specifications of Windows, thus easing the reverse engineering work of the developers of Wine ? Just wondering …
I believe that was just the server protocol APIs so other applications can interact easily with Windows Server. (eg. Samba)
“”Didn’t the case lost by Microsoft against the European commission forced them to publish the specifications of Windows, thus easing the reverse engineering work of the developers of Wine ? Just wondering …””
They won, price tag and patents.
I know one thing : I will never go vista crap. I’ve currently triple boot Ubuntu / XP / OSX. that’s fits all my needs. I just wish that pc’s got a better init system like EFI or linuxbios.
Perhaps a better title should be Open Formats+GPL+Open-source+Internet+Market Choice+embedded+content model+living room space vs Microsoft maybe is in for a chance.
Microsoft is fighting on a lot of fronts at the moment. There is an opportunity here, for the first time in years.
Microsoft lose…and lose again but simply are corrupt with large pockets, with a hell of a lot of influence. It may be under the banner of Ubuntu…but even at a casual glance the Distribution to take charge of whatever market share Linux has may well be fedora…or a yet to be realized Distribution.
vista will be sort of limping for the next couple of years, and then MS will come up with its replacement. the sooner the better.
This whole discussion about GNU/Linux ,if it’s ready or it’s not for desktop just shows how important is now Linux on Desktop.Let’s face it, it does matter in a desktop view point!
Why don’t you discuss if *BSD or SkyOS is ready for desktop? because they are outsiders!
I really liked your comment, but interestingly I would say *BSD and Solaris are starting to share the same desktop, unless you are in “port” denial. Its just about hardware support. Linux is the main player for obvious reasons.
This article assumes a world of desktop “ball and chain” boxes or devices. The real competitive power of free software is that it allows independent developers to use an OS as just another enabling base for apps to run where the distros can be totally custom and run from a USB key or multisession DVD. The independent free software developer can talk to everyone else.
Apparently the tacit position of the US government is protection of it’s domestic high-tech industry from competition. Devices like the eeePC and other hardware won’t see the American consumer without some sort of racketeering tariff-like tieup with component choke points intented to barr the independent developer.
Honda looks to have a similar situation with its American jet engine business. Without a tieup they would probably never get the requisite approvals needed to sell here. And the American politicians in control of the approval process are in position to run the racketeering schemes from 40,000 feet up.
But yeah Win-V is a hardware “power soak” for the sake of such to help Intel sell more chips at huge premiums while bleeding the board makers dry. Win-V is past the point of diminishing returns for most any mass-market non-tech user. And yeah it doesn’t work very well either.
What we bunch of nerds say, the only people who will determine the future OS landscape is the normal non-techy user, and as long as Windows is really the only option on most OEMs machines, as long as their kid’s Disney and Spongebob DVD games are Windows or OS X only, Linux will not make a serious dent.
I want it to, you want it to, but the fact of the matter is that us geeks don’t make these decisions. It’s the user.
The only way Linux will go main stream is:
1) It becomes more tailored to stupid, and ignorant people.
2) Novell, or Red Hat (or other well funded commercial company) start advertising to the main stream, get software development companies on board to write more software for linux
Or Google creates Google OS. With nearly the entire nation using google for search, and hearing the name Google OS, they would think, wow that must be cool. It actually might be the only hope to get dumb people away from “I have to use Microsoft Office” and if something is different, they don’t want to use it.
However, I don’t think Novell, Red Hat, or Google want linux to go mainstream, nor do they care if it does.
It actually pisses me off that since there are so many ignorant and stupid people out there, they end up being the people that decide what products are mainstream.
As an Ubuntu user, I wish this article would be accurate, but Windows is ingrained into too many homes for Ubuntu (or any other Linux distro) to pose a serious risk anytime soon, let alone in just 3 years. I can see where in 10 years that there could be a real parity among the desktop OS’s. But, for that to happen, you’d have to be able to run Windows applications seamlessly on top of Linux, or on top of Mac OS X for that matter. Until that is possible, then users will be unwilling to step out of their comfort zone to try anything different.
For instance, how many of you have friends or relatives that still call Internet Explorer “The Internet”? Also, if a friend calls you with a problem, and you ask them what version of Windows they use, they can’t answer that question. Sometimes I’ll get a answer like “Office 2000”!!
Microsoft won the war for the desktop a very long time ago, unfortunately. They produced something that users could use easily, and became comfortable with. They managed to get lucky by avoiding any serious risk by Apple, because people will refuse to buy a new computer just to try a different OS.
With where Linux stands, most people draw a blank when you say Linux. I’ve encouraged people to use Linux. I have given some Live CD’s to friends to try out. They are excited for the first week and tend to ask me about using it, but after that week, the excitement kinda goes away.
Now, does any of this rant of mine mean that MS Windows will always remain the dominant desktop force? No. Both Apple and some of the Linux distros really have a chance. And, as much as I dislike Apple and their vendor lock-in that they force, they have a better shot at easing their ways into the average Joe’s home than Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, or any other distro at the moment.
I totally agree with alot of your views.
I have seen how people deals with computers over 15 years. People, tend to fall in 2 categories: Normal people, and Smart People.
Normal People: Tend to resist to hate changes like switching OSs even with the same vendor. Those people ultimate computer would be better called an Appliance that has closer to zero change between versions.
Smart People: Tend to accept changes they are going to face – upto being so positive about the wildest OS/Application change. If they find IE they will use it, if firefox then they will use it, if given safari they will use it and they might talk about the power of konqueror with its multitab sessions and windows, and how they can rotate their workspace by kompez.
Now the ratio between those 2 categories possibly is close to 9:1
Thus I believe windows will remain the OS that would compete with each other (2000, xp, vista,…) and not the duel or platforms.
Has anybody noticed how most people posts got modded down, even they don’t fall in any of OSNews’s requirement for being modded down?
If OSNews staff could please investigate who did that, that would be nice, because I’ve been modding up comments that were at 0 or -1 even though they are not offensive or OT in any way, and it gets tyring
It’s almost as bad as a DOA, because it’s as if these people just want to discourage readers to come to OSNews.
Edited 2007-12-04 22:02
I was thinking the same thing. But I wonder; does someone who has been modded down a lot in the past eventually have comments that start at 0 or -1? If so, it would be nice if we could see the ‘history’ of an individual post to see if it really was modded down or just written by someone who has historically been a troll.
I think that bug has been fixed.
That was my 1st thought after read the headline.
worse than Vista, and there is no better desktop operating system than XP.
With XP everything just works. (Even DX10 video cards – they just work fine under DX9) Under Vista most older devices and programs do not work or do not work properly.
So this is unfair comparison, at least until there are XP in shops to buy.
Ubuntu is … just Linux. If I have to choose just between Ubuntu and Vista I would choose Ubuntu. But if I have to choose between XP, Vista and Ubuntu I would like to buy XP and install Ubuntu as second OS in dual boot as free bonus – as I did in my two PCs at home.
Ubuntu alone is not enough, especially if you are PC gamer. Wine is good, but not for Windows games. Simpler things like 40Tude Dialog (there is no better usenet reader in both Linux and Windows ecosystem IMHO) run under wine adequately already.
I guess you are forgetting about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Leopard kicks Vista’s ass and any Linux distribution too.
Linux is never going to be as big as Mac OS X or Windows XP/Vista on the Desktop because of the lack of commercial support of CRITICAL applications.
Edited 2007-12-04 22:43
“Linux is never going to be as big as Mac OS X or Windows XP/Vista on the Desktop because of the lack of commercial support of CRITICAL applications.”
Year its not like they have a browser and an ISO standard Office suite…hey! lol
Interestingly the trend is GNU is growing faster both.
Linux works on more hardware than either Vista or Mac.
Name some … there will be a Linux equivalent. The Linux equivalent will quite often be more functional and cheaper … but just not as well known through not being advertised.
We are also starting to see Linux versions of more and more commercial applications these days. Soon, if a company such as Adobe or AutoCAD has not ported an application, they will find themselves left behind.
The article is about Vista vs Ubuntu not Mac Leopard vs Ubuntu, lets not get carried away. It’s too early to predict the future of Linux, Linux is gaining market share. I use Ubuntu at work and Mac Leopard at home, but love the compiz effects on my Ubuntu box. Linux is not only for geeks but also for people who appreciate beauty. Linux is beauty with brains.
PClinuxOS is by far a better “just works” solution
and is the most popular distro on http://www.distrowatch.com
But Ububtu users do hype more…
“PClinuxOS is by far a better “just works” solution
and is the most popular distro on http://www.distrowatch.com
But Ububtu users do hype more…”
Much as I love a Distro smackdown. I hate to be the one to tell you Distrowatch figures are not an indication of popularity/Installs or anything else, they are simply page views. Although if you like PCLinuxOS perhaps you would be better advocating that. Although not here, because that would simply highlight the main advantage of Ubuntu which is its ability to attract Microsoft Users.
From the article…
While having an all Intel based laptop is a giant step in the right direction, buying a laptop from a maker that isn’t Linux friendly is not. Intel chips cover ninety percent of the laptop with the remain ten percent being proprietary to the manufacturer. (eg. BIOS and ACPI)
“While having an all Intel based laptop is a giant step in the right direction, buying a laptop from a maker that isn’t Linux friendly is not. Intel chips cover ninety percent of the laptop with the remain ten percent being proprietary to the manufacturer. (eg. BIOS and ACPI)”
Yes because the BIOS is the think that stops all those Linux stops everything being installed…oh and ACPI, Oh wait no its not.
I hope you have looked into the FSF reimplementing the BIOS, and have signed up…If its that important to you.
First off, how the hell did you get to 0.02 average cyclops? I find your comments recently have been a lot more reasonable, and less “zealotous” recently (I know how much you hate that word
)
But more on topic, from what I understand ACPI is a disaster of a spec. Basically, people implement it enough to get it working with windows, and stop there. Considering how well it works in linux, I can only imagine the massive amount of effort that OSS developers have put into working around bad implementations.
I wasn’t saying that the BIOS and ACPI were keeping the laptop from booting or keeping Linux from being installed. I was saying he shouldn’t have bought a Toshiba if he was seriously wanted to run Linux problem free. That’s great that he bought all Intel, but next time buy a Thinkpad or something else Linux friendly.
Basically I got tired of him whining about things not working without having a clue why they weren’t.
Linux BIOS, is that what you are referring to? Honestly I haven’t looked at it much at all. I’ve always looked at OpenBoot and EFI more. I’ve never had problems with the legacy BIOS aside from it being legacy.
One of the bravest forecasts seen yet. Not even Mr Shuttleworth can be accussed of such optimism. Seeing the systems side to side has made me appreciate the gnome interface. I have always wanted to like the Vista interface more but when I saw the screen by screen comparison you can clearly see that gnome’s interface is superior ( at the least for the screen shots displayed).
Criticising the ease of access of applications is a moot point, divide the time of installation by the time of intended usage and you find the initial effort becomes negligible. What should have been compared were the applications once they were installed for it to have been completely fair. And like some have already mentioned, you have to upgrade your operating system to upgrade your applications or do a MANUAL INSTALL. A manual install on windows I prefer much more than manual install on Ubuntu, even if it is packaged. What’s even funnier is that it is easier for me to get the latest openoffice for windows than it is for me to install the latest OO for Gutsy.
Desktop linux will grow more on handsets which are more OS agnostic than their desktop counterparts, in that regard will we see great growth for desktop linux. On the desktop, the greatest technological offerings (of which Gutsy cannot be accussed ) will take a long long long time to cause any mass migration , gradual or sudden.
I just did a depressing mathematical determination on how long it would take Linux to match Windows 92.4% desktop market share.
Assuming Linux continues to grow at just under 1/6 (.15) of a percent each year–as witnessed in the last two years, it would take 612 years and 3 months to reach 92.4% market share from it’s current 0.57%.
This is a very reasonable hypothesis because in the last 16 years Linux has only grown to 0.57% on the desktop.
“Assuming Linux continues to grow at just under 1/6 (.15) of a percent each year–as witnessed in the last two years, it would take 612 years and 3 months to reach 92.4% market share from it’s current 0.57%. ”
Please see my post here regarding those statistics.
http://www4.osnews.com/conversation/47533c31#438 which are a quarter of those on other statistic sites.
In addition your maths relies on linear growth which Linux does not have *even* on this site* where it has exponential growth. including a 14% rise in one month!? not 15% in a year simply you need to look at your maths
“It may be a brave opinion but I predict that Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista are going to be the two operating systems that will take over the largest chunk of the desktop OS market during the next couple of years.”
It must be nice to be so naive.
Simply put, Microsoft controls the distribution channels to the general public. Don’t believe me? Ok, walk into any major or minor store that sells Windows computers and tell me if you see any Linux computers for sale in a prime area of the store. How about back in a corner? What? You can’t find them there either?
You may point out white box stores but these don’t count. Hardly any “average” computer users go to these.
What about the internet? I’m laughing hard right now. Average people DO NOT buy computers with operating systems they have never used before, over the internet. Ok. maybe 1/10th of 1 percent do. But that isn’t going to get Linux 30% of the market.
The ONLY way that Linux is going to gain significant market share will be for LINUX stores (like Apple stores) to open. Then there will have to be Linux ads on TV showing how Linux is like Windows but better.
Before that happens though. I agree with people above that say that the need to use the command line for *** anything *** needs to be FIXED. Average people do NOT use the command line and will not learn it. PERIOD.
Due to that, Linux is not ready for prime time. Sorry but that is the basic facts.
I use Apple computers and have tried Linux several times. I’ve used over 50 PC operating systems since 1981 (that even close to all of them) so I’m very used to having to use command prompts and lots of different tricks to work with OSs. Linux is getting there. It isn’t there yet. Keep up the good work Linux developers.
My hope is that MS isn’t destroyed but ends up with less than 50% market share. That I think, would hurt Bill Gates feelings more than his company dying.
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=7754614
http://www.system76.com/
Well, it is a start anyway.
Also
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/ubuntu?c=us&cs=19&…
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7778908329.html
http://h50025.www5.hp.com/ENP5/Public/Content.aspx?contentID=22792&…
MS Grip is being broken little by litle.
Edited 2007-12-05 00:24
All of those are only available in the US – so basically you’re saying to me that the world revolves around the US.
Um you would be wrong maybe you should look closer, The dell ones are in several EU markets the RHEL are only in Australia, so Only 1 of them was US only.
Which is completely useless to me – who is located down in New Zealand.
Not that I’m interested in it, I have a Mac and happy with it. Just pointing out that if Linux wants to compete, it needs to be offered globally.
“if Linux wants to compete, it needs to be offered globally.”
You can’t download Linux globally?
’nuff said
Hang on, thats strange logic.
Someone claims that Microsoft has a monopoly due to OEM.
Another says that OEM’s are now offering Linux on the machines as an option.
Now you’re claiming that you don’t need to have it offered via OEM to make it a viable alternative?
Mate, you and your linux zealots need to have a group meeting to find out which hymn sheet you’re singing from, because you’re all over the show.
1. Everyone thinks that Microsoft is a monopoly.
2. There are Linux PCs available from limited OEMs. Better OEM support would help Linux tremendously, but it’s not the only thing that “would” make it a competitor since it IS a competitor.
3. I’ve always claimed that it can be a viable alternative.
4. People are individuals, just because they see more clearly than you do (yes I looked at your blog) doesn’t mean that we can’t all have our own opinions.
Opinion, that’s the word of the day. Look it up.
Looking at your blog it’s painfully obvious that you are a zealot. Things like:
“Still no third party software vendors bringing their software natively to Linux; off the back that people in the Linux world care more about ‘teh source’ than whether or not they can do something productive with the damn thing.”
“Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista will be released; will fix alot of the issues. The whining will continue but the volume will be greatly reduced.”
“Large once UNIX software companies will start pushing their software onto Mac OS X.”
“Linux vendors will claim that their distribution is *THE* Microsoft killer, but ignores the fact that there is no software and hardly any hardware support.”
The zealotry you published just puts the finishing touch on your credibility going into the crapper. Maybe you should google some of this stuff before you spray the nonsense.
Sorry to ruin your spin.
Have a nice day.
Edited 2007-12-05 02:31
Oh dear god, out trots the Trotsky like “Avant Garde” of the ‘enlightened individuals’ who will ‘lead the uneducated fools’ to ‘computer nirvana’.
You claim that Microsoft has a monopoly due to their OEM channels, claim that Microsoft is doomed because Linux is now available via OEM channels. I then give an example where it isn’t available world wide through OEM channels, and the response is, “you can install it yourself” – which ultimately destroys the first hypothesis that monopoly is due to OEM channel dominance.
According to the last person, the individual makes the choice, purchase a regular computer off the OEM then install the Linux distribution of their choice onto it.
Edited 2007-12-05 02:33
“You claim that Microsoft has a monopoly due to their OEM channels, claim that Microsoft is doomed because Linux is now available via OEM channels.”
I do? Show me. Where did I say Microsoft was doomed because Linux is available via OEMs? Are you high? The only uneducated fool here is you.
Are you stating “You” as if I was an audience? You must be high.
Thanks for playing.
Edited 2007-12-05 02:34
And yet you see fit to violate the terms and conditions regarding moderation for taking points off a post – simply because you disagree with it.
Thanks for playing ‘who wants to be the biggest hypocrit’.
Actually there is only one EU market. It’s called single market for a reason.
The Dell/Ubuntu machines are available in three localisations, which already cover a big portion of all native speakers in the EU.
All of those are only available in the US – so basically you’re saying to me that the world revolves around the US.
Funny that you said that. Actually, that is exactly the same thing that I can say about you and other Mac apologists and your obsession with Apple products. While I do understand that Apple sells reasonably well in the US and to some extent in Europe and in places like Australia/New Zealand, it is nearly unknown everywhere else where the average income is much lower.
I’ve already met several Linux users in person – at work and otherwise – but I can count in the fingers of one hand – and have some fingers left! – how many people that I know that have worked with Macs, let alone that can afford them. Heck, I have friends working on IT for years that have never seen one Apple computer in their entire lives and frown upon the suggestion of using it when given the chance. When I go to the mall and drool over a MBP on the shelf, my friends/relatives look at me as if I were a weirdo. Apple just priced itself out of these markets! (And if the number of complaints in forums like this is anything to go by, it is not unreasonable to presume that it is not exactly affordable over there either…)
Here in Brazil we have what we call telecentres (translated literally for the lack of a better word to describe them) where city’s employees and volunteers teach people that cannot afford their own computer the basic concepts of computing and guess what: most of them use either a local version of Linux or Windows. Sometime ago, the fast food chain McDonald’s deployed cyber-cafes in most of its shops with funny looking computers running a highly customized WindowMaker, with a few dockapps and Firefox running almost fullscreen. When you buy a lunch, you get a ticket that allows you to use it for a few minutes. They’re good looking, easy and fun to use.
Nowadays you can even walk into some shops and purchase a laptop running Linux from vendors like Acer, Amazon or Itautec (the latter is a brazilian company).
Except for LAN Houses, where gaming is the main concern, most other computer-oriented deployments intended to be used in public places are running really low-spec/refurbished systems and since they’re mostly used like Internet appliances anyway, Linux suit them just fine.
You can sing praises to Apple all that you want but it doesn’t change the fact that despite the hurdles to get a proper number of Linux users out there, one can safely expect that counting all the Linux users in the 3rd world together will probably result twice as much the number of Apple users in the whole world.
And keep in mind that these kids in Africa getting acquainted with a computer for the first time in their life running Linux and the current universities’ undergrads that are gradually getting familiar with these technologies as well will probably help to change the landscape within the next decade. If I were you, I wouldn’t dismiss Linux and OSS in general so fast.
http://lxer.com/module/db/index.php?dbn=14
“”agree with people above that say that the need to use the command line for *** anything *** “”
When!? give! I’ll reply to *each* of your examples while I’m fixing the registry. And fixing a machine with a virus checker or doing one of those clean installs. *giggle*
Edited 2007-12-05 00:20
“”Average people DO NOT buy computers with operating systems they have never used before, over the internet””
I re-read this bit, what interesting is *Average* people did not buy anything over the internet two years ago.
“”Linux ads on TV”” you mean like those by IBM. Although I’ve got to say Linux awareness grows every year.
“”basic facts””
lol
This battle is really on now more then ever. There are a number of Linux Distro’s that are user friendly (Ubuntu & PCLOS among them) and people are starting to notice. The gOS machines at Walmart sold out in 2 weeks. Dell is Offering Ubuntu in a number of markets, and Lenovo and HP are offering Suse and RHEL in some smaller markets on desktops and laptops. Apple has been moving up in the world the last little while.
Windows will hold the dominant share for a while yet but really this is a market where 5 – 10% is huge and that is not unreasonable for Linux to hit, seeing as the desktop numbers are all over the board when measured sometimes its 1ish some times its 6ish. But that is more the difference between market share and user base.
Either way Linux and Mac are moving up and Windows will be around for a long time so its good news all around.
How much of a share would Ubuntu have if it DID NOT send out free cd’s? Imagine if all the disto’s had free cd’s, who would the leader be then?
Ubuntu will never be a challenger with the restrictive community attitude, especially it’s continuing use of calling those who don’t understand it ‘IDIOTS’. Abusing your potential customers wont get you anyware.
Remember, Ubuntu is a religion , don’t knock it or the anti-window trolls, Linux sook’s and the bucket heads will attack without mercy and without common sense.
What? You mean that going to the Ubuntist Temple is a bad thing and that I shouldn’t burn at the stake every Windows user I see and drink their blood? *rolleyes*
C’mon, gimme a break. We’re talking about two Operating Systems remember? It’s not a religion, it’s a bunch of people who do their best to help other people. They’re not a professional support service; Canonical would be more than happy to give you professional support by charging a fee.
So please cut them some slack, they’re just trying to help.
BTW, I’m modding you up above zero.
Stake-burning and blood-drinking is simply not enough.
For a start, this infection is contagious. You should never drink the un-sterilised blood of a Windows enthusiast, better still, carry around a stick of enriched uranium to irradiate any Windows-related biomatter before contact.
Secondly, if you think that burning is enough to kill these monsters, then you are responsible for letting many of them walk-free. They should be approached at midnight on a full mood, stabbed in the heart with a silver stake, then their severed head should be mounted on the walls of the Ubuntist temple for all to see.
*laughing* You just made my day, dude.
I wasn’t referring to Canonical as the community, i meant the unreasonable and immature ppl that fill the various forums with anti-windows-user hate.
Thanks but no need for that, it is what it is!
Me neither. I meant that, even with its problems, the community does its best to help and you shouldn’t expect a top-notch, professional, support service from them. That’s what Canonical is there for. Sorry if it was unclear or I didn’t get your point, english isn’t my native tongue and sometimes I screw up.
I’m afraid that you will find those all over the internet, no matter if it’s an Ubuntu, Windows or Mac forum. I’ve read jewels like “I had to recompile the Linux kernel just to change my screen resolution to 1024×768” even here at OSNews. I’ll never understand how something cold and dull as a bunch of code can heat up discussions so much
But it’s wrong. If I don’t agree I just say it, as I actually did. Modding down without valid reasons is just plain childish.
The prediction would be true if the following software was released on Linux
Adobe software suite, Quicken, Open Office loses a lot of weight, and to top it off iTunes Linux release
and couple of major game companies released more Linux games like HL2.
I’ll be cheering on and using Linux, but people are stuck in these applications
But really, who cares? Just use your freaking computer and be happy with it. If your not happy with your computer experience then that sucks.
I remember the “get the facts” campaign from Microsoft. They released a study that showed that Linux is much more expensive than Windows (TCO). The secret thing was, the Linux was running on a expensive IBM mainframe and Windows was running on a PC. Of course Linux had higher TCO then.
Imho, the only people that bash linux are the ones that tried it years ago before user friendly distros such as Ubunt & OpenSUSE came out with user-friendly package management (Synaptic, Yum) & GUI’s for *most* configuration tasks.
Vista is just not up to it, Ive been running vista since the summer and will be un-installing it soon, it just hasn’t lived up to its (microsoft generated
) hype… Driver support is bad etc still one year on from the RTM version. I was going to hold out for SP1 but ive decided to go back to XP as SP3 will be released soon… I wish now i’d never switched from XP in the first place… If it aint broke dont fix it..!
I went to vista with a level head even after hearing all the bad press it got, I realise now its been a bad choice and MS will seriously need to re-think its strategy and possibly release Windows 7 earlier than it thought.
The reviewer doesn’t take into account device compatibility, common software compatibility, or typical desktop tasks like importing music and photos, playing video, encoding audio/video, or playing games. Personally I beleive that both OSX and Linux are better options than Vista for a subset of computer users. Unfortunately certain software and/or hardware is only compatible with Windows. If you’re willing to make the change and learn something new Linux or OSX will probably work for you but if you don’t want to learn something new or need some specialty hardware or software then you’re probably stuck with Windows.
Unsupported, or misleading, accusation.
I could equally well, for example, say that certain software is only compatible with *nix.
For example:
http://us3.samba.org/samba/
http://xinehq.de/index.php/about
http://www.winehq.org/
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
I know you will scream in protest … but the underlying point still stands.
Certainly Linux will run on far, far more hardware than either Vista or MacOSX can, and Linux has drivers for more peripherals than Vista or MacOSX does.
Finally, if you are going to claim that in order to run either Vista or MacOSX properly then you must chose the right hardware and software that is compatible with it … then it has been shown that exactly the same can be said of Linux.
Sorry, but Vista is also “something new” that also requires you to be “willing to make the change and learn”.
Edited 2007-12-05 22:54
Call me crazy, but why should we (as Linux users) want Linux to be the leading desktop platform?
Leading server platform and/or development platform, sure… but desktop?
Targeting Joe-six-pack carries a hefty price tags – one that I (for one) don’t really like to pay.
Has anyone ever studied the effect that over-automation/dumbed-down UI interfaces/over-GUI-zation have on security? stability? remote management? power users?
Do we really want to be a second Windows where you don’t really need to open the console, but you have laughable console capabilities and you may spend days removing broken registry entries that were generated by a broken Norton A/V installation?
Again, I’m not saying that this is -bad-, I am saying the that Windows became Windows partially because it targeted Joe-sixpack and (far-worse!) Joe-six-pack your friendly IT manager.
Having said all that, thankfully, in the OSS world I can mix and match my own distro – leaving the offending of the Joe-six-pack parts out.
– Gilboa
Ditto. I couldn’t have said it any better. I also don’t want Linux to become the leading platform to avoid the sort of thing that you described. It just needs to reach critical mass so that hardware manufacturers start to take it seriously and start to develop drivers for their products for Linux (releasing the specs so that all the OSS ecosystem including BSD, Haiku, Syllable and others could benefit would be even better!), ISVs can see the benefit in actually bringing their applications to the platform and the people that adopted it not because they hate Windows or want to look 1337 to their friends but actually appreciate its strengths can keep using it and improving it without having to make it Windows-ish or OSX-ish in order to cater to the lowest common denominator.
You deserved that mod point up, mate!
Edited 2007-12-05 18:55
Another comparison of Vista/Ubuntu, telling about the same things, having same conclusions. Great. I saw ~10 like this just the last month.
I recently did a one year GNU/Linux experiment. Linux Failed in the application dept. Although there are thousands of applications in the repository’s most are redundant. People talk about how good the GIMP is and I agree it is a good free program, but it does not equal Photoshop, as a semi-pro photographer it is vital that I have Photoshop. With the explosion of digital photography and new printing methods many companies have software used to create books, calendars and post cards that can then be uploaded right to the lab. None of this is available for Linux.
I have young children that also use a computer sadly there are a good amount of plugins that are not available for Linux systems that would enable them to play educational games.
On a more personal level. There are programs that will let me link my IPod however I have found that it is problematic at best, and causes my IPod to freeze regularly a problem that I have not found when syncing my IPod on a Windows XP based machine. As a competitive
cyclist I use a Polar Heart rate monitor, once again no software in Linux is available.
Linux is a stable platform and I had my system running for months at a time with no problems, however without having any applications that fit my needs I look forward to service pack 3 of Windows XP.
You listed some failings of Adobe Photoshop and your Polar Heart rate monitor, not of Linux.
Linux is perfectly capable of running both of those applications if the vendors were prepared to port them. Despite the fact that many applications are not ported, and are not cross-platform, many applications for Windows (where the application vendor has not bothered to make a cross-platform application) can nevertheless be run flawlessly under Wine.
There are some vendors who go out of their way to make sure that you cannot run their software on any platform other than Windows. Adobe is one such company (for some of its applications), Autodesk is another, and of course Microsoft is the most famous.
Don’t buy their products would be the sensible recommendation. They are deliberately trying to limit YOUR choice of computing platform, after all.
Would you buy a CD that could only be played on Sony equipment? Would you buy a TV that could only receive one broadcaster’s signal? Would you buy a telephone handset that could make calls only to other phones on the Bell network?
No? You wouldn’t? Then why put up with this sort of nonsense on your PC?
Well not all of Autodesk’s is strictly window. Eventhough the software wasn’t originally developed by them Maya runs fine on all three OS’s MacOSX, Linux and windows. Because of this that particular software has almost become the defacto 3D package in the industry, it is installed everywhere and therefore used everywhere. name a movie that you saw and chances are the Maya was used on it. Adobe is a rare one, they support tow platforms but the big effects houses in the industry usually have a linux based pipeline, yet adobe which is used heavily in production is still not available for Linux. Rhythm and Hues (Chronicles of Narnia, etc) for example extended gimp to support common cinema color spaces and formats, yet the gimp team decided not use the additions added by the the film industry and instead now have the mess that they do. The work was already half done, why they didn;t use it is beyond me. Adobe can be replaced, its just a matter of producing a better alternative and if its open the better. The issue is that right now we don;t have a better alternative and Adobe is entrenched deep into all sorts of multimedia production pipeline. Apparently the rumor is that Adobe is looking to cjhange their gui and toolkit with the next release, due to Apple’s soon to be deprecation of carbon and if Adobe were to pick or write a toolkit that was trully cross-platform then we all win.
Computer desktop is consumer product, and, as such, it needs marketing to spread around. No matter how good it is or will be in the future, it is not going anywhere away from Linux fans circles without marketing. I don’t remember seeing a single advertisment about Ubuntu.
This is the biggest flamewar I have ever seen.
It’s got everything in it: vista vs ubuntu, leopard vs ubuntu, console gaming vs pc gaming, odf vs ooxml, xp vs vista OH GOD MAKE IT STOP!
I lol’d.