Linux on Desktop
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But it does. I am using nvidia drivers which are distributed binary only by nvidia, and I am loving it. Orhun Birsoy
Yeah, I'm using an nVidia driver also. There's nothing like playing Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004 on Linux. <3
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Also, try to keep in mind that Linux's goal isn't to dominate the desktop market, rather it's goal is to provide an alternative. Different OS's provide different functionality. People use Windows because it's relatively easy to learn and use. People use Linux because they like the freedom of being able to "get under the hood" of their operating system. This is probably the main reason Linux will never take over the desktop market.
I agree that it's a major reason because most users don't want to be bothered. Hey, I used to use Red Hat Linux to run a firewall router before the hardware units became affordable. Now, granted, the Linux option, is more flexible and, if done right, more secure, however, it was a bear to set up. And, even as a professional with a decade and a half of *NIX experience, I needed help to get it set up. And if "experts" like me find it this hard, what about the average user? The appeal Windows or Mac OS/X is that they are "easy" to use. Even if it is only an illusion in some case. But, this perception is reality for many people. Now, in my opinion, the main reason for the failure of OS/2, Linux, Mac OSes, etc. to take over from Windows is this, lack of software. Now, if all you need to do is surf the web, read email and run a basic office suite, any OS will do. But, even in the Mac market which has thousands of apps, it's size is still a fraction of the Windows software market. Most of us Windows users have some app whether it's serious or a game that we can't or won't do without and will only run on Windows. And, even with things like Wine for Linux and Virtual PC for the Mac, Windows has the best backward compatibility for applications and still will even with Vista as it moves away from so called "Legacy" applications. I did not mention Boot Camp above because it is not that type of solution. Boot Camp is the Mac equivalent of System Commander, Linux's boot loader (I forget the name), or OS/2 boot manager. All of these products will let you run multiple OSes but only one at a time. Also, these solutions, as well as Virtual PC still require a Windows license. VMWare allows multiple OSes to run simultaneously but again still requires a Windows license. What is needed is something like Wine that works with 98% of "modern" Windows applications, including games. That way we can run our Windows-only apps without a Windows license. But, even this is not enough. The Linux or Mac worlds need to get to more of a parity with Windows as far as software availability. I think the "ulitmate Wine" would allow us to run our WinApps and, possibly, allow Linux or Mac OS to get the "critical mass" where native code versions would arrive. In other words, this "ulitmate Wine" would simply be a transition tool to wean us Windows users over to another OS. Andrew C. Eisenberg Nashville, TN, USA
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Disclaimer: I make my living programming on Linux these days - don't think I am a Linux hater. Now, having said that, I ran into a reasonably written and unbiased[^] article that explores reasons for Linux failure to take over the desktop market.
My programming blahblahblah blog. If you ever find anything useful here, please let me know to remove it.
Before reading the article: We don't use Linux because we don't use Windows either. We are using Winamp, Developer Studio, Nero. Windows is a tool, as much as the PC and the desk and the chair. Linux: the first question is "which?" and you can gather answers for ages. As usual, "it depends", but that decision is not our job. That and because of the Linux marketing department (a.k.a. Slashdot)
Some of us walk the memory lane, others plummet into a rabbit hole
Tree in C# || Fold With Us! || sighist -
Disclaimer: I make my living programming on Linux these days - don't think I am a Linux hater. Now, having said that, I ran into a reasonably written and unbiased[^] article that explores reasons for Linux failure to take over the desktop market.
My programming blahblahblah blog. If you ever find anything useful here, please let me know to remove it.
After reading: Interesting, thanks for the link. btw. it mentions An old rule of the desktop is that support costs go up by the square of the number of different products you have to support. does anone know a reference?
Some of us walk the memory lane, others plummet into a rabbit hole
Tree in C# || Fold With Us! || sighist -
Yeah, I'm using an nVidia driver also. There's nothing like playing Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004 on Linux. <3
Sure, you *can* use proprietary drivers on Linux, but within the Linux community as a whole there is a lot of antipathy to the idea. Strictly speaking the kernel license doesn't accept loading of non-free loadable modules (e.g. drivers) into the kernel. Of course there is nothing stopping you from doing this, but Linux folks frown on this. The problem is, as pointed out by an earlier poster, that the above is an untenable position, and the Linux folks are being driven by dogma rather than common sense. It does not seem to be possible to write a *good* open source driver for bleeding edge video chipsets, because the chips churn quickly and the chip programming APIs are proprietary and not publicly available. My Ubuntu box has an ancient NVidia GeForce2 video card, and even for that old card the proprietary 'nvidia' driver is far better in several ways than the mediocre OSS 'nv' driver. And to get the "good" non-free driver I had to reconfigure the package manager to download the driver and then manually edit my /etc/xorg.conf to install it. For the critical non-technical majority this is a non-starter. Speaking of Ubuntu, currently the most popular of the non-commercial distros, it does not support Java out of the box, due again to OSS dogma. Don't get me wrong, I think Ubuntu is great, and Ubuntu and Canonical have done great things for GNU/Linux. But not supporting Java out of the box is just silly. For me, a professional programmer, this is merely irritating and inconvenient, as I know how to modify the 'apt' repository config so the package manager can find Java and install it, or I know how to download and properly install Java manually from Sun's site. But again, for the critical non-technical majority this is a non-starter. My stock broker's trading platform is a Java app. If I was non-technical I wouldn't know how to install Java, I wouldn't be able to run one of my daily-use sw packages, and I would therefore reject Ubuntu as a desktop platform. Modern GNU/Linux distros are very good. If you have not tried GNU/Linux for a few years (or ever) then you would probably be shocked at how good it is. IMO it is 80% there. But 80% is simply not good enough for the mass market, and that final 20% will require a culture change. The lack of broad Linux community support for proprietary hardware drivers, proprietary codecs, proprietary DRM (e.g. Apple's FairPlay), and proprietary software (e.g. Java VM) is a deal breaker for most people. Cheers, Doug
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I am also a part time Linux advocate, but as a user I have long believed that the reasons for its failure to take over any portion of the desktop market are self evident. (The instant I have to manually edit monitor timings in a .conf file just to get 1024x768 working, it's game over for the consumer market.)
with respect, didn't anyone ever told you that there's a xorgconfig binary for this purpose?
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I agree that it's a major reason because most users don't want to be bothered. Hey, I used to use Red Hat Linux to run a firewall router before the hardware units became affordable. Now, granted, the Linux option, is more flexible and, if done right, more secure, however, it was a bear to set up. And, even as a professional with a decade and a half of *NIX experience, I needed help to get it set up. And if "experts" like me find it this hard, what about the average user? The appeal Windows or Mac OS/X is that they are "easy" to use. Even if it is only an illusion in some case. But, this perception is reality for many people. Now, in my opinion, the main reason for the failure of OS/2, Linux, Mac OSes, etc. to take over from Windows is this, lack of software. Now, if all you need to do is surf the web, read email and run a basic office suite, any OS will do. But, even in the Mac market which has thousands of apps, it's size is still a fraction of the Windows software market. Most of us Windows users have some app whether it's serious or a game that we can't or won't do without and will only run on Windows. And, even with things like Wine for Linux and Virtual PC for the Mac, Windows has the best backward compatibility for applications and still will even with Vista as it moves away from so called "Legacy" applications. I did not mention Boot Camp above because it is not that type of solution. Boot Camp is the Mac equivalent of System Commander, Linux's boot loader (I forget the name), or OS/2 boot manager. All of these products will let you run multiple OSes but only one at a time. Also, these solutions, as well as Virtual PC still require a Windows license. VMWare allows multiple OSes to run simultaneously but again still requires a Windows license. What is needed is something like Wine that works with 98% of "modern" Windows applications, including games. That way we can run our Windows-only apps without a Windows license. But, even this is not enough. The Linux or Mac worlds need to get to more of a parity with Windows as far as software availability. I think the "ulitmate Wine" would allow us to run our WinApps and, possibly, allow Linux or Mac OS to get the "critical mass" where native code versions would arrive. In other words, this "ulitmate Wine" would simply be a transition tool to wean us Windows users over to another OS. Andrew C. Eisenberg Nashville, TN, USA
Microsoft made their Virtual Server 2005 software free. Haven't tried it out yet, but it is probably similar to using VMWare. As an alternative there is Bochs which works quite well although can be sluggish on slower machines. As to Linux being usable, it is quite so; however, one other big problem is where does the common user go to get support for Linux? There aren't that many local people (that are prepared to make a house call) that know Linux very well. The same goes for the MAC. Alternatively, there is usually a raft of people that know a good deal about Windows.
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Disclaimer: I make my living programming on Linux these days - don't think I am a Linux hater. Now, having said that, I ran into a reasonably written and unbiased[^] article that explores reasons for Linux failure to take over the desktop market.
My programming blahblahblah blog. If you ever find anything useful here, please let me know to remove it.
I don't think a Linux Desktop is for mass market. In fact, Linux isn't. It's a system from developers for developers. Have you ever tried to administrate a Linuxbox through a http-proxy tunnel? Well, no problems. Even X Forwarding works fine. Try this with a Windows System. You surely will fail. What about different Desktop Environments? Windows only have one. And nativly even without multiple virtual desktops. On Linux there's KDE, Gnome, XFCE, enlightenment, fluxbox, iceWM, ... What about a shell focusing usability? Have you ever used zsh or bash with bash_complition package? The upcoming PowerShell offers great functionality, no doubt. But usability wasn't really a design goal, was it? And, overall, I _trust_ OSS. Install a desktop firewall on your Windows machine, especially one of those old ones, and have a look. There are so many components wanting to connect to some servers in the inet without a need. Sorry, that's not what i want.
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Disclaimer: I make my living programming on Linux these days - don't think I am a Linux hater. Now, having said that, I ran into a reasonably written and unbiased[^] article that explores reasons for Linux failure to take over the desktop market.
My programming blahblahblah blog. If you ever find anything useful here, please let me know to remove it.
The problem with binary drivers it's because of the open source nature of Linux it's internal API's are very dynamic, supporting binary drivers might reduce it's change possibilities thus reducing flexibility (Linux main advantage in my view), see driver doomsday.
If you want to try a free "Linux" distro with proprietary driver support (out of the box) you can try Freespire when it's released (you can also see Groklaw for an OSS view on Freespire). -
The problem with binary drivers it's because of the open source nature of Linux it's internal API's are very dynamic, supporting binary drivers might reduce it's change possibilities thus reducing flexibility (Linux main advantage in my view), see driver doomsday.
If you want to try a free "Linux" distro with proprietary driver support (out of the box) you can try Freespire when it's released (you can also see Groklaw for an OSS view on Freespire).I have installed over 30 Linux desktops for people that got a computer from a friend, family member,or Goodwill. Most of them 500 mhz to 1.2 ghz computers with 128 meg of RAM. All they did was play default games, surf the web and type up some letters. They are not hardcore Linux people. They are just basic computer users. That is where Linux could hit the mass market. Instead of being tied to computer pros, how about basic users that never touch the operating system and if it works they don't make changes. Out of the 33 or so computers only 2 have bought and installed XP. The rest just work away on thier boxes with no trouble. Marc P