Desktop Linux Falters as Linux Use Shrinks for First Time
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From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. cheers, Chris Maunder
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From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. cheers, Chris Maunder
Chris Maunder wrote: From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. Actually, the article is a bit confuse: what shrank? Linux usage or Linux adoption? Any numbers? I could not find any reference on Google about this... I see dead pixels Yes, even I am blogging now!
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From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. cheers, Chris Maunder
Gee I wonder why???? Could it be 'cuz it's, ohh, so *easy* to use and configure??? Hmmmm... Linux === Geeks Paradise. I can hear Bill laffing: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
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From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. cheers, Chris Maunder
About time. Don't get me wrong, i've used several Linux distros, and liked most of them. Ditched Windows for quite a while, 'till i got hired to write software for it. But the hype has outpaced reality for quite a while now, and the idea that a consistant, useable, desktop environment would suddenly emerge from the bubbing ooze of competing projects is quite ridiculous. Consider the amount of time and effort it took Apple to make a "desktop os" out of BSD - and Apple is a towering giant of a company in the area of UI design (and "laying down the law" to 3rd-party developers...). There's no-one even close in the Linux camp, and little reason for there to be. Maybe
Ave Shog9, CP-addicti te salutant! - K(arl), The Soapbox
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From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. cheers, Chris Maunder
The Linux fundamentalists should realise that it's not enough just to attack Microsoft all the time. They need to start giving users what they want. Miguel De Icaza seems to grasp this and its him and his ilk that will best help more widespread adoption.
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The Linux fundamentalists should realise that it's not enough just to attack Microsoft all the time. They need to start giving users what they want. Miguel De Icaza seems to grasp this and its him and his ilk that will best help more widespread adoption.
OmegaSupreme wrote: Miguel De Icaza seems to grasp this Doubtful. What it seems that Miguel wants to do is just yet another carbon copy of MS products. Not there's anything wrong with that, but it's hardly "innovative". And it's dubious if simply copying Microsoft is *really* what customers want. It would seem to me that to determine that you'd actually have to *ask* customers first. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
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Chris Maunder wrote: From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. Actually, the article is a bit confuse: what shrank? Linux usage or Linux adoption? Any numbers? I could not find any reference on Google about this... I see dead pixels Yes, even I am blogging now!
I think this is the same thing... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/09/linux_sgcowen/[^]
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From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. cheers, Chris Maunder
The only suprise about that is that so many people believed all the hype for so long. Too bad though - the industry would be better served in general if MS had some real competition.
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Gee I wonder why???? Could it be 'cuz it's, ohh, so *easy* to use and configure??? Hmmmm... Linux === Geeks Paradise. I can hear Bill laffing: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: HA HA HA :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
ahz wrote: so *easy* to use and configure? And great documentation and overall consistency... Maybe it's just me :| David
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The only suprise about that is that so many people believed all the hype for so long. Too bad though - the industry would be better served in general if MS had some real competition.
Stan Shannon wrote: the industry would be better served in general if MS had some real competition. You gotta give Google some time... David
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About time. Don't get me wrong, i've used several Linux distros, and liked most of them. Ditched Windows for quite a while, 'till i got hired to write software for it. But the hype has outpaced reality for quite a while now, and the idea that a consistant, useable, desktop environment would suddenly emerge from the bubbing ooze of competing projects is quite ridiculous. Consider the amount of time and effort it took Apple to make a "desktop os" out of BSD - and Apple is a towering giant of a company in the area of UI design (and "laying down the law" to 3rd-party developers...). There's no-one even close in the Linux camp, and little reason for there to be. Maybe
Ave Shog9, CP-addicti te salutant! - K(arl), The Soapbox
A-Fucking-Men. The comment above this mentions that Linux is a "Geeks Paradise" - well I'm pretty sure I qualify as a geek, and I most certainly do NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, consider it a paradise. I consider it a half assed solution that, more often then not, makes me waste *my* time on futzing around with it in all sorts of stupid ways, from configuring, to fighting with installers/updaters, to dealing with piss-poor development tools/libs that were not very good 15-20 years ago (make anyone? - TAB as a critical character???, automake/autoconf/autopuke and friends) and are *certainly* not noteworthy at this point in time. Linux will never take off as whole until it becomes a *platform* and until it's software "ecosystem" is something other than the largely GPL mono-culture that it is today. Linux suffers from: - Absolutely no baseline *platform*. This includes a standard directory tree, standard set of libs, from basic kernel level and IO stuff all the way to UI libs. As a developer that is considering targetting linux you are forced into making all sorts of low level decisions that have ramifications on your users because of library dependencies. You have no guarantee that the libs you need will be on the version of linux (or whatver the hell it's supposed to be called) that your user may be using. - No standard set of configuration tools nor any standard whatsoever of config storage. - No baseline installation techniques. They vary ALL over the place, each distro seems to relish either completely re-inventing the installer (i.e YAST, RPM, et al) or making subtle changes to "standard" packages that make it difficult to install on another distro. - No baseline UI that either a developer can count on, and thus either work with or against(in the case of some custom UI app). - Development tools that lag behind pro tools found on other platforms. For example, what does it imply if your baseline compiler generates binaries that are three times the size of what most Win32 compilers (specifically MS compilers from VC6 onwards) can generate? ALL your binaries are fat. And compiler optimizing performance isn't too great either. What does that imply when this is spread across the whole damn system? - A software ecosystem that is largely a "mono-culture". On both the Win32 and Mac OSX platforms there's a wide variety of different developers (and, gasp!, even companies!), from commercial developers/companies, shareware developers, freeware developer, to GPL/OSS developers. This is not (o
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The only suprise about that is that so many people believed all the hype for so long. Too bad though - the industry would be better served in general if MS had some real competition.
Agreed, that's why I hope Apple does well. As far as I can see they are the only real competition that Microsoft has. Furthermore they at least do something more than simply carbon-copy whatever new project that Microsoft comes up with. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
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A-Fucking-Men. The comment above this mentions that Linux is a "Geeks Paradise" - well I'm pretty sure I qualify as a geek, and I most certainly do NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, consider it a paradise. I consider it a half assed solution that, more often then not, makes me waste *my* time on futzing around with it in all sorts of stupid ways, from configuring, to fighting with installers/updaters, to dealing with piss-poor development tools/libs that were not very good 15-20 years ago (make anyone? - TAB as a critical character???, automake/autoconf/autopuke and friends) and are *certainly* not noteworthy at this point in time. Linux will never take off as whole until it becomes a *platform* and until it's software "ecosystem" is something other than the largely GPL mono-culture that it is today. Linux suffers from: - Absolutely no baseline *platform*. This includes a standard directory tree, standard set of libs, from basic kernel level and IO stuff all the way to UI libs. As a developer that is considering targetting linux you are forced into making all sorts of low level decisions that have ramifications on your users because of library dependencies. You have no guarantee that the libs you need will be on the version of linux (or whatver the hell it's supposed to be called) that your user may be using. - No standard set of configuration tools nor any standard whatsoever of config storage. - No baseline installation techniques. They vary ALL over the place, each distro seems to relish either completely re-inventing the installer (i.e YAST, RPM, et al) or making subtle changes to "standard" packages that make it difficult to install on another distro. - No baseline UI that either a developer can count on, and thus either work with or against(in the case of some custom UI app). - Development tools that lag behind pro tools found on other platforms. For example, what does it imply if your baseline compiler generates binaries that are three times the size of what most Win32 compilers (specifically MS compilers from VC6 onwards) can generate? ALL your binaries are fat. And compiler optimizing performance isn't too great either. What does that imply when this is spread across the whole damn system? - A software ecosystem that is largely a "mono-culture". On both the Win32 and Mac OSX platforms there's a wide variety of different developers (and, gasp!, even companies!), from commercial developers/companies, shareware developers, freeware developer, to GPL/OSS developers. This is not (o
Top post !! You said it well. Please accept my covetted 5 of the day. :-) Regardz Colin J Davies The most LinkedIn CPian (that I know of anyhow) :-)
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From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. cheers, Chris Maunder
The average computer user today is not the same as it was 20-30 years ago. Today's computer user wants a toaster, even if they have to pay for it. Plug it in, drop the bread (which they will happily buy) into the slot and activate the switch. Pop, out comes the toast. They do not want to have to assemble the free toaster using nonexistent or difficult to find/understand instructions, find out they have the wrong plug for their country's power system, find that plug, take the toaster apart, remove the old plug and install the new plug, put it back together, find out that the algorithm for toasting the bread is not quite right for their taste, download the source code for the bread toasting algorithm, find the specific piece of code dealing with toastiness, fix it, recompile the code and reinstall. Oops, did you want to toast two pieces of bread at the same time? Well, you installed the single-toasting kernel by mistake. Time to find the appropriate line in the source code to enable dual-toasting, recompile and reinstall. Unfortunately, there's only a couple of kinds of free* bread out there that will run on the toaster, so options for toast are limited. * that's free as in beer. -Sean ---- Shag a Lizard
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Top post !! You said it well. Please accept my covetted 5 of the day. :-) Regardz Colin J Davies The most LinkedIn CPian (that I know of anyhow) :-)
Thanks! I tried to hold back, but I feel a real bad case of anti-unix/anti-X coming on.... ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
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A-Fucking-Men. The comment above this mentions that Linux is a "Geeks Paradise" - well I'm pretty sure I qualify as a geek, and I most certainly do NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, consider it a paradise. I consider it a half assed solution that, more often then not, makes me waste *my* time on futzing around with it in all sorts of stupid ways, from configuring, to fighting with installers/updaters, to dealing with piss-poor development tools/libs that were not very good 15-20 years ago (make anyone? - TAB as a critical character???, automake/autoconf/autopuke and friends) and are *certainly* not noteworthy at this point in time. Linux will never take off as whole until it becomes a *platform* and until it's software "ecosystem" is something other than the largely GPL mono-culture that it is today. Linux suffers from: - Absolutely no baseline *platform*. This includes a standard directory tree, standard set of libs, from basic kernel level and IO stuff all the way to UI libs. As a developer that is considering targetting linux you are forced into making all sorts of low level decisions that have ramifications on your users because of library dependencies. You have no guarantee that the libs you need will be on the version of linux (or whatver the hell it's supposed to be called) that your user may be using. - No standard set of configuration tools nor any standard whatsoever of config storage. - No baseline installation techniques. They vary ALL over the place, each distro seems to relish either completely re-inventing the installer (i.e YAST, RPM, et al) or making subtle changes to "standard" packages that make it difficult to install on another distro. - No baseline UI that either a developer can count on, and thus either work with or against(in the case of some custom UI app). - Development tools that lag behind pro tools found on other platforms. For example, what does it imply if your baseline compiler generates binaries that are three times the size of what most Win32 compilers (specifically MS compilers from VC6 onwards) can generate? ALL your binaries are fat. And compiler optimizing performance isn't too great either. What does that imply when this is spread across the whole damn system? - A software ecosystem that is largely a "mono-culture". On both the Win32 and Mac OSX platforms there's a wide variety of different developers (and, gasp!, even companies!), from commercial developers/companies, shareware developers, freeware developer, to GPL/OSS developers. This is not (o
gcc actually produces exe's comparable to microsoft compilors. The defect in Linux development tools is that they don't have anything that as user-friendly as Visual Studio. Also, bear in mind Linux is constantly improving KDE is supieror to the Windows desktop in many ways. They have a huge advantage, a new version of KDE is released every 6 months, compared to Windows XP which is now five years old. Also, there is some effort to make Linux distributions compatible and improve sw installation.
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gcc actually produces exe's comparable to microsoft compilors. The defect in Linux development tools is that they don't have anything that as user-friendly as Visual Studio. Also, bear in mind Linux is constantly improving KDE is supieror to the Windows desktop in many ways. They have a huge advantage, a new version of KDE is released every 6 months, compared to Windows XP which is now five years old. Also, there is some effort to make Linux distributions compatible and improve sw installation.
I read a comparison around a year or so ago that compared GCC, VC6/7/7.1, BCB and DMC(Digital Mars Compiler) with a number of different tests. The results had GCC doing the worst for most tests, especially in anything performance related. I think the article was in Dr Dobbs. Granted this was on Win32, but I don't see why the linux version of GCC(from what I remember of the tests it was all commandline stuff that I'm pretty sure would have run on linux as well) would be that much different. I know for a fact, on both OSX and linux, that the binaries that GCC produces for C++ code (that also makes uses of templates and STL) is at least 3 times the size from what VC6 produces (this is with debug turned off and running strip over the binary). This is the same code base with the exception being the platform specific classes, and there's *less* code being compiled for linux/OSX than for Win32. This was using GCC 3.4.x and GCC 3.3.x. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
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I read a comparison around a year or so ago that compared GCC, VC6/7/7.1, BCB and DMC(Digital Mars Compiler) with a number of different tests. The results had GCC doing the worst for most tests, especially in anything performance related. I think the article was in Dr Dobbs. Granted this was on Win32, but I don't see why the linux version of GCC(from what I remember of the tests it was all commandline stuff that I'm pretty sure would have run on linux as well) would be that much different. I know for a fact, on both OSX and linux, that the binaries that GCC produces for C++ code (that also makes uses of templates and STL) is at least 3 times the size from what VC6 produces (this is with debug turned off and running strip over the binary). This is the same code base with the exception being the platform specific classes, and there's *less* code being compiled for linux/OSX than for Win32. This was using GCC 3.4.x and GCC 3.3.x. ¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF!
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From the WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 13[^]. Scroll down about a quarter of a page. cheers, Chris Maunder
Actually it's a shrink in the growth rate Chris, I've seen this elsewhere. Personally it would be nice to use Linux as a desktop home OS but just not pratical, you spend too much time on the OS and too little carrying out tasks. Elaine :rose: The tigress is here :-D