Six Tech Companies Join Up to Boost Linux

[jonnyboyC]

I'm pretty excited about this personally, i'm mostly windows, but i've had my laptop dual boot vista and ubuntu, and linux no longer has the vertical learning curve it used it, it's a hike but it's possible

but I'd be interested to see where this would go, possible super showdown, windows apple and linux duking it out

 

[kencolestud69]

I have tried many different distros of linux for the last 12 years. But the best user friendly distribution flavor has to be Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid Lynx. I recently installed Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and am loving it. Wubi let's you install Ubuntu while still being in Windows operating system. All my devices worked out of the first install. Even my cheap wireless USB network adapter. Also, Wine worked for me(by installing in Synaptic Package Manager), so now I can play counter strike source on Linux. The most amazing thing that they corrected was the ease of use with dependency files. If you open up an application for instance, the default music player, it will notify and take you the dependent file you need to install in the package manager. At this moment I have fewer reasons to switch into my Windows 7 partition. Seriously though, if you haven't checked out Linux or kept it installed because you were lazy or bothered with all the bash commands this version is for you.

 

[kencolestud69]

I almost forgot to mention that OpenArena is a cool game also in the Synaptic Package Manager.

 

[boogalooelectric]

As I have said recently I have just started using linux, ubuntu 10.4 as a matter of fact and am considering trying Mint on another machine.

In response to some of these people bashing linux or decrying the labor involved in installing some applications, let me endeavor to relate how I see this, I am not a programmer, I am merely a home user who is self taught in the realm on building and repairing PC's and I am sick and tired or getting gouged by Microsoft every few years.

Linux to me as it is now is like a car with a manual transmission in that not everyone could or should use it, it takes some manual input, you have to know the nuances of your system and you have to learn how to use it. As opposed to a automatic transmission (windows) where you just sin down put it in gear and go, and in many cases lose performance and even some control because you are allowing the car to decide for you what gear to use and how much much torque is utilized.

In Linux you have to have some understanding and patience similar to a manual transmission, like the first time you get stopped at a red light or a stop sign going uphill, it takes time, patience and trial and error in some cases to figure out how to get the car rolling without stalling it. Linux is similar, you have to learn and sometimes the hard way at that.

Therefore it appeals to me, I like driving a manual transmission, I like having control of my car, similarly I like having to know a little bit about the OS I am using. At this stage of my life I am tired of just point and click no brain systems, I want to use my brain, I like to think.

Just my two cents.

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

[citation][nom]shin0bi272[/nom]I think what ta152h is saying is from a standpoint of a home user (which he most likely is) linux isnt very user friendly after you install it. When you install it you put in the cd you burned on your windows box and boot the machine and it installs and looks kinda like windows 3.1 (the buttons and window boxes etc) but it installs and only asks you a few cryptic questions about where you want to install and what you want to put on the machine. All's fine so far. Then you reboot and get into linux and log in on your first linux desktop (again as a home user not going to dive right in on the CLI) and its pretty. Thats it... youre done... open firefox and surf the web because doing anything other than what's installed on the box is a lesson in zen-like patience. I tried to install a driver for my nvidia video card in my box and they wanted me to compile the friggin driver myself. Not really a problem but the thing is I didnt install the compiler with the rest of the OS because I didnt think I was going to do any programming on it. [/citation]
When did this happen? As far back as I can remember using Ubuntu they've offered to install the proprietary drivers for you, and that was back in 2006. Ubuntu was kind of strange in that they didn't provide compiling tools out-of-the-box but that was 1) easy to fix and 2) not necessary for the nVidia binary drivers. If you didn't install the compiling tools like gcc and build-essentials when you first installed, you probably had the option to pop in the CD and grab them off the disk after the OS was installed. It's likely you weren't using Ubuntu (Fedora, maybe?), but if that's the case you have a lot to learn about ease-of-use in Linux. This is especially true for recent releases where even the common problems (PulseAudio not working) are usually better OotB. So much is automated now that I find it easier to install Linux than Windows 7 (took less time, too).

Then ON TOP of that having to compile your own drivers because there's no standardized installer for linux is another blow to the adoption of the thing by the mass market. Home users dont want to compile their own software just to get the web browser to scroll smoothly. Hello? Redhat has RPM packages but if you arent using fedora or rhel you dont get to use those.

What are you talking about? Just about every distro out there has at least one official repository of pre-compiled software and a package manager that handles dependencies well, plus several community-supported repositories or PPAs for specific software like WINE. Debian has APT and Ubuntu is Debian-based; both draw on a huge, HUGE number of packages that are ready to install painlessly. Fedora, Arch, SUSE, Mandriva, they all use precompiled binaries (even for proprietary drivers) available from a package manager. How long has it been since you tried desktop Linux, and what were you using?

But with over 400 flavors of linux and none of them allow someone to install a program or driver simply by double clicking on something leads to a big fail in the home user market.

Double-clicking is the way most popular distros handle it; has been for at least a couple of years.

Hell I spent 5 days (granted not looking 24hrs a day) looking for a skin for pidgin that I could tolerate. After all of that what are you left with (assuming youre like me and you didnt bother to reinstall the OS so you could try to compile your own video card drivers)? You are left with a pc that has a music player, a web browser, email client, a handful of table top style games (like 8 different kinds of solitaire), an IM program, an MS office clone, and i think that's about it.

Windows doesn't even come with the Office clone (or the IM anymore), not to mention a PDF reader, Photoshop clone, Outlook clone, etc. Out of the box, a fresh install of Ubuntu or Fedora is far more complete than a fresh install of Windows, even 7. If you think there's a dearth of software to install afterward, you're out of your mind.

Linux is a great OS for business cause its free and doesnt have the virus problems windows does. But that would change if more people used it... then they would be in the same boat as windows with daily security updates etc etc.

I actually got more security updates running Ubuntu than Windows, but those were all things that were found pro-actively rather than waiting for someone to come up with an exploit in the wild. Also, fewer updates required a reboot after installing them. Windows security has gotten better, but there's still more potential for Windows exploits than for a reasonably-configured Linux install. Most distros ship with sane default security settings and a sudo prompt (which I find less annoying than the UAC equivalent) which makes it much harder for someone to run something without your permission.

IIRC there's a virus out for mac now, and thats just a hacked version of debian anyway.

It's a hacked version of BSD, and it doesn't conform as closely to the UNIX standard file system as most Linux/BSD distros.


Basically, all your arguments are weird and not representative of the recent state of Linux on the desktop. I think the biggest barrier to adoption is that people are just plain used to Windows, and it comes pre-installed on 90+% of the world's PCs.

 

[wongster]

whats linux?

 

[guzz46]

shin0bi272 when was the last time you used linux? 10 years ago? linux works on more hardware than any other OS, from the smallest devices to the largest super computers.

And when people say linux is lacking in ease of use its just because they are used to doing things the windows way, infact i think in most areas linux is easier.
A lot of people make a business out of windows being hard to use, prone to viruses, tendency to slow down over time.

 

[Dirty Durden]

[citation][nom]LORD_ORION[/nom]This is a bad thing (considering we are a capitalist society). They don't use these types of companies to advance Linux, they use them to mess up other OS vendors. They will probably aim squarely at apple, google and MS and put "free" competing products in their market space built by an unpaid army of nerds.[/citation]

Yes, also what happens after MS goes out of business. What happens to Privacy when a bunch of Communist/Socialist/Marxist Pigs gets access to all of our Info. You Marxist Pigs talk about competition, no one can compete with free. I do not understand, what is so wrong with a company making money, it helps everyone.

 

[guzz46]

How does a company making money help everyone?

 

[gm0n3y]

This is excellent news. Once Valve gets Steam running on Linux I plan on switching to Ubuntu as my main OS. If a couple more game companies would start multi-OS releases (Bethesda, Blizzard, etc) Linux could potentially become the most used OS within a few years. I'll personally still need Windows for a few things though (mainly Visual Studio, which is far beyond any other dev environment I've used, even if it does cost thousands of dollars).

 

[boogalooelectric]

Companies making money is the reason the world sucks today, all most companies care about is shrinking the bottom line and increasing profit margins. Microsoft gives you the crappiest OS they can for a premium, for the quality you get it should cost about $5.00 considering all the extra crap you need to purchase in order to make any new installation secure and stable. Let see, anti-virus, adware blocker, spyware, firewalls, etc etc.

Its friggen ridiculous.

Or take Apple, everyone knows their junk is made at Foxconn for dirt cheap, do they pass that savings on to their customer's? No, they still gouge the people who buy their logo and have over $40 billion on hand in cash.

That is one of the things wrong with a company making money, I could list many more examples, but this should suffice.

 

[Misdissident]

[citation][nom]boogalooelectric[/nom]Companies making money is the reason the world sucks today[/citation]

Companies making money is also the reason why you're able to use a computer right now, too.

 

[maestintaolius]

hemelkonijn:

"The Nvdia drivers are one click installers for some distro's while for others you have to recompile however typing in 3 lines in the command prompt should be something any moron can do and since you only have to do it once why not just use a guide and do it?, If for any reason you cant do it dont understand it or dont want to do it you should not blame the OS gfor making it impossible you should take blame for being lazy or should preach for improvement bottom line this is your stupidity.

I am not saying its easy i am just saying the thing you complain about are at least to be solved by a simple run to google and a 5 minute read."

This is exactly what he's talking about though, most people would find this unacceptable when most MS and OSX solutions pretty much consist of "point and click" and why *nix isn't mainstream. I have no problem solving my *nix problems by going to google (unless, of course, the problem is trying to troubleshoot networking and you can't get to google), but I sure as heck wouldn't expect grandma or my mother to know what to do, even with an online guide (if they even knew what to search for in google to get to said guide).

I have no problem fiddling with *nix (or monkeying around in my win registry) to solve problems, but I'm also a ChemE and generally use such technical knowledge on a daily basis. My grandma, wouldn't have a clue how to compile a driver (or even what a driver is), and I sure as heck wouldn't expect her to go to google to find the fix, but it's not because she's a moron. She's an accomplished author and could also teach me 1000s of things related to gardening and farming. Myself, on the other hand, couldn't write a novel or grow strawberries like hers if my life depended upon it. Same thing for my mother, she's a DoN and can recite from memory hundreds of pharmaceuticals and how they interact with each other and can tell you all about the ins and outs of medicare/aid to mind-numbingly precise extremes and I wouldn't expect her to be able to troubleshoot a *nix box either. I, couldn't tell you the difference between Lipitor and Crestor without google (or even if the information I find on some website is accurate) but she can do it from memory because that's her job and her interests.

This idea that everyone needs or should be some sort of computer guru capable of designing their own processor and writing their own OS kernel is my biggest issue with the whole "you're too stupid to use *nix" attitude and is part of what I feel keeps it from being mainstream. No one can be a master of everything and just because someone isn't as computer-literate as you doesn't mean they're "morons". I frequently see this on *nix forums where some new user comes in asking how to get something working and the first reply is some snotty elitist "use search button" comment (sometimes the problem is people don't exactly know what to put into the search field and get the right answer, or they're worried they'll get the wrong one and fubar their system). Everyone only has 24 hours in a day and some people don't want to spend it learning how to make their computer play YouTube full screen on their laptop without spending 3 days on forums and downloading packages. Some people just want it to work with a mouse click, hence why OSX and MS dominate the PC consumer market.

 

[hemelskonijn]

maestintaolius:

Dont get me wrong i get what your saying however shin0bi forgot to emphasis that he purposely chose not to install vital parts of his operating system (his compilers) or at least that he had not enough knowledge and common sense to follow the step by step installation. Its a created problem (created by taking on to much without reading up on it) while there is no reason to create such problems. Most of the problems he described could have been prevented by picking the right distribution and sticking to a standard installation (at least till you get the hang of it).

My mother and some of my friends run suse linux after i gave them a live cd and believe me they are intelligent but far from knowledgeable. This gives them one advantage they dont fiddle around unless they know its safe and they google before they do anything (and if that wont help them they call me) they know they can use there computer probably better then many other people but they recognise that they themself are not proffesionals.

If you don't know what your doing go default if your still not sure google its as simple as that.

Back to the drivers ... if you know you don't want to dive in to the deep you can always go to any major Linux distro's website and read their compatibility list if that's to much you could take a quick first glance at distrowatch.org or if your lazy go to the disro's irc channel and ask around. These are things any one should think about in any migration and if you fail to do that you can hardly blame an entire family of operating systems for your failure.

BTW ... ubuntu is linux but linux is not ubuntu and while both are *nix, *nix is neither of them. I would take shin0by more serious if he at least noted the name and version of the distro he tried.

 

[hemelskonijn]

Edit:

My mother and some of my friends run suse linux after i gave them a live cd and believe me they are intelligent but far from knowledgeable when it comes to computers both software or hardware.

 

[randomizer]

[citation][nom]maestintaolius[/nom]This idea that everyone needs or should be some sort of computer guru capable of designing their own processor and writing their own OS kernel is my biggest issue with the whole "you're too stupid to use *nix" attitude and is part of what I feel keeps it from being mainstream.[/citation]
Nobody needs to be a computer guru. Everybody needs to have some computing knowledge. You can't use Windows or OSX without computing knowledge, and you can't use *nix without different computing knowledge. This is especially true when something goes wrong. How do you fix most Windows problems? Do you "send an error report" and pray that somehow your program won't crash next time you start it?