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OSDL's Review of Desktop Linux In 2006
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Jan 27, 2007 09:58 PM
from the it's-a-wrap dept.
from the it's-a-wrap dept.
derrida writes "The OSDL's Desktop Linux Working Group has published its first year-end report on the state of the overall desktop Linux ecosystem. The report provides insight into the year's key accomplishments in functionality, standards, applications, distributions, market penetration, and more. Of great interest is the Market Growth part. Quoting from there: 'Most observers believe that much of the growth will take place outside of the United States. "It will be in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries," said Gerry Riveros, Red Hat, "because of the price and because they aren't locked in yet."'"
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Other countries (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not seeing the appeal.
Re:Other countries (Score:4, Funny)
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So just to clarify, you mean, "Will trade for software of the same quality as half a carcass."
Sounds about right.
Re:Other countries (Score:5, Funny)
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Ripoff. (Score:2, Funny)
Sounds like a bad trade to me. You can make soup out of that chicken, but what are you going to do with those Windows discs? Even sauteed, I think they'd be pretty tough.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So they're going to say that Linux will really grow in countries like China and India, where street vendors hawk a variety of Microsoft bootlegs for less than $0.50?
Any you pay $179....
Or should you pay $98 or $95...
The OS is a commodity, $9.99 at Walmart with Office is the Windows future. Lets face it a $5999 dual core system not to long ago goes for $599 today. Everything in personal computing has gone down but Microsoft. Eventually the cost and perceived benefit is going to change. I even predict
OS as a commodity (Score:3, Insightful)
The OS is a commodity, $9.99 at Walmart with Office is the Windows future.
I wish this were true, and it probably is true in the enterprise market. But I think it's unlikely in the home or consumer market in the near term. Items become commodities (in the non-pork-belly sense) when there are many suppliers, producing nearly interchangeable products, competing mostly on price. We're not there yet in the OS world. There are still only a few major players: Windows, Linux, various flavors of Unix, and assorted niche OSs. Price doesn't seem to matter much to consumers and OEMs
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Oh, the Irony! (Score:5, Interesting)
Technology flows from the first world to the third. They will be the last to get linux on the desktop, not the first.
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Linux in poor countries (Score:3, Informative)
That's exactly what I did, installed Slackware from diskettes in an old notebook with 16MB memory and 1.3GB HD. Runs Abiword and Gnumeric fine, what you need for the majority of office work. It originally had windows 95, but do you know what is the newest version of a Microsoft OS that will install in a machine with 16MB RAM? And how would you fit a Microsoft OS
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Unfortunately, most of the people who fix consumer hardware are incompetent. People who fix PCs for consumers know how to re-install Windows and some apps and that is it. The fixed PC will, no doubt, be re-infected (well, what do you imagine the commonest problem will be with pirated software and no systems administration) within hours of be hooked up to the net again.
On the other hand, it i
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Only too right I fear. Windows 3.1 will run satisfactorily with 8mb of
Outside the US for now (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the interesting thing about this is the projection of the greatest growth in the "BRIC" countries. I don't think it's so much that they aren't locked into Windows, as much as Microsoft has (inadvertently on their part) pushed it along. When MS started its big "anti-piracy" crackdown, it mostly hit in these parts of the world. Add in the high cost of Windows, and the ever-increasing hardware requirements for it, and a free OS that can run on existing hardware looks pretty darn good.
The problem desktop Linux is still facing is getting more penetration in the biggest market - the United States. There are still areas where improvements need to made, and in some areas, applications to be developed. One thing that we have to recognize is that MS is not going to give up its stranglehold on the OEM installed market. The only way Linux going to be able to make any strides is to recognize that the user is going to have to do the install, and to make it easy for them. There's a project going on for Ubuntu which shows some promise, called Winbuntu - it's a Windows installer for Linux. I don't know how it'll work out, but it shows the concept.
Inside Out. (Score:2)
the high cost of Windows, and the ever-increasing hardware requirements for it, and a free OS that can run on existing hardware looks pretty darn good.
Is there any place that this is not true?
Re:Outside the US for now (Score:5, Insightful)
If you change the steps, the order of the steps, or the location of the steps, and they're LOST. Not only are they lost... they're angry, unhappy, less productive, complaining, and in need of re-training. It doesn't matter if the new software is better or "just as good". It doesn't matter if the platform is better. They know how to be productive when they're following these specific procedures. If changing the software changes the procedures, you have to re-train them in the new procedures, and you have to deal with all the productivity lost while they learn and adapt. And that doesn't include the pushback from the ones who resist change out of fear or inertia.
Any exec or front-line salesperson who uses ACT!... never going to switch platforms until ACT! supports that platform. Seriously.
And that's where your hurdle comes in. Change is neither easy nor painless. Imagine a pain meter on a scale from 1 to 10. Let's say that Windows is a 5 and Linux or Mac is a 2. But the adjustment of switching is an 8. People will opt to stay with the 5. They know the 5. They know they can tolerate the 5. Because even though the 2 is promised, the 8 looms large in the immediate future.
What's going to prompt people to switch is when the combination of Microsoft arrogance and aggressive bad guys raise the pain of Windows to a 6.5, while the efforts of Linux and/or Apple developers lower the pain of switching to a 6.5 or lower. When switching is no more painful than staying the course (or possibly even less painful), you'll see the needles start to move in bigger ways.
Parent
You can lead a manager to water.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure you know how right you are. (In fact, I hope you don't; and if you do, I feel your pain.)
The "training problem" is something that most technical people fail to appreciate, because it almost universally doesn't apply to them, because they generally have some conceptual understanding of how their software and hardware operates. Once you have that conceptual understanding, it's nearly impossible to imagine how it would appear without it. It changes the way you think about the tools you use, on a fundamental level.
Unfortunately, imparting that type of conceptual understanding to someone who isn't interested in learning it, is nearly impossible as well -- even when in the long run, it's almost certainly to their benefit to have it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
OSS mainly outside of the USA (Score:5, Interesting)
My 2006 report (Score:5, Informative)
In years past I have always noticed that FreeBSD always makes it easy to install. Makes it easy meaning it recognizes hard drives, network cards, even 56K modems, without a problem. I installed FreeBSD with two 3.5" standard FreeBSD install disks a few years ago over a 56K modem with no problem. Like the Apple commercials say - "it just works".
I prefer Debian and Linux to FreeBSD, but Linux distros have a lot to learn from FreeBSD in terms of ease of installation. FreeBSD makes it really easy to install itself on a PC without barfing on network cards, hard drives and so forth. It was the same situation ten years ago when I was installing Slackware on multiple floppies versus my FreeBSD network installs. And from my experience last week, I see it still holds true.
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About three years ago, I ran into a server (HP, if I recall correctly) that had the strangest problem I'd ever seen: Neither Gentoo or FreeBSD would run on the thing. You could install it, but the thing would randomly kernel panic within 5 minutes of being up, and you couldn't trace where exactly the crash was.
If, on the other hand, you shoved Windows XP onto the thing.. it would run perfectly fine.
To this day
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Novell or ODSL? (Score:2)
Anyone care to estimate how many companies put Linux in place to run Mono vs. Java?
Driving the Linux Desktop in 2007 (Score:5, Interesting)
I myself switched to Ubuntu on my home desktop because of Vista-fear.
It's not happening (Score:5, Insightful)
Every year, I see these "Linux is ready for the desktop" articles. But it never happens. Back in 2004, WalMart offered a $499 Linux laptop. They don't do that any more. [walmart.com] Lenovo, HP, and Dell have fooled around with Linux laptops, but try to order one on line. Search for "linux laptop" on Dell, and you get back "Dell recommends Windows Vista(TM) Business." There are some off-brand Linux laptops available, but they're overpriced.
Linux on the desktop looked closer three years ago than it does now.
I don't think that is true (Score:2)
Two, I think the focus was on the desktop. Notebooks are slightly different animals. Sleep/Hibernate and all that fun, as well as many of them having their custom buttons on the keyboard.
Three, when I saw Walmart selling Linspir
Desktop linux is in good shape, now it's users (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Legacy systems, documents, and most importantly user training in said systems and documents. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rules when computers are the tool rather than the end goal in and of themselves, and it's hard to fault that logic. If you change your systems you're effectively "breaking" your employees in terms of their productivity, and fixing them is quite a job. It's only justified when the end benefits are worth the pain, and to be fair in most cases they probably aren't, at least in the short term. And we all know how good capitalism is at thinking long term.
2. Compatibility with the largest possible market segment. If your customers/suppliers insist on dealing in old formats (see #1) then it's rather hard to force them to change. And every minute spent dealing with such issues is one less spent on work related to producing something.
3. Costs of retraining your IT department and switching your software/machines. Yes it will take time - hardware support, IT helpdesk training, identifying and testing replacements for currently used apps, etc. Not painless at all.
I would say Linux was "ready for the desktop" several years ago, or at least as ready as Windows. KDE and Gnome are excellent systems for most users, once installed and configured properly. (That's what admins are for - work PCs are not normally maintained directly by users, regardless of OS.) Now the problem is revealed as being rather deeper than originally anticipated - it's not JUST Linux that's the problem, it's change period.
For home use, people want to play media and install thousands of commercial specialty packages, which are all written for Windows. More legacy software issues, with no budget or interest on the part of the people writing them (why target an uncertain platform populated by geeks who give stuff away?)
The problems aren't technological now - I would say they can be more accurately characterized as inertia. It's hard to give people reasons to switch from something that works, even when the new thing is BETTER than the current one. Linux, due to legal constraints as well as not quite 100% compatibility with things like Word formats, is not and probably CANNOT become (legally) a drop-in which is better in all cases.
Personally, I think the only hope for a massive switch to an open source OS is one where the software is written in such a fashion that it can be PROVEN (mathematically) to be secure/crash proof/what have you. Such a verifiable guarantee might gain enough interest/momentum to be worth the massive shifts that still have not taken place, but I am aware of no other lack in the marketplace severe enough to warrant it.
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It's broken again. Fix it with free software. (Score:5, Interesting)
Legacy systems, documents, and most importantly user training in said systems and documents. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rules when computers are the tool rather than the end goal in and of themselves, and it's hard to fault that logic. If you change your systems you're effectively "breaking" your employees in terms of their productivity, and fixing them is quite a job. It's only justified when the end benefits are worth the pain, and to be fair in most cases they probably aren't ...
Funny how Microsoft has gotten away with just that. Every version of Windoze has a few pointless GUI changes and little real improvement, yet the Dells of the world push it out. Vista and Office 2007 mark the largest GUI change in a long time. Legacy software is broken. Where does that leave the user's "faultless" logic?
Free software interfaces are more stable. Window maker, is a Next clone and it's basics have not changed in fifteen years. There are several others, like the fvwm or olvwm, and Enlightenment, that have been just as rock stable. At the same time there have been many other excellent interfaces that have grown up. All of them are extensively customizeable so that you can have as much change in each as you like and they all work together, so you can mix and match. The same performance from Microsoft would have Windows 3.1 GUI be adequate, customizable still available and easily interchangeable with a dozen other excellent window managers. Right.
The same arguments apply to file formats and hardware. Vista is bringing with it .DOCX, the M$ "open" format with a 6,000 page spec. It's also going to obsolete 54% of exiting computers and 94% of them are not really "premium" ready, so their users will soon be disappointed by an upsell that degrades their actual performance. DRM promisses to make it all that much worse.
The real hope is that Vista goes nowhere. XP did not move hardware and it had much better driver and legacy application support at launch. It took four long years for it to be majority. People want new hardware and it's time for it to move. There are major improvements that are good for both performance users and people who want something small and quiet. If Vista's changes are so bad that it actually harms sales, look for Dell, HP and others to follow Lenovo's lead to make up the difference. That would break the M$ monopoly once and for all and then we would not have to worry about this upgrade train nonsense.
Vista - the Ow is Now.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You must be one of those people who descend on Amazon and "tag" every single Microsoft product with "defectivebydesign".
No, but that sounds like a good idea and I'm glad that someone is doing it.
I wish you would all stay here and here only.
Hmmmm, you don't like me and I don't like you. Let's make a deal. You go away, your friends leave computer vendors [slashdot.org], ISPs and everyone else alone and our paths will never cross. How about that? You get to pay Bill Gates for permission to use your computer, I ge
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Good news, then. You don't have to install anything with the command line.
I humbly disagree. I find installing drivers much much easier under linux (namely, you don't have to; your hardware is pretty much supported out of the box or not at all). Installing software is easier too, unless it's not provided by your distribution. In that case, it's exactly th
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is at http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html [reason.com]
According to this article, the studies that "proved" that Dvorak was a
better keyboard were all flawed in very significant ways.
My experience (Score:2, Informative)
I started with Fedora Core 5, got jealous of some of the functionality of my girlfriend's Ubuntu, and I'm now extremely satisfied of Fedora Core 6 which brought all the functionality it lacked and even great extras I didn't know I needed like the desktop effects (xgl/compiz).
An example of the graphics issue mentioned. (Score:2)
Next time, it's going to be Nvidia.
OSDL = Open Source Development Lab (Score:2)
So here is my progress... (Score:2, Funny)
Then I decided that I still prefer Clearlooks.
Boy, what a year.
Printing (Score:3, Informative)
I light off cups (that is, go to http://localhost:631/ [localhost] in FF), enter th IP address of the printer in the obvious place, and stuff works.
It's a cheezy home wireless network; I really want the Dumbest Thing That Works, realizing that if there is a reset, DHCP may re-jigger things.
Trying to figure out how to set a printer by IP in that other OS has baffled me. It's an Easter Egg hunt gone ronngg. The quest for simplicity has been abandoned at a variety of levels.
At least I only have to suffer that OS at work.
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Some kind of corner has been turned for the GNU/Linux desktop in 2006. I light off cups (that is, go to http://localhost:631/ [localhost] in FF), enter th IP address of the printer in the obvious place, and stuff works.
That ass Raymond not too long ago held up CUPS as example of things FOSS is doing wrong. I hate that sometimes. A lot of very talented people did hard and thankless work to make things work as well as possible and all some can do is bitch about what doesn't. I'm no fanboi. I know there things th
Re:Printing (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to add a new printer there should be an "add new printer" tool somewhere obvious, like under the System menu. Bonus points if it already detects the attached printer for you, and if the system can be configured to pop up the add-printer dialog any time you plug in a new printer.
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Sorta... (Score:3, Interesting)
However, there IS one important difference--it's quite easy to screw over a machine by mucking around in the registry, either by accident or because the instructions you found were incorrect. I can't compare that to simply browsing around localhost. What's the worst you could possibly do? Hit the wrong port and get a screen full of crap from chargen?
Linux has come a long way (Score:5, Insightful)
1) GOOD package management. I started out on Redhat. Whenever anyone brings up RPM problems, they get reamed on Slashdot "RPM IS NOT A PACKAGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM!" Well, once upon a time, there wasn't Yum or Red Carpet, and the best thing there was (RPM) was still hell to use. Now between RHEL and Gentoo, I rarely have to worry about not finding dependencies. Thank God.
2) 2.6 Kernel. The reason is because before 2.6, X under Linux always "felt" slow.
3. Firefox.
4. More expansive community, documentation. I remember in 1997 trying to get help:
ME: "I'm trying to do X and it's doing Y. Does anyone have experience with this? "
THEM: "RTFM"
ME, (looking): "The man page doesn't say anything"
THEM: "+b You've been banned, troll."
Now I look at the Gentoo install documentation and user forums now, and I am just in awe. Likewise for many of the other major distros.
Now that wireless is going smooth, the only thing I have to complain about is no matter what I do, font rendering is inconsistent and often ugly. But as of two years ago, I am a happy full time Linux user! Take this for what it's worth, I just wanted to share my experience.
What is BRIC, and why BRIC (Score:2)
So it's obviously a set of countries that Linux should be in..
Overlooked... (Score:3, Insightful)
In Windows, one installshield package does everything on any Windows version.
Nor does Grandma Gertrude want to download all 20 to figure out which one works on her system if all she knows is shes running Linux. Even if she does grab the correct package, she certainly isn't going to be able to open shell, su to root, and dpkg -i or rpm -Uvh the file. She will double click it, see nothing happens, and give up.
Something like VFW would be welcome, I install a video/audio codec, and it works in all applications. Also, some cleanup of the video code in general, why is there no decent video output, opengl has tearing issues even with __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK = 1, Xv is really pixellated, I forget the others now, but none look nearly as good as the standard overlay in Windows.
Standardization of directory hierarchy. Does that executable go in
Some just general stupidity as well, like I was bored and decided to try SuSE, so I pop in the 10.2 minimal cd which lets you install over the network. I boot and first off it takes like 2 minutes to boot into the installer, and its running like I'm on a 386, and if you've ever booted off the minimal cd, you'll see it has no reason to run like that. Anyway, I suck it up and figure it'll be okay once everything is on the hard drive. So initial question is where do you want the installer to get the files from, I was on a laptop, so I hit network, wireless, enter my WPA key, and off it goes, grabs the installer files, launches the installer, grabs all the packages, installs, and reboots to finish the configuration. Except... this time it doesn't ask for my network settings, nor save the ones I entered earlier, so I end up hitting skip on a bunch of files it needed for ending configuration because it couldn't see my freaking network anymore.
So I figure oh well I'll just configure it by hand when it boots, so I reboot and after about 5 minutes of waiting for it to boot up to a login screen I just hit the power button and boot off the windows CD and remove all the partitions and reinstall Windows.
Note: It is not the hardware, I had a Gentoo install on it ever since I bought it that worked fine, I just got tired of waiting for crap to compile all the time, and was hoping for a 'no-hassle' installation.
Other general stupidity...
- I have to install like 300MB of libraries in order to run Firefox if I'm running KDE.
- I have to wait for all those libs to load every time I open Firefox off of a fresh reboot.
- Total lack of standardized advanced GUI tools. What tool is good for administering what programs start when the system starts up? What about when the user logs in to X? How about something that tells me what video codecs are installed, what audio codecs?
- No apps seem to be 'lightweight'. Look at my two favorite windows media applications, Foobar2000 and Mediaplayer Classic. Foobar2000 is a 1.6MB download, supports every audio format under the sun, and loads almost instantly on a cold start. The closest thing in Linux is AmaroK, which is a 20MB download, and loads slow as holy hell, and doesn't offer nearly the range of audio support foobar does. Now MPC is a 1MB download (3mb? uncompressed s
Re:not to mention (Score:5, Insightful)
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Am I happy with the direction the US is going? Certainly not. Be it IP laws, corporate protection at the cost of citizens, or the attorney general claiming that the writ of habeas corpus is not granted by the constitution, I'm not happy with the way things are going. But th
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Cana-fuckin-da.
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Re:not to mention (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called the Berne Convention Treaty. America was shoved into coming in line with it; and ran with it.
America's shiny new copyright and patent crap is firmly rooted in the monarchial grants of absolute right and trade guildism that America's founding fathers firmly rejected.
Too many powerful people around the world want control of their respective economies, and one way you do that is by manipulating and suppressing technological advancement.
And adoption of the Berne Convention Treaty was one of the first signs that America was heading down this path. We gave up being the industrial might driving the economy of the world for being a bunch of paper traders.
If they can manage to hold themselves together as a nation China wins. If not India wins. In any case, we lose as our bits of paper become worthless on the international market.
Jesus we used to make some good stuff.
KFG
Parent
It was of our own doing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen. What's ironic, is that as I drove around certain parts of Western Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, is that it's not as if we don't have the capability to make "stuff" anymore -- the machinery, the productive capacity, is mostly all still there, albeit rusted, and the workforce is there, albeit unemployed and twenty years out-of-date -- it's just that the desire to do it disappeared and moved elsewhere, by virtue of some pieces of paper that swapped hands and certain handshakes between heads of state.
We have a government run by the "paper traders," as you put it, for their own kin; they have sold off the economy, piecemeal, to the benefit foreign interests and themselves, despite the obvious outcome: you cannot maintain a first-world economy and standard of living, when you are competing in a labor market with a billion-plus Chinese and Indian peasants. It just isn't going to happen, it's unsustainable: either the first-world country's costs and standards of living are going to sink, or the third-world's are going to rise, and the former is a whole lot easier and a lot more likely than the latter. (Think of it in terms of economic "mass," and of two bodies orbiting around each other; it's a lot easier to move 300 million people down towards the level of a billion poor ones than it is to move the billion up to meet the 300M.)
When the shell game is done, the U.S. is going to become a nation of aristocrats: the same paper-traders who have run the place into the ground, and thus knew from the beginning where it would end, and have moved their wealth into hard currencies; and everyone else, who will be stuck with their savings in a currency suddenly not worth the paper it's printed on (it's already not worth the metal its minted with), and forced to buy everything from abroad (since the country has long since ceased to produce anything of value), who will be stuck with the bill.
Take a look around: you're witnessing the decline of one of the world's great empires, which, like many before it, was brought down not by invaders from afar, but from mismanagement and greed from within.
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