OSDL's Review of Desktop Linux In 2006 200
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."'"
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.
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).
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.
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 plus Microsoft Office in a 1.3GB disk with space left for user applications, unless it was w95?
The advantage Linux has is that you don't need a 1995 version of Linux to run in a 1995 machine. There are distributions made specifically for small machines [superant.com]
The only thing that keeps Linux from being widely used in the poorest countries is the same factor that keeps it from being more widely used in the USA: ignorance. The tragedy of it is that the poorer a country is, the most it would gain from switching to Linux.
Re:Linux in poor countries (Score:3, Informative)
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 is not hard to find competent people who know Linux. If your lucky someone from the LUG might fix your problem free, otherwise you may have to pay more than the Windows person, but at least it will be fixed permentantly and properly (and without wiping your data either!).
But no, people would far prefer the nice guy at the local PC shop, who sells them crappy hardware and incompetent service with a nice smile.
Re:Oh, the Irony! (Score:3, Informative)
Only too right I fear. Windows 3.1 will run satisfactorily with 8mb of memory. It'll crash every few days when its 64kb heaps fill up, but at least it will run. Windows 95 runs quite acceptably with 16mb of memory. My experience has been that even text mode Linux will have trouble with a machine with only 8mb of memory. e.g. it will be swapping to disk just to run man. I'm sure that it can be optimized to run better by using fewer consoles, etc. It'd be interesting to watch the "just download Ubuntu and go" crowd try to deal with one of these minimal machines.
If there is a Linux release that will run a GUI acceptably and do anything useful of old machines without much memory, I've never encountered it. My feeling is that to get anything like Windows 95 performance and capability out of linux you probably need a MINIMUM of 64mb of memory (and more than 500mb of disk storage probably). And that might be optimistic.
Re:Desktop linux is in good shape, now it's users (Score:3, Informative)
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.