Where Does Linux Go From Here? 360
With the success that Linux is currently enjoying Linux.com (also owned by SourceForge, Inc) asks the question, where do we go from here? With such a high level of success and greater corporate participation (on both the consumer and provider fronts) will the spirit of freedom and idealism remain true or will the ever-present corporate bottom line eventually take over? "Linux is surrounded by proprietary IT firms. Some of them view Linux as a profit maker, others as a threat to their profits. Both sides represent a challenge for Linux in holding to its ideals of freedom and openess. The first large IT firm to really grok Linux was IBM. It has a long and mutually beneficial association with Linux, Apache, and other FOSS projects. The company has learned the language and the mores of the FOSS world, and has made significant code contributions as part of those projects along the way."
Can I be the first to say (Score:0, Insightful)
Take over? (Score:5, Insightful)
will the spirit of freedom and idealism remain true or will the ever-present corporate bottom line eventually take over?
How much do we have to worry that something will "take Linux over"? No matter what corporations do, they'll always have to release the source code, which means people can always fork it. Wasn't that the point?
Re:Take over? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and yes (it's already happened). The neat thing is both can happen without being mutually exclusive. Such is the beauty of FOSS. Is Linux suited for big-iron, misssion critical enterprise stuff backed and supported by heavyweights like IBM, Sun, etc? Yup. Can it be tinkered with on cheap commodity hardware for "backyard" projects and hobbyist programming? Yup. And everything else in between.
Hot air rises (Score:4, Insightful)
Now I know ideally we should all be intelligent enough to be able to operate Linux without screwing something up, and if we do be able to fix it. But the layman is not and will not have our technical ability, however simple the task may be. Since Linux does not have technical support often in the same way Apple and Microsoft do, users are driven away for fear of an inoperable computer. They would rather have a computer that works 50% of the time than 25% of the time. As far as business use for Linux, obviously they have the resources to be able to have any problems fixed and prevented, but personal users can not do that.
As far as games, Tux Racer does not cut it. Email and web browsing of course are workhorse reasons for having a PC, but you can do that on your cell phone nowadays. Honestly, game development seems to be in a bit of a catch 22 in the same way that driver support is a problem. Investors need to see profitability in the market, so they want to see market demand. However market demand isn't rising because there isn't enough of a reason to switch to Linux when you can't play the hottest new games on it. Of course games do get ported, however initial release of games for Linux I think is vital to bring the average computer user into the fold of open source.
Just my two cents.
Tagged psuedointellectualism (Score:3, Insightful)
Its the hardware not the software! (Score:1, Insightful)
The main problem that your pointing out is a problem with x86 hardware. Windows and every other OS that runs on x86 have the same problems. The problem stems from there being no standardization and no evolution of the technology. Essentially all of these 50K x86 servers are just big beefy PC's with built in redundancy and some extra monitoring options and are essentially an evolution of the original IBM product. The vendors are moving in the right direction though and Linux is supporting this hardware as they need to. For example the IPMI interfaces and BMC interfaces have direct access with ipmitool where you can read chassis and sensor information. Window's cannot natively talk to the IPMI interface without add on drivers. Linux supports MANY of the raid controllers from within its kernel unlike windows that has to have drivers to even see the drives.
Im a big Solairs fan myself because it truly is an integrated hardware and software platform. The big issue is cost. Thats why a number of companies in the industry are willing to put up with the shortcomings of x86 hardware and related OS's. Its a big trend now for people to go with the cheap mantra when in actuality it costs them more in the long haul in downtime and data loss.
Even further into the cheap cheap cheap mantra is the concept of VM's which were abandoned in the 1970's because they never worked and because of the political battles between departments for resources of the mainframe. This is being looked at again for the concept of energy savings and hardware savings but virtual machines really equal virtual performance. Many companies have the concept that you can oversubcribe the resource of one machine and serve many users and "hopefully" not all of them will need resources at the same time. The Administrator of a VM box is under the pressure from that many more users when there is a hardware failure. It amazes me that companies put all their eggs in one basket on cheap commodity hardware that is known for failure. Loose a system planar or other low level non redundant piece of hardware and suddenly you have hundreds of servers down instead of just one. And of course because we are cheapskates we have to call up and scream at our vendor to get out ASAP because we were to cheap to have a spare kit and an Admin onsite and or capable of switching out hardware.
You get what you pay for one way or another and most people are obsessed with the price tag rather than the true costs. Buy the bottom of the line machine and spend your time down on the phone to India.
To working.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know that's not what a lot of you want to hear. But it's the truth. I don't want to spend several days trying to get a 802.11g wifi card working. I don't want to have to use some install manager or try to figure out how to get some script to run from the terminal in order to install an application. I simply want to be able to click and launch it, and have it install. Sadly, driver & software installation hurdles plague Linux. (In fact, these were the same issues that plagued Linux when I tried it repeatedly in the late 90's early millenials.)
I will say, it's improved quite a bit. At least in video card support apparently. But the truth of the matter is, I'd take XP & OS X over Linux. And that's because I'm anti-Linux or don't support Linux. Far from it, I wouldn't have tried it for my wife's (non-critical use) machine. So please guys....focus on these issues. (And don't say "Linux isn't really for the masses." Because everyone else keeps trying to push it that way. And that is the slated goal of many.)
Best of luck all...
- The Saj
Re:ugh (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux isn't done yet (Score:5, Insightful)
I love Linux as a concept: An open-source, free as in beer, free as in speech, tweakable operating system offered and supported by multiple vendors. But Linux as a reality is an hodge-podge of incomplete applications spread across multiple subtly-incompatible distributions.
Moments ago, I read the following thread on the Rapidsvn mailing list. Rapidsvn is a very nice front-end for the Subversion version control system. I've compiled it, made changes to it - it's quite nice. I like it especially since it works on Linux, Mac, and PC -- all three are OSs I use to some degree. So the following is not a dig on this particular project. It is one example of something that happens a million times every day:
(P.S. I chopped the thread for brevity to make my point)
at the command prompt. I get a lots of messages and finally:
checking for APR... not found
configure: error: APR is required. Try --with-apr-config.
I tried...[various things] but got the same error message. I installed all the available APR's for
listed listed as version 1.2.2-13.2
Any ideas how to install rapidsvn -- I really want a gui interface on
linux similar to tortoisesvn on windows.
[various responses about apr-config, apu-config, downloading pre-built binaries, etc. but no solution]
This is the Linux I know, and it is why I have Linux on that other partition so I can boot it up now and then and see what the state of Linux is. But so far, it's always stuff like this. The challenge with Linux isn't learning the UI or thinking differently or anything. It's just getting stuff installed and getting it to work properly. I've never gotten a Linux distro up to the productivity of either my Mac or my Windows PC. I've maybe gotten 80% of the way, but with 500% of the effort. It's just not worth it.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Take over? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:To working.... (Score:3, Insightful)
When Linux works and e.g. OpenOfficer fulfill your needs, and you don't need any Windows-only software, it's awesome, like running a non-hardware dependent OS X that's free and with an incredible community. Using Linux don't even need to imply giving up on a great user interface anymore. I honestly think there's no match anymore either in Windows Vista or OS X. Vista is really too "heavy", and tries to do too much at once out of the box, and OS X has problems I can't really see any open source fan can enjoy. I think it's even worse than Windows in the proprietary sense. People would start foam if MS started tieing their own hardware with Windows copies and get retailers to sell that crap, but at Apple, that's routine. Obvious advantages with hardware compatibility, but obvious disadvantages from a personal philosophy in how you want to use your computer.
The problem with Linux is however than if things break, or don't run, it can be the most weird problems to someone used to Windows. Like it not working well on a 1 year old graphics card. Now I'm not talking about what people whine about with Vista and Geforce 8's, but that you don't even get a picture from the X server on the live CD, even in VGA mode, if you have such a card.
So Linux IS unfortunately still very much "hit & miss" to me, and that's the #1 thing I'd like to see improve. The examples I gave depends a lot on hardware manufacturer support, but I could just as well have given software examples. For example, in the very latest KDE version (of the 3.5 branch), Konqueror's column icon view didn't even work with keyboard navigation. It skipped icons and jumped around. It works well in Windows, and Nautilus. This is a very very basic feature to me.
Eh... not so sure. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not so sure. I think the real next stop is actually handheld devices, be they cellphones or tablets. Not only that, but I'm willing to bet most people won't even know or care that these devices are running linux. The only people who have ever cared about what they run on their desktops is A) Geeks and/or B) Fanboys.
Re:Same old, same old. (Score:2, Insightful)
Red Hat, Canonical, Novell... hell, even Microsoft have a few open source projects kicking around.
Re:To working.... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Use the latest desktop-oriented distro.
3. Did I remember to say buy supported hardware?
There are always people trying to make non-supported hardware work on Linux, who are trying out various arcane command line incantations, alpha-quality reverse engineered drivers and hacks like ndiswrapper to make it work with Linux. If you do not want to be part of them, you must accept that said card will not work under Linux. No, you can't expect every piece of hardware, working as it might be in Windows, to also work in Linux.
Would duplicating Windows' method be any problem? Hell no, I see it every time I run "wine setup.exe". Linux has it's variation of that too, but I prefer the distro way. It's not like a distro is anything like a monopoly, consider it more like a megamart with a searchable index. Why you'd try to chase down random snippets of code to run *and* and the same time claim you want mainstream userfriendliness, well it just doesn't compute.
Re:Linux isn't done yet (Score:3, Insightful)
Your only "problem" is that since the development process if much more transparent you want to get the product before it's ready for everonye. Consider that a benefit in itself.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Linux isn't done yet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hot air rises (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't do it because:
* The LiveCD can't possibly have drivers for all future video cards
* The LiveCD can't even guarantee the ability to read the host computer's HD to save the game. The HD could be encrypted or in a format it doesn't understand.
* The LiveCD can't possible guarantee it will have every game accessory the player may use during the game (like a voice chat program, or maybe a web browser), and if it did, it would have to be re-configured for every game.
Running in a VM is a new angle I hadn't seen before, and might solve a couple of these problems, but it still seems a lot more trouble than it's worth. The number one most important reason is this:
* DirectX already exists. Why reinvent the wheel?
Re:Linux isn't done yet (Score:5, Insightful)
sudo apt-get install rapidsvn
Output of this command:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libsvncpp0c2a libwxbase2.6-0 libwxgtk2.6-0
Suggested packages:
libgnomeprintui2.2-0
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libsvncpp0c2a libwxbase2.6-0 libwxgtk2.6-0 rapidsvn
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 3817kB of archives.
After unpacking 10.8MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com] feisty/universe libsvncpp0c2a 0.9.4-1ubuntu3 [73.1kB]
Get:2 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com] feisty/universe libwxbase2.6-0 2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6 [567kB]
Get:3 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com] feisty/universe libwxgtk2.6-0 2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6 [2875kB]
Get:4 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com] feisty/universe rapidsvn 0.9.4-1ubuntu3 [303kB]
Fetched 3817kB in 16s (237kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package libsvncpp0c2a.
(Reading database
Unpacking libsvncpp0c2a (from
Selecting previously deselected package libwxbase2.6-0.
Unpacking libwxbase2.6-0 (from
Selecting previously deselected package libwxgtk2.6-0.
Unpacking libwxgtk2.6-0 (from
Selecting previously deselected package rapidsvn.
Unpacking rapidsvn (from
Setting up libsvncpp0c2a (0.9.4-1ubuntu3)
Setting up libwxbase2.6-0 (2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6)
Setting up libwxgtk2.6-0 (2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6)
Setting up rapidsvn (0.9.4-1ubuntu3)
Wow! That was so easy! Took me 30 seconds to install including downloading. Would have taken longer to install on windows just to find the rapidsvn website, download the files, click the install button and hit the next button on the wizard. Geez people start using Ubuntu or at least a Debian based distro. It's not 1997 anymore.
Where Are The Users? (Score:5, Insightful)
The users. There's virtually no mention of them. There's talk about companies who are connected with Linux, about the technology, about the freedom of open software. But of the actual users there's only one passing reference.
If you want to advance Linux, start thinking about the users - their needs, their desires, their problems, and so on. To begin anywhere else is to neglect the most important part of the equation, and Linux will remain a "system for nerds" forever.
And so far as "Where does Linux go from here", send it to rewrite.
Re:I know where you can go... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Linux isn't done yet (Score:3, Insightful)
Your claims of increased productivity are no more statistically valid as an indicator of Linux's effects on productivity than the GP poster's claims that it's been a productivity drain. And as far as the GP poster's over-arching point, that Linux suffers from multiple, subtly-incompatible systems competing for marketshare with one another, I think he's actually making a very useful point that Linux developers would do well to bear in mind.
In short, you admit that you've not seen a "real" statistical analysis of the productivity gains or losses related to an OS switch... so why even bother to chime in, except to tell us you're a CS major and you've compiled some Linux stuff from source? (As for your claim of "exponentially" increasing your productivity by simply switching to a new OS... come on now. I'd think that a critical thinking class would also teach you that making wildly inaccurate & unfounded claims with no supporting evidence is typically met with derision and skepticism...)
Pretty much. (Score:4, Insightful)
#1. Develop your own system, keep it proprietary and hope that Microsoft doesn't see enough value in taking it from you.
#2. Support Microsoft's system and hope you can:
2a. compete with everyone else doing the same
2b. make enough profit to survive, but not enough so that Microsoft moves into the market itself.
#3. Go Open Source / Free Software and try to get your system enough marketshare that you can turn a profit, somehow.
#4. Give up on the computer industry and close your shop.
Sun has realized that #3 is the only option short of just giving up. At least they have something marketable - their expertise in the systems that they designed and that they built.
Re:Hot air rises (Score:2, Insightful)
Here, use this. You're stuff will get pirated less.
Re:not an enterprise operating system (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong on ALL accounts.
There IS a standard way for ALL Linuxes to monitor EVERYTHING. Smartd+snmp will do the trick and it works just about the same for them all.
As for the rest, vendors create their measly, unoperable, stupid shitty stuff to supposedly "monitor" things. They are all really pretty badly made, but its "their" way.
That being said, "Linux" as an abstract entity has no room in corpoland, you need to start thinking RHEL or SLES, and there you will see: all RHEL is monitored the same way, all SLES is monitored the same way. If you wanna use the crap monitoring stuff dell, hp and ibm attempt to push down your throat, by all means, do it, but dont come crying to us.
Re:Hot air rises (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly! OpenGL already exists, why in hell would anyone invent DirectX?