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Linux Software

Linux Advocacy From the Trenches 262

Posted by CmdrTaco from the duck-and-cover dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Tom Adelstein, longtime Linux advocate and consultant has spent the last year working closely with state, local, and federal government open source software initiatives. Tom launched Government Forge,spearheaded the Open Source bill in Texas and other programs. Tom shares the grass roots efforts that have offered him an insider's view of what is propelling Linux toward critical mass and the desktop. He shares his view of Linux "from the trenches" in this interview."
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Linux Advocacy From the Trenches More

Linux Advocacy From the Trenches

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  • Big Bully (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tarquin_fim_bim ( 649994 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:11PM (#7057870)
    "The main PC makers have held back on releasing Linux desktops only because they're afraid of offending Microsoft"

    It saddens the heart to on ponder on the technological advancements that have been missed because of this disgusting behaviour. And what is worse, is that many blindly idolise this company and it's unethical practises. Man the lifeboats or go down with the ship.

    • Re:Big Bully (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:31PM (#7058094) Journal
      You do realize the quote is from a self-admitted linux zealot, take it as such.

      I could think of a million technical reasons not to release Linux desktops.

      They all boil down to linux sucking as a desktop machine. Very few of their customers want it. How many linux dudes here are gettin' a Dell?

      It's just not worth the cost to tweak a distro for their needs, then support it down the road. And how do you support it once people start recompiling their own kernels and userspace apps - not talking about corporate world here, but the average linux user?

      The PC makers are driven by profits, not by Microsoft. Make preloading a linux desktop profitable, and watch the landscape change.

      MS's tactics haven't stopped them from shipping linux on servers instead of 2003.

      • Re:Big Bully (Score:2, Informative)

        by Penguinshit ( 591885 )
        That's all well and fine if you want to discount the fact that Microsoft forbid PC distributors from releasing an alternative OS on their systems. Microsoft isn't supposed to do that anymore, but still plays games with "Preferred Partnership" programs and the like.

        So, the PC distributors who had customers requesting a Linux desktop system were not allowed to even investigate opening up that market because Microsoft would have jacked up their costs of bundling Windoze on the rest of their systems. Truly

      • Re:Big Bully (Score:2, Funny)

        by UtucXul ( 658400 )
        You aren't actually suggesting that Dell supports the computers that it sells with windows, are you? Back in the dark days when the old Dell I have still occasionally got booted into windows, my modem died. When I called Dell (it was still under warrenty then), they refused to replace it because they couldn't do "online trouble shooting" since I had WIn2K on it. How did they expect to do online trouble shooting on a computer with a broken modem regardless of the OS? With that kind of support, I don't th

  • Ah, Linux / BSD / Unix in general... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:17PM (#7057934)
    Does anybody miss the days when Unix was respected? Back in those days, if you ran Unix or a variant, men would tip their hats at you, people would call you "Sir", women would approach you instead of waiting to be approached, and no one would question the decisions you made.

    Nowadays most any chump will try and recommend Windows, even if it's not the right solution to a problem, just because it's all they know and all they ever learnt. They don't have the uncertainty and fear of Ghod in their hearts like most people used to.

    A crying shame.
    • And remember the days when you could get a free ice cream cone if you told the clerk at Baskin Robbins that you used an Amiga?

      Ah, the good old days...
    • Bull shit. All the VMS idiots were picking on me.

      But I fixed them, did I . I 0x'ed em. They came back as Windows NT.

      No wonder somebody said that Unix and C were the ultimate viruses....
    • As oposed to recomending Linux even when it's not the right solution to a problem?

    • Re:Ah, Linux / BSD / Unix in general... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @06:41PM (#7059492) Journal
      Does anybody miss the days when Unix was respected?

      Modded as funny, but there's some sad truth here. Certain developments, mostly by Microsoft, have lowered the entry barrier into computing. This is a good thing in the case of end-users, but things like VB and point-and-click NT server installations and database management tools have brought in droves of drongoes doing development work and system administration.

      To use the inaccurate but wildly popular Construction/Architecture analogy: it is like someone has come up with really big Lego blocks with which you can build your own home. These blocks come with plumbing, wiring, and are ready to use. So, now everyone can build their own home, right? Sure... but people will soon find out that properly designing a home is an art, and that you still need to know how to lay a solid foundation before you start building. But if everyone is able to build a home that will stand, more or less, people will lose their respect for architects and construction workers.

      And that, my friends, is what I have seen happening in our own IT industry: when company managers saw that pretty much anyone could be taught to program and administer systems, sort of, they started hiring anyone with approcimately the right body temperature. The result is that management, and society in general, has lost its respect for IT professionals. Even when the demand for IT people peaked, interest in IT studies was lukewarm at best, and wages weren't all that good for academics working in IT, compared to their colleagues in other disciplines (at least, this seemed the case in mainland Europe).

      I for one do remember when I started in this industry, and when I was indeed respected as a professional. Those days are long gone.

  • Linux is only lacking in the apps. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:19PM (#7057954) Homepage
    The kernel, basic system and desktop (ala kde/gnome) is there and ready to go right now.

    Open office is really darn close, Mozilla is dead on...

    but... some things are lacking horribly...

    Examples? Video editing.. nothing available for linux can touch adobe Premiere.. not even the old version 5.0 of it.

    Desktop publishing? It's finally starting to get there with the one app we have.

    but the biggest hold back is that unless you are a medium level linux user you CANNOT install software without a fight.

    a newbie want to click on an install icon... like UT, quake3, or all the loki games has.. and Open Office and Mozilla .. they have them too...

    linux needs a unified installer system. it needs to be a click-and-drool GUI (command line capability though)

    this is desperately needed and actually USED by the developers.
    • very true. the linux installer for quake3 can go cli or gui which is very good especially when doing a remote install for a friend who's having problems or even dear old mom.

      a unified installer will probably be that god forsaken RPM format, which should be done away with. But my personal opinions aside, I agree with the comment about Premier. Even just working with audio alone there's a windows app called SoundForge [soundforge.com] that's pretty awesome and I use it frequently. Is there one for linux yet? Sadly there isn'
    • /* a newbie want to click on an install icon... like UT, quake3, or all the loki games has.. and Open Office and Mozilla .. they have them too... */

      Newbie fucking hell. I'm not exactly a newbie and all I want is a fucking icon to click to install.

      Yes, apt-get install foo is nice and all, but compared to clicking an icon labeled "Install", it's rocket science for 99% of the people out there.
      • Well, you could always use something like synaptic, which is actually easier than using an installer program, because you don't have to do all the shit the Windows installer makes you do, you just have to choose your app.

        • Why synaptic still isn't good enough (Score:5, Insightful)

          by lordcorusa ( 591938 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @04:55PM (#7058888)
          apt-get and Synaptic are absolutely fabulous apps for those of us who are experienced using Linux and installing software for it. However, they fail to help newbies because the process they use to get and install software does not map to the way the newbie thinks about installing software. And anyone who says "The way the newbie thinks is wrong" is simply failing to understand newbies at all.

          Now that I've made a generalization, let's have a specific run-through of the problem. I have first-hand experience with switching (some successfully, some not) a number of Windows users to Linux, and here is the problem that they all run into. (NOTE: I ran into this very same problem when I first switched, but I knew no one who could hold my hand through it all. The only reasons I am still using Linux are that I am far more intelligent than most people, so I am better at figuring things out on my own, and I am also incredibly stubborn when it comes to learning something new.)

          You are Joe Newbie. You've got your nice shiny Linux system running. You hear about a great app called "FooBar". You like what you hear about it and you decide you want to try it. You search google for it, and go to www.foobar-software.org. You try to download it. But you can only get source or an RPM or DEB package. (Let's assume your friend set you up with Libranet and for some reason you actually know that it's a Debian based distro -- a stretch in its own right) You download the DEB, but you run into dependency conflicts. It wouldn't be so bad if this happened once or twice, but it happens for bloody near every app you try to install.

          Now all seasoned Debian users, as well as most users of other distros, will be screaming at you to use apt-get or synaptic, or whatever other package management system. But that's the problem. People accustomed to Windows or Mac are accustomed to going to a store or a vendor's web site and getting the software they want. They have no idea that their computer might somehow "magically" know how to get it for them. Heck, if you didn't know better, why would you think your system would know how to do that? Even when you show them how apt-get works, they still often forget and revert back to the old way. It's a very deeply ingrained habit that only the most persistent learn to break.

          To make things worse, even Debian, with a repository probably more exhaustive than any other distro's, still doesn't have all of the packages (and new versions of packages) that a user wants. If that user is a newbie, having to remember multiple methods for acquiring software and knowing when to use each is a further strain.

          Granted, if a person sticks with Linux and becomes more accustomed to it, he or she will probably learn how to use apt-get (or insert package management system here) to streamline the package-acquisition process. However, it would be in open source's best interests to try to minimize culture shock so as to further help bring more people in.

          So the grandparent poster was dead-on. For example, Mozilla really does get it. Their installer is distro-agnostic and installs everything that the package needs. Even though this may introduce more bloat (redundant packages) for any given distro, it also results in an easy installation for a newbie. Advanced users will know how to get better versions of Mozilla specifically for their distros, but newbies will still be able to participate by getting Mozilla the way they know best.

          All end-user focused software packages should follow Mozilla's example of providing a simple executable installer which contains all libraries and files needed to run the software independently of most, if not all, other packages on the system. This certainly isn't the ideal setup from a sysadmin or advanced user standpoint, but it is needed to match the way newbies think about installing software.
          • Ok, so we can't be better than Windows and Mac because people are too used to their faults? The Win/Mac way of installing software makes no sense. I want my software installed. I don't care if it has to sacrifice some virgins to do it. apt-get does that. Windows installer and its Next->Next->Next->Finish braindeadness doesn't.

            Fuck it. You guys keep the newbies :)

            PS> A nice solution to this might be to make something like a "application install shortcut." Instead of being an actual installer, i
    • I think OOo is already there, but I don't use my office suite all that much.
      but the biggest hold back is that unless you are a medium level linux user you CANNOT install software without a fight.
      Install under '~/'. Non-administrators on Windows (NT) systems have the same disability, but on Windows systems everyone is an administrator anyway.
    • I couldn't agree more!

      Current Linux tactic of trying to reach both ends and only the ends of the bell curve is foolish because it means a lot of work to gain really small audiences. The day when (kernel) compiling is a doubleclick issue and when all the server programs ship with pretty and clean GUI is the level when the most prospective future Linux users will join. Why? Because there's a huge amount of people out there who'd basically want advanced linux but easier! To them commandline is the ultimate ob

    • Re:Linux is only lacking in the apps. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pavon ( 30274 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @04:43PM (#7058801)
      Here's the situation with installing stuff on linux. Developers are hellbent against statically compiling things (in many cases for good reason). In addition, due to the asyncronous nature of the open source development, there are all sorts of version of libraries in use by people at any one time. Therefore it isn't really possible for me as a developer to give you a package that installs on your system and just works, because I don't know what all your system entails. Dependency checking *has* to be done.

      So the "download a package and click on the icon" scenario will only work if clicking on that icon starts a program that does dependency checking, downloads dependencies off the internet, and then installs. This would be better, but not optimal, because you have to start downloading the package, wait for package to download, then start the install, then wait for the libraries to down load and install. The problem is the act,wait,act,wait. It would be better to have act,act,wait,wait - same amount of time overall, but free's up the user to do something else (ie, workflow is controled by the user, not the computer).

      Here's an idea. It is simular to how streaming integrates with the browser. Say we create a redirection file type whose contents is just the name (or url) of a debian package. Within the filemanager and browser, this file type (MIME type) is associated to a GUI version of apt. Then as a developer I (or my debian maintainer) would put the debian package on the debian server, and I would put a link to a redirect file on my site. When the user clicked on the link it would start the apt gui which would look up the package specified by the redirect, determine dependencies, and then (after prompting the user for root password) would proceed to install all the necisarry packages for that app. One click installing. (hmm, I should patent this :)

      This is actually easier than the windows method, and meshes better with the technical issues that OSS has to deal with.
      • The way MacOS X solves this problems is a good idea and Linux might do well to learn from it. Applications come in the form of Bundles which are just fancy directories. To the user they are just singular icons in a folder. What makes Bundles special are the special files stored in them that mean something to the OS.

        A typical bundle only has one directory at the first level, Contents. In this directory is is the MacOS, Frameworks, Shared Frameworks, Resources, and Shared Support directories. The MacOS direc
        • yeah, I think that bundles are a nice way of distributing applications.

          In the past, UNIX was not so much application based, but rather you had files, and commands that worked on files. In this situation, the UNIX way of organizing file makes more sense. In addition, by having file system organized by how the files are used (ie /boot and /bin are hardware dependant, read-often, write-rarely, /usr/share is hardware independant, /var is write-often, etc) was (and still is to a lesser extent) really usefull be
          • You don't have to include any Frameworks with your application if you don't feel you need to. If you're using only system Frameworks or ones you can reasonably expect to exist on the system you only need to ship the binary and its resources in the bundle. Safari is a good example.

            In the beta versions of Safari the WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks were shipped in the app bundle. As they didn't exist on the system then it needed to ship with them. As soon as Safari went 1.0 Apple moved the frameworks We
      • Here's the situation with installing stuff on linux. Developers are hellbent against statically compiling things (in many cases for good reason).

        Right. Let's just get this out of the way first - static linking is not the solution (not least because not all dependencies can be statically linked anyway).

        So the "download a package and click on the icon" scenario will only work if clicking on that icon starts a program that does dependency checking, downloads dependencies off the internet, and then instal

    • Release engineering is hard and very boring work - a very unfortunate combination of qualities when nobody is getting paid.
    • "but the biggest hold back is that unless you are a medium level linux user you CANNOT install software without a fight. a newbie want to click on an install icon... like UT, quake3, or all the loki games has.. and Open Office and Mozilla .. they have them too... linux needs a unified installer system. it needs to be a click-and-drool GUI (command line capability though)"

      Well, with Gentoo Linux..simple as emerge and voila! It downloads the source....compiles it for you...takes care of the the lib and o

      • Good suggestion. A new Linux user has to open a terminal, know what the hell to even type, then wait for it to download and compile. That will endear Linux into the hearts of the uninitiated.

        However easy portage is to use it is not as friendly as an icon on the screen you can click.
    • You left out one crucial point that ties all of this together.

      Versionitis.

      I'm trying to build a full-blown desktop environment, so that I can get away from Windows entirely, except for games. The OS install took an evening. The apps are taking roughly a week EACH on average.

      OSS has a deep suspicion of precompiled binaries, and as a result they only exist for a few platforms (Mozilla being a relatively glorious exception). As a result I need to download the source, unpack, configure, compile, fix, fix, fi
    • Examples? Video editing.. nothing available for linux can touch adobe Premiere.. not even the old version 5.0 of it.

      Taken a look at Cinelerra [heroinewarrior.com] lately? Or MainActor [mainconcept.com]?

    • Not a lack of apps, too many of the wrong people (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ilan Volow ( 539597 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @05:57PM (#7059228) Homepage
      What's holding linux back? The linux community has a long heritage (starting with it's predecessor, unix) of devaluing graphical user interfaces in specific and usability in general.

      Isn't it odd we keep asking ourselves what stands in desktop linux's path when we all know where the unix people stood in 1984.

      A community that places no worth in non-technical people being able to get stuff done with a minimum of fuss has lost the battle for the desktop before it ever started fighting it. Every time I hear someone in the linux technical community refer to GUI's as 'click-and-drool', it is painfully clear to me as why linux is getting its asked kicked by an incompetant bunch of fools from Redmond Washington.

      I think desktops using a linux kernel will be so much better and more successful once the unix folks are shut out of the GUI design process. We let the programmers design algorithms, and we let'em design precious little else.

      Ergonomica Auctorita
    • "linux needs a unified installer system. it needs to be a click-and-drool GUI (command line capability though)"

      Okay, uh, go to www.mandrakeclub.com.

      If that seems too "complex," go to www.lindows.com

      But don't feel bad . . . the moderators need to do some research, as well.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Linux "Advocates" (Score:4, Funny)

    by Pave Low ( 566880 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:21PM (#7057984) Journal
    Slashdot Double Standard #50: Linux Advocates, Evangalists and Fans are pure noble warriors fighting the holy fight for good. The can do no wrong.

    Microsoft's defenders and supporters are almost always shills, corrupted, evil, immoral devils out to dominate the world.

  • for those that read the article... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zoloto ( 586738 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:24PM (#7058017)

    I also see history repeating itself. Remember when IBM had 96% of the PC Hardware market. Don't be surprised if you see Sun and some new market entries taking over from the current market leaders


    Sun hardware? It's one thing to have great hardware, but at such prices...
  • ...when at this very moment, the most important (IMHO) issue Linux faces is the very real threat of being rendered illegal via SCO?

    Articles which trumpet how nice Linux is (and it IS nice for many things) are much like articles talking about how best to play DVDs under Linux-- they tend to ignore the frightening and (IMHO) immoral legalities surrounding such things. It is still illegal to play a (store-bought, DVD-encrypted... which means 99% of mainstream movies) DVD under Linux, as there is no licensed
    • when at this very moment, the most important (IMHO) issue Linux faces is the very real threat of being rendered illegal via SCO?

      Perhaps because most other people around here do not consider that threat as being all that real? Dirt-throwing by SCO is very real, but there threats sound pretty hollow, especially due to low content/noise ratio of their actual claims, much less their proof (what proof?)

      Also, I would venture a guess that the Linux advocate in question has been working for a while, much lon

    • Anyone who takes SCO seriously is a troll or an idiot.
      Have a nice day.
    • >> It is still illegal to play a (store-bought, DVD-encrypted... which means 99% of mainstream movies) DVD under Linux, as there is no licensed CSS decryptor for desktop Linux systems.

      Not true, believe it or not. Lindows apparently licensed the technology. You can purchase a license from them ($40 if you don't have a click'n'run account, $5 if you do). Check it out here [lindows.com]. According to the sales rep I talked to, the license is good for both mplayer and xine.

      Still, you're right that our fair use r

  • advocate vs. zealot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sczimme ( 603413 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:26PM (#7058047)

    I recommended that instead of going forward with the migration, that we educate users and build support internally first.

    In response to perceived resistance, he decided to back off a bit and get "buy-in" from the people that actually would be using OpenOffice.org; IMO this was a smart move.

    I cringe whenever I see rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth zealots - regardless of topic (OS, programming language, political party, etc. - spouting off and alienating the people they are trying to convert. Such zealots hurt the cause they are trying to help.

    As an aside, I picture a modified logo and an advertisement for "A55 Hat Linux", a distro developed 'specially for the zealots...

    • As an aside, I picture a modified logo and an advertisement for "A55 Hat Linux", a distro developed 'specially for the zealots...
      Pure genius.
      /me frantically tries to catch his breath after laughing uncontrollably!

  • My wife once worked for Tom Adelstein.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Emrys ( 7536 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:32PM (#7058106)
    Shortly after he started Bynari, she got a job working for them with their then business model of acting as a US support center for Mandrake. It looked like a good opportunity at the time, but it went sour pretty fast.

    I spent some time talking to Tom and was shocked to find out he didn't apparently care all that much about OSS. He mostly cared about finding ways to make money off it. He was positively giddy when describing to me various turnkey vendors he was talking to who were building net appliances (consumer firewalls, etc.) which ran GNU/Linux but were themselves closed systems. They were pretty upfront when talking to investors that they were able to do this legally by making sure all of their mods were routed through kernel modules which were written in such a way they could stay proprietary. A lot of big vendors do this without trouble, it was more these guys' attitude that they were so clever for getting a free ride on Linux this way. It disgusted me.

    Anyway, Adelstein continually was trying to change Bynari's business model to find something that would make the big money. He reminds me of nothing so much as the Loki top brass fiasco stories or the Caldera/SCO stuff. He loves to talk himself up and position himself as a big name Linux consultant, but in my experience cares very little about software freedom for it's own sake or has any kind of deep technical understanding of what's even going on.

    But then maybe I'm just bitter because he fired my wife less than a week after finding out she was pregnant (draw your own conclusions), based on (foundless and unsupported) claims that she had been actively working to impair and destroy their systems. Then he refused to pay us the moving expenses he owed us until we got lawyers involved and reached a settlement. A few months after that was over we got contacted by the former Bynari CIO who had been fired after Tom reportedly claimed he was selling company secrets to the Japanese. I really tried to lose track of him after that.

    • Re:My wife once worked for Tom Adelstein.... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Do not tag the parent as a troll or offtopic! I can tell you that much, just not everything (because I don't know all of it first hand), of the parent story, is true. While I could certainly add much more detail and insights to the above story, I will not. I'm not actively looking to gun for Tom. Just the same, people should get a complete picture when they work with him.

      If you see a story about Tom or Bynari, chances are it was not only written by Tom, but submitted by Tom as well. He is well known f
      • Thanks. My first thought also was that he wrote and submitted this himself, but I didn't bother saying it, partly because it's been long enough I couldn't remember names like Consulting Times (one of my wife's tasks while at Bynari was some web work on an early rendition of that site).

        I'm not looking to gun for him either. We put this behind us a long time ago. But I really would like for people to know what he's like, lest he ever manage to suceed in digging himself deep enough that he can cause real
  • I am sitting in the middle of large information-centric US agency right now and I concur: OSS is adopted here very slowly.
    I have been plugging in OSS solutions for long time but most of the time they look at me like I am an idiot. It appears that problem is there is not a single recognizable vendor behind OSS products. Apache, Tomcat even JBoss have no chance at the moment. There are big bucks involved and large "traditional" vendors are like sharks circling around government contracts.
    I think OSS and gov

  • "Spearheaded"... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:40PM (#7058200)
    In fact, the government produces and finances the production of (via academic grants) lots of Free Software. I doubt the US government has any idea how much FOSS they are themselves responsible for producing (I realize that code produced directly by the government is generally public domain, and not released under any license per se).


    The government is no different from any large bureaucratic organization, like a Fortune 500 company. Tons of developers and IT people using Linux everywhere because they don't have to get umpteen budgetary approvals to take an old Pentium machine, throw it into the corner and make it a departmental or development server. Lots of Free Software behind the scenes everywhere that's supported internally.


    Sure, more advocacy is needed by large shops like IBM of their Linux work so that large bureaucratic organizations (governments included) don't have to shamefully keep their Linux servers hidden away and can freely admit when a project uses Free Software. But this still isn't going to go anywhere toward getting Linux on the desktop.


    I think the initial adoption of Windows on the desktop largely happened in corporations first and then overflowed into home use. But these days, I don't think it's that simple. I'm not convinced you can sell organizations on making a change to something that users aren't familiar with due to massive retraining costs (or at least the fear thereof) in the modern office, where Word, Powerpoint and so on are kind. I think you have to pursue the home audience first, where you can sell people on cost, features, reliability. Of course, you have to have a winning case before you can do that, and Linux doesn't really have that yet for the desktop.

  • Learning Linux by Trolling (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25, 2003 @03:42PM (#7058233)
    When I started out, I'd ask for help and people would say read the man pages. I didn't know what man pages were. Was Linux really that gay? I laugh when I think about that now. I discovered that you'd never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem.

    For example, I didn't know how to find files by contents and the man pages were way too confusing. What did I do? I knew from experience that if I just asked, I'd be told to read the man pages even though it was too hard for me. Instead, I did what works. Trolling. By stating that Linux sucked because it was so hard to find a file compared to Windows, I got every self-described Linux Guru around the world coming to my aid. They gave me examples after examples of different ways to do it. All this in order to prove to everyone that Linux was better.

    So if you're starting out Linux, I advise you to use the same method as I did to get help. Start the sentence with "Linux is gay because it can't do XXX like Windows can". You will have PhDs running to tell you how to solve your problems.
    • I can appreciate the parent posters frustration (I started in 1996), but his technique lacks a lot of integrity. Just because members of a community act abusively doesn't mean that your best approach should be to act abusively as well.

      But, more importantly, this RTFM! (Read The Fucking Manual!) trend is dying out. More and more I hear people taking an interest in helping other people, and that's probably a direct result of new users who (unlike our poster) instead of reacting aggressively to the old RTFM'

  • Advocacy...sigh. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 )
    If there's one thing that really hurts Linux, it's advocacy, especially when that advocacy is unfounded, uninformed, or overzealous. I really wish these so called "advocates" would just get on with their lives.

    Realistically, a lot of people--even knowledgeable, technical people--either prefer Windows or MacOS to Linux, or they see advantages and drawbacks to each of them. To such people, trying to force "Photoshop is better than The GIMP," or "Yes, there is a version of that application for Linux, it's [

  • OSS is not a religion (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mattgreen ( 701203 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @05:09PM (#7058954)
    Many advocates seem to confuse OSS with organized religion. Ironically, they disparage religion for its belief system and how it limits your life, but then they turn around make statements like "Keep yourself pure -- don't install Windows XP for Half Life 2!!" I'm sure I'm not the only one that laughed when I saw "keep yourself pure."

    It's an operating system, people. Not a way of life, or a higher moral standard, or any of that. Some of us just see it as a component of life, not the reason to tell others about it.

    When I see people evangelizing Linux, I can't help but feel like they are REALLY missing the point. Linux in and of itself is a wonderful accomplishment, but its not for everyone. This is completely intentional. The Linux community and advocates thrive on not being mainstream. The feeling that you are 'oppressed' (or whatever term you want to mistakenly apply) is that which keeps the fervor high in the zealots.

  • *An* alternative? Try *which* alternative. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by duck_prime ( 585628 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @05:27PM (#7059079)
    From the article:
    Of the lesser known, if you asked me which distribution to install for my aunt, I'd look toward Lycoris. If she was the youngest of my aunts, I might recommend Red Hat since I have had too many installation problems with SuSE.
    This displays two of the problems of widespread desktop linux acceptance:
    -- There are so many alternatives that it is hard and frightening for managers to pick one. Sounds silly, but Microsoft offers, for better or for worse, a de-facto standard on many fronts. Picking a linux, an open office-like suite, etc. introduces a huge set of choices which are perceived to have been already made.
    -- Dippy analogies like the above. Youngest aunt, indeed.

  • Sadly, the guy's trying to sell his only product, himself. Anyone believe that someone other than Adelstein is responsible for this /. submission?

    The governmentforge [governmentforge.com] site was created two months ago has no FAQ of its own, no downloads, and is virtually devoid of content. The Leopard [sourceforge.net] site was created last month and is likewise empty of any useful content. One interesting facet: it states "Project Requirements posted 17August 2004 at Sourceforge" so I guess he can travel into the future too. Maybe he's alrea

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