A Peek Into Tomorrow's Linux 126
jellybeans writes "MadPenguin.org takes a peek into the world of Linux as it looks going forward. "I hear this argument all the time. How companies trying to make Linux more accessible, through any means necessary, so long as they abide by the GPL, are working against the vision of Linux from the beginning. This is asinine. The vision, based on my own interpretation of Linux was always about choice."
Good article (Score:5, Insightful)
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guis are nice for tools i'm not fimilar with.... but it takes 3 commands for me to setup a network. and i'd rater add them to a boot script then look for -then figure out- a gui tool.
however i do like the
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The great thing with Linux and all the GUI tools is that people who need or want the GUI can use it and the rest of us can pop open a shell and do it the CLI way. Since the CLI tools are Free, even if a distro is stupid enough to remove them, they can always be put back. There's little reason to remove them since they take a fraction of the space the GUI tools do. It's not only the less resource intensive way, it's the more consistant way and in some cases, the only practical way.
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Re:Good article (Score:5, Funny)
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Here's the computation:
http://www.google.com/search?q=pi+*+e&btnG=Search [google.com]
And here's an explanation of its components:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant) [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, we just have to make sure there are always enough developers for the Slackware's, Debian's and Gentoo's to make sure the power side of the OS is kept as powerful as we need it to be.
I honestly haven't seen a loss of power from Debian to Ubuntu. Really the power side is stable, and good, its the user-friendly part that could use a bit of help. Linux has a stable kernel, stable shells, stable package managers, stable GUIs, a few stable browsers and many stable programs, however to say that from Joe Windows-User's standpoint they aren't really easy to use and until Linux can shed the "free copy of Windows" syndrome that happens when people don't understand there are OSes besides Win
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Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
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Please, show me one distro that has achieved wide popularity that takes Linux and makes it watered down and its not easy to do all the power user stuff.
Whenever Linux is connected to some form of package management, power-user stuff is available. It's about whether it is encouraged. In ubuntu, it is not. I mean, hell, it doesn't even include build-essentials by default. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any distros that water it down to impossibility, because, for that to occur, you would have to make a linux system incompatible with the power tools, which would require major rework of the operating system. Why bother when you can just put friendly GUIs
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I really don't think that any distro has watered down Linux.
You obviously haven't seen the default OS that ships with the Asus Eee [eeeuser.com] notebook -- a dumbed down version of Xandros [eeeuser.com]. You'd better hope that you can find the applications you need in the collection of huge 2" icons, because that's all there is. You don't even get a normal desktop until you install some packages from an added repository.
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As a certain chair-flinging goon is wont to say: 'de
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Yes, there's often a lack of low-dependency alternatives to the newly desktopized applications.
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I don't know if KDE4 is moving
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Yes I just encountered this a few days ago. I use Claws-Mail which has a HTML mail rendering plugin that uses gtkhtml. Now last year to compile that I would have needed to actually compile some gnome stuff, but this year, all I needed was a relatively recent GTK (and gail I think) Much better.
I don't use QT apps because I can't get QT3/4 to compile on this box (mipsel)
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Your point is well-taken, but there's an important difference between Windows and Windows-like Linux. The latter is open source, so security holes and bugs are addressed rapidly and efficiently by a huge community that includes some of the best programmers in the world.
Microsoft, on the other hand, will pretend there's nothing wrong until somebody rubs their nose in the problem. At that point, they'll come up with some patch that only an idiot would install without waiting for a few days to see if the
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Further, if someone makes a simple distro they aren't ripping Slackware from your hands. Rest assured that you will always enjoy the availability of elitist distros.
If anything, they just add to the pool of choice.
I wonder if the real gripes about simple Linux isn't about that the 1337 h4X0rZ feel that t
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Re:Good article (Score:5, Insightful)
User friendliness (aka usable by idiots) is a GOOD thing because it allows us to do what needs to be done, faster. I don't want to take 5 minutes to do something that could be made in 30 seconds, and I guess other people think the same way, geeks or not.
Guess I should be answering this from Lynx and not Firefox.
Re:Good article (Score:5, Insightful)
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Whereas if you use the latest 'control panel' busybox to configure wireless, you've got your wireless... until the next shiney-thing distro comes along, and you have to learn a whole new set of buttons to press.
There's an inhere
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Re:Good article (Score:4, Insightful)
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And it's not just linux this applies too, i've encountered windows and mac problems where it was necessary to use the cli or edit the registry to make something work or fix a problem.
Re:Good article (Score:5, Insightful)
I think, while by now people have learned to distinguish between "users" and "power users", there is one more level of distinction to be made. That is between "power users" and "system admins". I use command line a lot for my daily tasks, I custom and build some of the software I use, and I constantly tweak my ubuntu installation, so I consider myself a power user. OTOH, I don't consider myself a system admin, not when all I have to manage is 3 ubuntu desktops. For a system admin, yeah, learning how to do things in the bare metal way can be really beneficial, because it's cost effective when you have 278 system to amortize your effort with. It's a completely different economy for desktop users.
You say that as if "the bare-metal ways" don't change as often, if not more often. 8-)Re:Good article (Score:4, Insightful)
They strive for user friendliness just as much as other distros.
However their targent audience is power users, not your average computer user.
People who dont mind opening a text editor to add a wifi key and people who want more power and control than what pretty guis can ever provide.
A few hours to set up wifi is somewhat incorrect.
On Gentoo I had to emerge madwifi-ng and then create a new symlink for the new init entry.
Out of the box it scans for the best open wireless network, connects and runs dhcp.
Adding a WEP access point is just a matter of telling it which AP uses which key. One simple line.
Not for your average user but its certainly not difficult.
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I loved Slackware for that. As I learn Ubuntu, it's getting just as easy to do things in it. RH is the same way. I can still run my environment (WindowMaker) on Ubuntu, and just by importing my GNUstep directory I get the same interface I've had for the last 6 years. All my key maps are the same, and it's like an extension of my mind at that point.
Because of cur
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If you're adding a WEP access point in 2008, then you're doing worse than your average user.
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Yeah, a few DAYS is more like it. I fell into version/dependency hell trying to install a native rt2x00 driver only to find out that all the forum posts/"documentation" for my wireless card were outdated and I needed to install a SECOND driver (rt61) from source for it to work. I'm sure we all have thousands of linux nightmares like this, and it really doesn't surprise me that Windows still reigns supreme on the desktop. Decentralized or non-existent doc
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A P3 should only take 2 - 3 days to get everything including KDE.
I've never had a linux problem which I couldnt fix myself or what Google couldnt fix.
Taking a week to fix a problem is far too long and you must be doing something wrong.
Sure I've hit the odd snag over the years but its been pretty smooth.
And do keep in mind that once hardware is configured, you dont need to touch it ever again.
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Plus, 1 hour to get Ubuntu installed compared to minimum 2 weeks here in Iraq over a crappy satelite connection from an Italian ISP which Google somehow thinks is in the Netherland Antilles.
Re:Good article (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends on what you mean by user friendliness. Generally people refer to user friendliness as a metric of how easy it is to learn how to use a program, and not how productive one will be with said program. The latter is often sacrificed for the former (because it's less work to remove a feature than to make it easy to learn), but it doesn't have to be.
Now you're mixing the two up, assuming that making something easy to learn will instantly also make that program the most efficient way to get something done. This is an incorrect assumption. A program that is easy to learn does not imply that it is efficient, nor does a program being efficient imply that it is easy to use. Similarly, a program that is difficult to learn does not imply that it is efficient, nor does a program that is efficient mean that it is difficult to learn.
Obviously, making a program both easy to learn and efficient to use is the ideal. However, if you can actually figure out how to do so in any non-trivial case, you'll probably be able to retire by the time you're about 30.
For example, Notepad is a very easy to learn text editor. Notepad, however, is hideously inefficient for actually editing text with. In comparison, Vim is a difficult text editor to learn how to use, but once you know how to use it, you'll find yourself several orders of magnitude more efficient at editing text than someone who only uses Notepad. If you think that comparison is unfair, replace Notepad with your favourite word processor, but the large gap in efficiency does not change (though the ease of learning how to use it dips).
So yes, ease of learning is good, but efficiency of use is more important, especially for people who already know how to use the program. Unfortunately, ease of learning a program is more flashy and marketable than efficiency of use, and keeping in mind the quickest path to making something easier to use (removing features, as noted above), you can understand why people who already know how to use something really don't want developers to take the short road to making something easier to learn, as it gains the experienced user nothing, while possibly giving up feature(s) in return.
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If you're a system administrator, you might consider it more efficient to do it differently. And then there's those who just do it the hard way cause it makes them feel good about themselves.
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However, I like a nice GUI to twiddle the settings after that, preferably one that's web based as all my servers are located physically far away.
So: support webmin, then you get to keep the config file, and have a gui to edit it wit
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For example, Notepad is a very easy to learn text editor. Notepad, however, is hideously inefficient for actually editing text with. In comparison, Vim is a difficult text editor to learn how to use, but once you know how to use it, you'll find yourself several orders of magnitude more efficient at editing text than someone who only uses Notepad.
I believe you are using a rather narrow definition of efficiency. In particular, for software that is only used occasionally, the learning curve is the dominant reducer of efficiency. The same reasoning applies to the aspects of your example that are not used every day (the configuration process, for example). Furthermore, like it or not, there are plenty of users who rarely edit text; for them, vim is far less efficient than notepad.
Herein lies the fundamental OSS challenge on usability. Most OSS a
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You must be new here: telnet to port 80.
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User friendliness (aka usable by idiots) is a GOOD thing because it allows us to do what needs to be done, faster. I don't want to take 5 minutes to do something that could be made in 30 seconds, and I guess other people think the same way, geeks or not.
I think that when people raise objections to the user friendly stuff, we really don't know why we don't like it (so we make up bullshit, as humans are prone to do). I don't actually object to things that are easy to use, but I hate ubuntu. Why? I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect it actually has to do with these "easy" systems having more complexity than I can understand. I don't like it. I prefer package management systems for "power users", because I can understand them. I like config files for the same
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Install Already! (Score:2)
So, I may
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We have two Canon cameras - DSLR and a video one. Pretty much everything is manually tweakable but there's also a setting I call the 'idiot button' that puts them into full auto mode. It's good enough for 90% of situations. For the other 10% (where you'd need some technical knowledge anyway) you can go to
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The new office was designed to be easier to use by everyone. My understanding is that it is easier to use if you've never used it before, however experienced users found it less intuitive. I've yet to do anything terribly advanced with it, however I suspect it may have made the best case slower, but improved the average case.
That having been said, I find keyboard shortcuts for most tasks to be quite invaluable; I'm very glad the latest beta
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What's good is to have the choice, a watered down gui for new users, while having a capable command line for experienced users.
To give an example that annoys me, a graphical "installer" program which requires you to sit there and keep hitting next is very annoying, compared to a package manager where i can type a single command and not be bothered by
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Including shooting off their feet. That's the part user-friendliness advocates tend to forget so commonly.
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"Make a tool easy enough for even idiots to use, and only idiots will use it."
Oh, stop this fallacy already.
It's not a fallacy, but it's also not the whole truth. "Power-user systems" tend to scale much better with complex requests, because they hide much fewer options. However, that doesn't mean the complexity of doing it should exceed the complexity of the action itself. For example, to enable WPA shouldn't be more difficult than System settings -> Network -> Wireless -> Security -> Encryption = "WPA", enter password and you're done. If you got three pages of arcane hacking to do it, the system isn
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Oh, I'm sorry, that's not the kind of user friendliness you were talking about?
A tool for idiots (Score:2)
So you've never used a spoon, right idiot? ;-P
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So you've never used a spoon, right idiot?
I guess you didn't get the memo. There is no spoon.
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"about choice" (Score:3, Interesting)
Were you talking about GNU/Linux? Cause we all know what GNU is about and it isn't "choice".
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Precisely. GNU is about "freedom".
As long as I can get it the way I can like it (Score:3)
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Some people just don't have it.
Linux Excuse #27 (Score:1)
Linux Reason #27 (Score:2)
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ZOMG finally! (Score:2)
It is about choice... among other things (Score:4, Interesting)
Then it was "hey, look... it's like a baby Unix"
Then "wow, it's actually usable if you don't need tight compatibility with MS.
Now... there are 5 different ways that I personally can use MY computers as I see fit. I'm only talking about flavors of GNU/Linux here. Each of them has free apps that are all compatible, more or less. Each of them is comparable to Windows. Each of them will work for many users, all save those few who use apps that will ONLY work on Windows or Mac. Each of them is fairly user friendly, and I mean that in the same way that managing an XP install is user friendly for your average user. (I don't care whose coolaid you drink, Windows set a fairly low standard for user friendliness in terms of how many people can actually manage a windows system out of the box... Think I'm wrong? then explain Geek Squad and other businesses like it)
Right now, it is EASIER to get and install GNU/Linux than MS Windows. The applications work as good or better 90% of the time on a strict is-it-as-good-as-windows scale, which I think is a bogus way to compare them anyway. If you have ever had to teach your parent/uncle/friend how to use e-mail then you KNOW it would not matter what OS they used.
Being able to say, hey, I want to throw a new motherboard in that case, move it to the upstairs family room, add a video tuner, blah blah blah... you are only dreaming unless you have a licensed but unused copy of Windows hanging around.. UNLESS you are using one of the other choices for OS.
Personally, based on inconvenience alone, I will never use windows again by choice.
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Being able to say, hey, I want to throw a new motherboard in that case, move it to the upstairs family room, add a video tuner, blah blah blah... you are only dreaming unless you have a licensed but unused copy of Windows hanging around.
I'm not sure where you're going with that statement. If you want to throw in a new mobo and add a tuner you can do it, you just have to phone the Microsoft authentication line. I've done it about 4 times now. The only painful part about it was getting past the obvious Indian accent that the reps had. They pretty much only ask you for the Key and how many machines it's installed on and then give you the new activation number.
Is that easier than a clean install
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Unless the new mb has an incompatable IDE (esp RAID/SATA) controller, in which case it can be a lot more work (often a reinstall) to get windows to work than linux (which usually at most requires adding the driver to the kernel if it's not already there). There can also be ACPI incompatabilities that can require a reinstall or some tricky fiddling (as anyone who's tried to boot their v
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Yeah, we all get caught by the blue screen thing until we figure that one out, happened to me too the first time I had to switch to a totally incompatible board...but thats all there is to it. One tiny key.
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(I've switched motherboards with the most incompatible setups you can imagine, and never had this issue).
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That said, as I mentionned to other people, my point wasn't to say Windows was easy: it was just to say that you would never have to do a reinstall for something like that. Nothing more, nothing less.
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I'm sure you are talking out your expectation or directly lying. I know because I literally did they both.
The registry was first: go start programs, look for execute, write down regedt32 and press enter (it was quite a time ago); look at the left pane (I don't see any pane); expand HKLM (what's that?) expand this branch, then this one then... (heck, I don't remember th
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I mean, of course if you sa
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I didn't say you were lying because I didn't believe you managed to get someone through the steps to modify some registry entry. I said you were lying because there's no chance you really directed people over the phone both on a GUI and a text command line and found the former easier.
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I love desktop Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I think Fedora and Ubuntu are great! I love how they have such friendly communities to turn to for help. But when The Year Of The Linux Desktop comes, it's not going to be like this -- it's going to be from preinstalled systems. And I, for one, think that this t
Linux in a Windows world (Score:2, Insightful)
Just call it by the distribution name (Score:2)
Don't say "in Linux", say "in Ubuntu" or "in Fedora". Ubuntu itself very rarely mentions the name "Linux" in its stock UI. End-users don't need to know that Ubuntu is Linux any more than they need to know that Windows Vista is Windows NT.
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Look, people cope with different Windows systems behaving very differently every day. Different Linux distros are more different from one another, but not by all that much. The solution is education, not dumbing down.
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Exactly. I know most users couldn't give two pennies about the crazy configurability of Linux. Heck most people i know don't even use bookmarks, they resort to scrolling through the recently visited sites in the address bar.
What would be the point of introducing these types to Linux. None I guess, other then cheaper software. I would more be for us UNIX/Linux guys/gals who don't want to use Windows at all, even thought everyone we work with does.
You underestimate Joe Sixpack, he could have used Windows f
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OS X doesn't even do that... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mac OS X doesn't even try a damnfool thing like that.
Hell, even Windows doesn't try a damnfool thing like that.
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That hinders adoption because you cant say "Ok in Linux to change setting A, click Start->Control Panel->widget.
That is why most of the help you find is along the lines of "Copy the below text into your terminal", because by and large most distros are the same at the terminal level. This has the added benefit of being a single instruction, instead of a series of "Are you there yet? ok, now..." instructions, and it doesn't rely on possibly confusing terms (i.e. "How can I click on your computer?" when you tell someone to "Click on My Computer"). And if you think you can use the same point-and-click instructions fr
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But you can't say "in Windows..." either, because it keeps changing between versions. (You can't even say "in Windows Vista..." or "in Windows XP...", because you don't know which mode the user's control panel is set to display in.)
The real problem is that people are much more forgiving towards Windows. When they can't get something working in Windows, they shrug resignedly and assume that
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asinine? (Score:3, Insightful)
> I hear this argument all the time. How companies trying to make Linux more accessible,
> through any means necessary, so long as they abide by the GPL, are working against the
> vision of Linux from the beginning. This is asinine.
no, this is a straw-man.
it's also a bizarre tangential rant. he was writing a (fairly lame and light-on) review of little linux-based desktop/laptop devices - and then suddenly goes off on this weird rant to pre-emptively address an entirely unheard criticism followed by an even more bizarre attack on imaginary "crazy whack-job" linux dudes who happen to be trapped in the 1990s for some unexplained reason.
Hey Matt, don't look now but your inferiority complex is showing! it must be way past time for your medication.
the great thing about Linux is ... it Linux (Score:3, Insightful)