Linux Turns 25, Is Bigger and More Professional Than Ever (arstechnica.com) 316
The Linux operating system kernel is 25 years old this month, ArsTechnica writes. It was August 25, 1991 when Linus Torvalds posted his famous message announcing the project, claiming that Linux was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu." From the article: But now, Linux is far bigger and more professional than Torvalds could have imagined. Linux powers huge portions of the Internet's infrastructure, corporate data centers, websites, stock exchanges, the world's most widely used smartphone operating system, and nearly all of the world's fastest supercomputers. The successes easily outweigh Linux's failure to unseat Microsoft and Apple on PCs, but Linux has still managed to get on tens of millions of desktops and laptops and Linux software even runs on Windows.Do you use any Linux-based operating system? Share your experience with it. What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?
lol wut (Score:2, Funny)
Do you use any Linux-based operating system?
No, that's why I'm here on this linux loving website shit posting about microsoft since the late 90s
"More Professional Than Ever" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nope, Linus still leads the project, and he is employee of non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association
Re:"More Professional Than Ever" (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope, Linus still leads the project, and he is employee of non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association
Linus no longer appears on the top contributors list. Developers are overwhelmingly corporate or corporate sponsored. What he merges into the official branch is overwhelmingly corporate directed development.
Re:"More Professional Than Ever" (Score:5, Insightful)
You are confusing contributing with leading the project.
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Contributors don't get credit in corporations, only the upper managers get the kudos.
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You are confusing contributing with leading the project.
Actually he's conflating them. You are confusing 'conflate' and 'confuse'.
Re:"More Professional Than Ever" (Score:4, Informative)
er, Linux is just the kernel.
The GNU utilities (not corporate) and other open source wares (let's analyze that a bit) that make up the rest of the OS, are the big pieces corporate controlled?
server:
apache web server and tomcat java ee server: 501(c)(3) charitable organization, Apache Foundation
PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, node.js., the big web platforms...nope
mysql - yes oracle, BUT
mariadb is now used more than mysql, community led
postgresql -
java - oracle, very corporate controlled really
desktop:
the major desktops are community led
mozilla foundation: non-profit
chrome browser - yup google
adobe flash - yup though going away in favor of html5
So on the desktop I could choose to be corporate-ware based, or not...
FSF/GNU are happy with corporate directed (Score:2)
er, Linux is just the kernel.
No, Linux is an overloaded name that can refer to the kernel or the operating system as a whole. And it is used in both ways by many Linux advocates and enthusiasts. Context usually makes it quite clear which is being used.
In this discussion's context, Linux is corporate directed whether you are referring to the operating system or the kernel.
The GNU utilities (not corporate) and other open source wares ...
You also misunderstand the nature of corporate directed. If the developers of a GPL project are funded by a corporation then that corporation will have a lot to say
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er, Linux is just the kernel.
No, Linux is an overloaded name that can refer to the kernel or the operating system as a whole. And it is used in both ways by many Linux advocates and enthusiasts. Context usually makes it quite clear which is being used.
In this discussion's context,
You can't weasel your way out of this one. The summary is about Linux, then the discussion was about Linus and his Linux. Stop trying to make this about GNU.
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er, Linux is just the kernel.
No, Linux is an overloaded name that can refer to the kernel or the operating system as a whole. And it is used in both ways by many Linux advocates and enthusiasts. Context usually makes it quite clear which is being used.
In this discussion's context,
You can't weasel your way out of this one. The summary is about Linux, then the discussion was about Linus and his Linux. Stop trying to make this about GNU.
Re-read, I didn't bring up GNU, I'm the one replying GNU isn't relevant since they have nothing against corporate sponsored.
And to get back to my point, Linus is not that relevant anymore. Corporations, not Linus, are directing the development of Linux. Linus just reviews and merge's in their changes in one part of the Linux operating system, the Linux kernel. Their changes being what they are submitting themselves or what their financially supported external developers are submitting.
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There are technical dictionaries online now you know.
Apparently you should inform the editorial staff of the IEEE and Linus Torvalds as well, they too seem to refer to both the operating system and the kernel as Linux.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu... [ieee.org]
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Consider the context - here the textbook definition applies and not the slang that was ripped to shreds by the Judge in MS vs Netscape.
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This slang usage again - the operating system includes the solitaire game and the glowing thing on the desk is the "computer" while the beige box underneath is the "hard drive". Consider the context - here the textbook definition applies and not the slang that was ripped to shreds by the Judge in MS vs Netscape.
There are quite a few bits of serious software sitting between your solitaire game and the kernel.
Re:"More Professional Than Ever" (Score:5, Interesting)
You are confusing contributing with leading the project.
Determining what code is written, what new features are developed, is leading the project. Not merging the contributions after ensuring the code is well written.
Linus leads from behind. After a feature is developed, he decides whether it will be allowed into the kernel. It's the same sort of decisionmaking process as in most development workflows, it just front-ends most of the work.
In most development processes, someone will decide "the product should do X", and they'll make some slides and pitch the ideas and the leaders will decide whether or not to pursue it. If they decide to pursue it then the developers will build it, debug it, test it, etc. The process is optimized around conserving a scarce resource, developer time.
In the Linux process, someone decides "Linux should do X", and so they build it, write all the code, debug it, test it... and then they'll send it to Linus, who decides whether or not to merge it. Same process, the difference is that the leader decides on the basis of fully-implemented code, rather than slideware. In the Linux model, developer time is not scarce and the process does not optimize for conserving it.
Re:"More Professional Than Ever" (Score:5, Funny)
Nope, Linus still leads the project, and he is employee of non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association
Yet for some reason, he has never been selected as "Employee of the Month".
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actually, yes, the kernel itself could contain certain web servers, so brush up on your tech knowledge before spewing, please
Linus accepted the systemd hooks, for good or bad. I hate the stuff but I can blame Linus. Worth noting I admin hundreds of servers without systemD, in about two years my employer will have to make a choice about that
Not seeing evidence of your corporate control, rather Linus accepting contributions.
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Not seeing evidence of your corporate control, rather Linus accepting contributions.
That's a semantics problem. Go back to the first post where the situation is better characterized as the development of Linux is being guided by corporations now, not hobbyists.
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Except when they don't work. Which happens.
Or when your shiny new MBP (from work) suddenly stops working, and you reboot, and it just stops booting partway. With no explanation. Or console output (that I could find), of course.
Or when you want alt-tab to cycle through all windows, not just window groups. I guess I'm using it wrong?
Or when you double click to maximize, but it only maximizes vertically and leaves a gap on the right side. I guess I'm looking at it wrong.
I could go on. There are annoying
Re:"More Professional Than Ever" (Score:5, Informative)
Look man, you just don't know how to use your operating system. Perhaps you need to go on a course. All the things you're complaining about aren't problems, once you know your keyboard shortcuts better. Windows alt-tabs through everything, which doesn't scale well with large numbers of windows. Mac alt-tabs through applications, and alt-backticks through windows within that application. Different approach. Being a mac, of course, there are loads of really nice tools that you can install to customise the behaviour of your system (contrary to popular belief). In your case, I suggest that you install Witch (Here [manytricks.com]). Yes, it costs money. The horror. It's nearly the price of two beers. Explain to me again why the hard work of software developers should be available to everyone for free, again? I forgot the details on that one. If you don't like the maximising behavour, there are tools to sort that out for you. I use BetterTouchTool myself.
It's ironic that someone who wants to install Linux, which pretty much entirely consists of little plugin tools to make stuff happen, hasn't bothered to go looking for the little plugin tools that can customise OSX for you.
Regarding your broken MBP, that's a shame. However, computers do break occasionally, and since you haven't bothered to look it up, you can hold down Cmd+V for a verbose boot, or Cmd+R for the recovery console, which will actually download an entire OS install from the internet and re-install your entire machine for you if you want - including pulling in your time machine backup (you have a backup, right?). Or, if it's something less drastic, you can start the mac in single-user mode (Cmd+S), or try some of the other tools from the recovery mode.
I mean, I get you don't like OSX, and that's fine. But nothing in what you wrote is actually correct, and so I hope I was helpful, and not too patronising, in correcting you. And what exactly don't you like about installing stuff on a mac? Sure beats windows installers - and apt-get on Linux just craps out half the time (I guess I'm doing it wrong... touche...). Android follows more of the OSX model, which is that everything lives in the application package, and you don't bother with sharing components between applications because it causes far more problems than it solves.
Re:"More Professional Than Ever" (Score:4, Informative)
>Explain to me again why the hard work of software developers should be available to everyone for free, again?
Nobody has ever said that. No really. Nobody ever said that. No. Not even RMS. Free software has nothing to do with price and a lot of free software does cost money. There is no rule against charging for free software and it doesn't make it any less free.
That said...why would I pay even the price of two beers for something that somebody else is offering me free of charge ? When the gratis one also happens to be free (as in freedom) then it wins on every count and there is no sane reason to want the for-pay one.
Anyway, customizing your desktop is such a fundamental feature that the idea that you need third-party tools to do it is a massive black mark against OSX. If you were trying to sell if by saying that, you failed miserably. I've never yet wanted to make a change to the behaviour of my KDE desktop that I could not do within KDE using tools shipped by the KDE project and included in the original install.
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For a LOT of people, their "mainstream desktop" or the device they most depend on is either their smartphone or tablet.
And hundreds of millions of those run Linux
Re:"More Professional Than Ever" (Score:4, Insightful)
World domination for Linux has been achieved a while ago and it is obvious that it has been. All the Linux-haters seem to have some pathological mental condition where they are blind to reality. Possibly it is a combination of fear of the unknown and fear of losing the illusion of being the master of their machine, that makes them leash out irrationally.
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Android (has a Linux kernel) has 86.2%
When I develop for Android (I do) I develop for one environment using one set of APIs, where my application will be deployed on a consistent, coherent and fully sane user environment. None of that is true for desktop Linux. The fact that Linux is not having a showing on the desktop has nothing to do with Microsoft and everything to do with Linux/GNOME/KDE/X/(all kinds of other shit).
For the average user, choice is bad, options are bad, configurability is bad. Users don't want options and choice, they want c
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The reason that people don't use it is because when they bought their computers, Windows was already installed. If Linux had been installed, people would be using that. Don't give me a lot of guff about Windows being easier to use - it isn't - or too much difference in OS's - Windows routinely scrambles even the most trivial of concepts between major releases. The only place where Linux fails miserably as a desktop OS is lack of a consistent cut/copy/paste.
The only time I boot Windows these days is to run T
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Of course, if we REALLY wanted Linux to be more like Windows, we'd have to make it disable the GUI and all user processes for 15 minutes after rebooting while displaying "installing update 1 of 36" messages and then cripple system performance for an additional 20 minutes after login while the virus scan ran.
Maybe Poettering and Icaza have something in the works. They like the Windows approach.
Cat got my tongue (subjects are dumb) (Score:5, Funny)
>> I'm afraid that is 64 tasks max (and one is used as swapper), no matter :-)
>> how small they should be. Fragmentation is evil - this is how it was
>> handled. As the current opinion seems to be that 64 Mb is more than
>> enough, but 64 tasks might be a little crowded, I'll probably change the
>> limits be easily changed (to 32Mb/128 tasks for example) with just a
>> recompilation of the kernel. I don't want to be on the machine when
>> someone is spawning >64 processes, though
If only he knew...
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If a modern kernel were to panic once 65+ processes were running, I wonder how far it would get through the boot process.
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64 processes should be enough for anyone!
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Processes: 264 total, 3 running, 2 stuck, 259 sleeping, 2182 threads
Mac Book Air, likely "to many browser windows open"
It's not Linux (Score:4, Informative)
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It is software written assuming the APIs a linux machine exposes. Microsoft wrote a clean room implementation that did what colinux did on 32bit windows, and cooperated with Ubuntu to make it work better. That Microsoft have seen the need for a more positive attitude towards Free Software, Open Source, and Linux is a good thing. That Ubuntu Bash on Windows would not have happened without the success of Linux based operating systems is, I think, certain. Don't knock the penguin, he doesn't like it.
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Yes, the high percentage of devs on linux/mac computers has scared microsoft (if trends continue, the next stack overflow developer survey will have less than 50% of devs on windows). Even though they do annoy customers, they still cling to their monopoly, as it allows them to annoy customers.
They didn't do it because they liked linux. They did it to convince devs to move from linux to windows, because now the devs can enjoy both the features of the linux world and the features of the windows world.
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Linux is the kernel. The GNU software is not Linux. (And no, it is not GNU/Linux and has never been. It is Linux kernel with GNU user-space, i.e. at best GNU + Linux.)
Professional level audio experience (Score:5, Interesting)
What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?
Still waiting for the year of the desktop. A viable alternative to osx (and ms) for multimedia work, specifically, professional level audio engineering work.
Re:Professional level audio experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Ardour is great, and so is Reaper. The existence of a solid DAW on Linux isn't the issue at this point.
First, one of the major issues is inertia - Logic Pro, Ableton, ProTools, Cubase, Sonar, and FL Studio are all respected names in the field, with lots of users, forums, and ecosystems around them. Audio engineering is very susceptible to a herd mentality, because anyone who uses something different will be told to join the herd, rather than getting actual support.
Next, audio engineering is much more hardware dependent than most CS/IT disciplines. For us, 'input' basically consists of keyboards and NICs, which are interchangeable. Pro audio involves audio interfaces from Tascam, Presonus, M-Audio, and FocusRite, with MIDI controllers ranging from Korg/Yamaha keyboards to guitar pedals and drum pads. We'll circle back to the interface problems in a moment, but the MIDI controllers are largely USB now, meaning there are abstraction layers that may require specialized drivers, mapping software, and plug-ins.
Back to the audio interface question, amongst the major things we have here is that Jack/Alsa are fine for desktops with Realtek chipsets, but when you're dealing with thousand dollar interfaces that can record sixteen channels of audio in real-time with 1ms latency, Jack and Alsa just don't cut it. OSX has CoreAudio and Windows has ASIO, both of which are industry standards that work with those interfaces. Linux would need something similar to it, but even if such a thing were to come into existence, support by the hardware OEMs is certainly not coming into place overnight. Meanwhile, those OEMs need to sell gear, which means that CoreAudio and ASIO handle over 99% of the market, and no one seems to be chomping at the bit to write yet another audio system for Linux to even provide a viable target. Reaper and Ardour could well start on that, but now you have DAW devs stuck writing middleware that already exists on Windows and OSX.
I look forward to it happening, but it's a pipe dream right now. Hardware OEMs are targeting ASIO and CoreAudio, plug-in writers are targeting Ableton, Protools, and VST hosts, industry standard DAWs are targeting Windows and OSX, and a soup-to-nuts Linux ecosystem would require cooperation from everyone at the same time for a market segment that's super picky at best.
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Back to the audio interface question, amongst the major things we have here is that Jack/Alsa are fine for desktops with Realtek chipsets, but when you're dealing with thousand dollar interfaces that can record sixteen channels of audio in real-time with 1ms latency, Jack and Alsa just don't cut it.
Yeah, this. I have and do use Reaper, it's great. It's been a while but last time I tried to record with Linux the audio interface support just wasn't there. I had a M-Audio Delta 1010, which was a good consumer+ level interface at the time (PCI) but nothing in that league even was supported on linux. It sounds like that hasn't changed much, even now with high quality usb audio interfaces. It's a bummer but I guess the demand really isn't there...
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Try Ardour: http://ardour.org/ [ardour.org]
Ardour is a very capable DAW, but by itself it's not "A viable alternative to osx (and ms) for multimedia work". AV Linux [bandshed.net] is, however, a snapshot of Debian testing with numerous setup tweaks and a real time kernel that does make a usable OS for audio work. And includes Ardour, of course.
(if you're interested, watch the AV Linux forum., A new release is imminent...)
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"professional"? (Score:2)
What does this word mean in regard to the Linux kernel? Or it should be applied to Linux/GNU?
Sorry, this article is some marketing BS. I've no idea how it found its way to /.
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Well the point is the humble beginnings were Linus sharing a hobbyist project without much ambition. At the time, GNU was a big effort to produce a full Unix system, but licensed under GPL. Proceeding very carefully/slowly for things. Making sure they had the right plan in mind before going and executing to that plan pretty thoroughly. This worked fine for a lot of the system, but kernel wise there was a big gap.
So along comes Torvalds, with an appropriate amount of uncertainty, sharing his quick and di
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Ultimately his more pragmatic approach would lead to a usable system long before GNU could deliver one.
Have they ever delivered a usable system? - if so, I've never Hurd of it. ;-)
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The article isn't trying to market anything. If you really don't get the reference, you should bone up on Linux's history before spouting shit all over slashdot.
User friendly (Score:4, Interesting)
This, in turn, means it's all but impossible to provide a simple, straightforward instruction to a user for how to do something with her machine. Even something that should be dead simple. As soon as a user has to modify a config file or open a command prompt that's a huge roadblock. And no I'm not saying "be like Windows". That implication is a cop-out.It's not about doing things the way Windows does them, it's about making it "just work", and when it doesn't offering highly intuitive graphical interfaces for changing the way it works.
The Linux development community has made huge strides in this direction, but more is needed. Write drivers that interface with Gnome and KDE environments and provide GUI's for every setting. If a driver doesn't gave a Gnome and KDE GUI that covers 99.99% of use cases it's not finished. Make it so a user never, ever has to open a command prompt. Stick to the top three or fewer interfaces, and make them rock solid. No more installing interfaces to install interfaces to install decompressers to compile drivers. Do this and you shall see the year of Linux on the desktop.
Re:User friendly (Score:4, Informative)
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And with Metro onward, Microsoft also has introduced an XML configuration structure as well. Maybe for Joe and Jane Average running Windows 10 Home, as long as they're not interested in anything beyond the sparest kind of modifications that the increasingly simplified and unconfigurable Settings system makes available, Windows remains a simpler system, but for those administering AD domains and the like, it can be an incredibly complex environment. Our recent fun with configuring default applications on dom
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Well XML can be a workable choice if the structure is stable. Don't know how it's for their other configuration files but the project files for Visual Studio is a complete nightmare since it changes with every release. And of course just using XML because of XML is never a good solution, having simple field=value (or fieldvalue) is quite useful.
And nightmare when things go wrong, o boy. My son just got a laptop from his school which refused to connect to our home WLAN, it spins for a few seconds and then "c
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If I may, and even if I mayn't, I'm going to rant about the same thing I always rant about in these stories: usability.
You and I use very different Linux's. There are only two reasons I go to the command line in Kubuntu:
1) To secure shell into another Linux computer.
2) To install a driver that Linux doesn't support out of the box.
The first one is something that the vast majority of new Linux users would never do, unless they come to Linux specifically for that purpose. The second one is something that the vast majority of users never do under any operating system without help.
I haven't had to compile a kernel in probably
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I think there is a lot of room for improvement for reasonable defaults and auto-sensing correct behavior.
However I take issue with the 'highly intuitive graphical interface for changing the way it works' *always* being available. The GUI should really focus on the most frequently fiddled with things. In Microsoft, you can very rapidly need to drop to do things via powershell commandlets or registry edits to modify some hopelessly obscure thing. Similar in OSX. It's a rare circumstance and frankly the ab
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Say what? 2000 called, and they want you stop trying to install their linuxes.
What a ridiculous rant, from someone who obviously has little to no experience with Ubuntu or any of the other more popular, modern distros.
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Say what? 2000 called, and they want you stop trying to install their linuxes.
What a ridiculous rant, from someone who obviously has little to no experience with Ubuntu or any of the other more popular, modern distros.
I agree with you that GP is completely exaggerating, but "2000" is also an exaggeration. GP's rant would have been completely valid in 2005, and it's perfectly feasible that he still might be encountering stuff like that regularly ca. 2010.
But today? Not so much... and definitely not on any distro that's meant to be particularly user-friendly, like Mint.
In the past few years, I've installed Linux on old laptops for two family members after they became unusable due to "Windows rot." Both of these peop
Re:User friendly (Score:5, Insightful)
The other problem is resistance in the Linux community to complex tools - because the problems are complex to solve. Even if you apply the "do one thing and do it well", it ends up as a complex tool (see SystemD). And no, sysvinit scripts are not the solution (question - why does /sbin/init provide a perfectly usable daemon manager that no one uses? I mean, it will monitor daemons, if they die, it will restart them. If they die too quickly, it will pause restarting to let the admin have CPU time to fix the problem).
System initialization isn't easy - Apple has tried many different forms of system initialization daemons until settling on launchd (they started with sysvinit at first, then migrated to SystemStarter and a couple of others). And the BSDs have tried to port launchd over as well.
Then there are other use cases - networking for example. NetworkManager is a solution to a problem users have - they may connect to different networks with different network settings. Because without it, handling the simple case of a user going from home wifi to public wifi is much harder. At least to Linux's credit, when it detects public wifi, it can auto-start a VPN client, or even prevent unencrypted traffic in the narrow window between connecting to public wifi and before the VPN starts up. Or even something as minor as going from static IP to DHCP.
Then there's PulseAudio, a framework made necessary because users are complex. Such as being able to switch audio devices while the program has the audio device open. E.g., VoIP - user might be having it on the main audio device waiting for it to ring. The moment it does, users plug in a USB headset (new audio card), and have the call audio automatically routed to the headset without the controlling application (VoIP program) having to do a thing. Or a user switches from onboard audio to a Bluetooth headphone and being able to do it transparent to the player application.
Of course, there's a Linux that does all this transparently to the user - we call it Android. And all this stuff is complex because it has to be - there's no simple way to have a system do these tasks.
Re:User friendly (Score:5, Insightful)
We are still seeing this shit after MS Powershell came out?
Look up "grep", "sed" and "awk" and you'll see why some people dealing with CSV files or similar are happy that there is a command prompt instead of having to wait for someone to write a special program for them.
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Desktop Linux is a great operating system for those who have put in the many hours needed to understand its quirks. It's a great operating system for people who never so much as install a new sound driver. For the remaining 80% of users it's a usability nightmare.
Hmm. Well, Linux is not a desktop OS, it is server OS, on which you can also run a graphical desktop - which you can, incidentally also run on other architectures; I have heard of various X desktops, even for MVS, although that may have been an urban myth, as I have never actually seen one. In UNIX, the graphical desktop and the applications that go with that environment are only applications - together you can them a "sub-system", at most. I don't like the way the GUI layer in Windows seems to reach far do
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Sure! Because instructions, how to do something, should look like this: https://s4.postimg.io/6lkmasqd9/gui.png [postimg.io]
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It is also a lot easier to document a command line process.
Less pages and you don't have to cut&paste dialog windows into paint to circle the different sections to click on/enter data, in the end you create a pretty multi-page document that could have been replaced with two or three commands.
Re:User friendly (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake me up when even Windows follows that paradigm. In fact, Microsoft is, at least in the enterprise, moving explicitly away from the GUI, and pushing Powershell for many tasks. But really, it's always been that way. GUI configuration tools in Windows have always presented only a portion of the configuration options, and many settings have had to be adjusted via the Registry. Even with GPOs, many settings can only be accessed via the Registry.
Like any system, whether it be Windows, OSX or Linux, everything works great out of the box... until it doesn't, and at that point the user is forced to go to some pretty daunting places. I've had enough fun trying to install drivers in Windows, or trying to solve problems on everything from screwed up profiles to getting the damned thing to time sync properly to know that Windows "ease of use" is more a marketing slogan than reality.
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Reminds me off a guy that our support staff had to help over the phone on my first workplace. It took them a while to realise that his definition of stopping and starting the computer was powering the screen on and off :)
Or that Windows 95 user who had never turned his computer off since the day he got it, he was utterly impressed that all kinds of stuff began to work after our support staff rebooted it for him...
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Reminds me off a guy that our support staff had to help over the phone on my first workplace. It took them a while to realise that his definition of stopping and starting the computer was powering the screen on and off :)
Or that Windows 95 user who had never turned his computer off since the day he got it, he was utterly impressed that all kinds of stuff began to work after our support staff rebooted it for him...
That can't be true - Win95 had a timer bug that locked up the machine if you ran it more than X days (where X is anything from 16-30 - I don't remember the exact number). Your Win95 user used the computer for less than X days? How new was he? :-)
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Or that Windows 95 user who had never turned his computer off since the day he got it, he was utterly impressed that all kinds of stuff began to work after our support staff rebooted it for him...
...
As funny as that is: but you do know that a real computer just runs and does not need any reboots? Just wondering
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So, only IBM mainframes and some specialty Unix hardware are real computers?
Did you know that you're a piece of shit and that you probably should help humanity out by destroying yourself and any children who may have the misfortune of being your offspring?
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1997
Me: What's it say on the screen?
Margaret: I don't know. It doesn't work.
Me: You don't know what it says on the screen?
Margaret: No. It just doesn't work. Come fix it.
Computer screen: Operating system not found.
After popping the floppy disk out and rebooting the machine Windows NT launches.
Margaret: Well, I could have done that, why didn't you tell me that was the problem?
I can't tell you how many times (Score:2)
I had this exact conversation with family and friends in the '90s. The answer was always "nothing."
Q: What do you see?
A: Nothing.
Q: I mean, what's on the screen?
A: Nothing.
Q: There is nothing at all on the screen?
A: No.
Q: So the screen is entirely blank. No power?
A: Pretty much.
Q: Pretty much? Is there something on it or isn't there?
A: There's nothing on it.
I go over... And sometimes there would be words ("Operating system not found" or similar), sometimes even a complete desktop but hard-locked or similarl
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I, too, have made my share of Windows registry edits. But having once tried - and miserably failed - to install a sound driver on Linux, I really appreciate the fact that Windows Plug-and-Play (do they even still call it that?) "just works" nearly all of the time.
The common experience is that you plug something in, it shows you that it's installing a device driver for the new device, and a short time later, its ready to go, with nothing to configure at all. For example, I recently bought a small USB audio
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Now wait for when it doesn't just work. Windows' device detection and driver installation has its own pitfalls.
And frankly, it's been about ten years since I had a sound device not picked up by Linux. I'm sure there are hardware combinations that still produce this problem, but then again, having just upgraded workstations that are about seven or eight years old, I can tell you that a new version of Windows' reliable "window of availability" for drivers is in fact a lot narrower than Linux's. I'll wager I c
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Yes, all four are doing it wrong, along with the many more who haven't posted and all those who gave up with Linux because the sound doesn't work properly. Fucktards every one. Linux doesn't need people like that.
Really? I haven't had a sound driver problem in over 10 years on Linux.
The people who keep waving this non-issue around should be providing some backing information, cos it sounds like they are making up complaints about something that was solved a long time ago.
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But the command prompt is part of the GUI
The command prompt, by definition, is not part of the GUI (Graphical User Interface), it is a Text-based User Interface, you don't even need a GUI for the command prompt to work. In fact when problems cause the GUI to fail to load the interface you use to fix that is the command prompt precisely because it is not part of the graphical user interface. If it were then when the GUI fails there would be no interface and no way to fix it.
2016 (Score:2)
The year of the Linux desktop people.
Wow has it been that long? (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when Linus posted it. I downloaded it and played with it a bit.
When Slackware 0.99a came out I gave it another try. It was not long before I was converting my Minix boxes at the house over to Linux.
In 1995 I switched from Windows 3.11 to Slackware and never looked back. To this day I run linux on all my systems at home save a small laptop that runs Windows XP though it is just to manage the spectrophotometer which does not have a linux driver.
Linux has come a long way and I am always amazed at how much of the world runs linux from Cell Phones, to routers, to supercomputers.
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I got Slackware 0.9 running from a CD in the back of a book [amazon.com]
Re:Wow has it been that long? (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. It is pretty phenomenal that Linux runs on over 2 billion device. You're absolutely right on scalability: from cell phones all the way up to 99.4% of supercomputers. WOW.
Hopefully nVidia and AMD will continue to support OpenGL on the desktop so that Linux can continue to make inroads into high performance heterogeneous computing & gaming.
What's ironic is for MS to have once called "Linux is a cancer" to now admitting that they use it on 33% of their Azure servers!
* http://news.microsoft.com/byth... [microsoft.com]
* http://fossbytes.com/33-micros... [fossbytes.com]
Not bad for the little OS that could. :-)
eh (Score:4, Interesting)
Long-Time Linux Household (Score:2, Informative)
We gave up on Windows shortly after Windows 2000. I migrated the entire family to Linux fifteen years ago, and we never looked back. My daughter wrote her master's thesis on Open Office on a Linux system (I remember it's being a KDE desktop). I enjoy the idea of not paying money every time I need to do something different.
One caveat, however. Normal people need someone with computer experience to maintain Linux for them. My family had me, and my son. At this point, that's a requirement, not an option.
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Risk of a flame war (Score:3)
The most useful thing for average users is making the GUI config tools easy to use by a lay person, and doing it without breaking the traditional config files people like myself are used to working with. In this respect I think Mint is suitable for large percentage of average users but the focus needs to be on the small but significant number of cases where it is not possible to get a system up and running properly without opening a command line window.
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What tools does Mint have that Ubuntu doesn't? I've used both but never noticed a difference, perhaps because I used their KDE editions.
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I was talking about is what Mint should do to help capture more of the Windows users, hence my comments about having the tools needed to resolve issues from the GUI as this is what migrating users ar
Desktop user here (Score:2)
Been using Linux as my OS of choice on home computers for a while now. The desktop experience has come a long way to achieving what I would consider "expectation parity" with a few exceptions.
The biggest thing I hope to see change is Apple start publishing iTunes for Linux. That's not because I use it, but because many people who otherwise have no reasonable need to use Windows would be able to switch to Linux.
In a similar vein, I hope to see WINE get to the point that pretty much any random Windows based a
Linux 0.96 on Slackware (Score:2)
I think it was around 1992, I was browsing ftp.txt files at multiple ftp sites and kept running into this "linux" thing. I was a CS student, so I looked into it more and found out it was a UNIX OS for PCs. I thought cool and thought I'd try it. 40 diskettes later downloaded from the student computer lab and I was installing it onto my computer at home. I hardly knew anything about partitions on a hard drive at the time and easily wiped out my Windows 3.1 partition. When I finally got it to boot up and got a
What a long painfully joyful trip it's been... (Score:4, Interesting)
I ditched Windows back in 1998 and installed RedHat 5.1. It was awesome! Then I upgraded. Wow, what a nightmare. Dependency hell. I struggled with it for a few years, but hung in there because I just loved it and had no interest in going back to Windows. Macs make my brain hurt.
Then along came Mandrake which took away some of the pain. That was great as well, really liked KDE. Upgrades were still painful, but much better.
Then I started hearing a lot about Ubuntu so I made the leap to Kubuntu 6.06. I went through about 8 in-place upgrades over time (minorly painful) until I finally things got unstable enough that I did a fresh install. Things were much better... but I kept having issues with KDE wigging out on me and pegging my cpu.
So I installed XFCE on top of Kubuntu. XFCE spoke to me - I realized all the UI flash didn't matter to me. I would flip back to KDE, but the problem kept happening and I was happy with XFCE. Eventually I heard about Mint around 2011, and had to try Mint XFCE - I have been there since. I have decided to not do rolling installs anymore, but I am configured pretty well to do full installs. I just installed over my Mint 17 XFCE release and was up and running on Mint XFCE 18 in about an hour. (my / partition is 55 GB and only uses about 12, and I have a separate partition for home). This was the smoothest linux system update I have ever had - even no issues with the Nvidia proprietary drivers!
Installs aside, my Linux system does everything I want it to do. Seeing all the various applications on it grow and blossom, and really cool things like bootable distros to embedded linux to mini systems to android. It has really been great to see it all flourish.
At work I use Windows 10, and I get by. But it brings me no joy. At home I run Linux, and it brings me joy. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to it.
Yep (Score:3)
I use Linux Mint exclusively on my laptop, soon to be on all of my PCs.
For 90% of home users almost any Linux distro will serve them just fine. If they just need email, browsing, and online shopping, Linux will do everything they want.
For professional shops it's a bit different since there are lots of applications that will never be ported to Linux, but as more and more stuff moves to the web I expect that will change over time. Graphics-heavy stuff will probably stay as local desktop programs for a long time, but I'd bet that 80% of the stuff that requires a desktop application will eventually become available in some form on the web. Some stuff, probably never (AutoCad, video and sound editing apps, etc).
Use Android and Chrome OS at times. (Score:4, Insightful)
I am a big fan of Linux in technical terms, but not a big fan in terms of UX (basically, the social end of computing, where collaboration across large teams is basically required for a high quality product).
Android is illustrative of what Linux *can* be, but on the desktop has never managed to be because of the obvious differences between the social (i.e. people and hierarchy) infrastructure behind Android vs. behind the Linux desktop.
I used Linux from 1993 through 2010. Early on I used the same .twmrc files with TWM that I used on my HPUX and SunOS boxes at CS school. At the time, the Linux desktop was *light years* ahead of the Windows desktop. 16-bit color, high resolutions, fast, lots of very powerful applications from the Unix world and experimental desktop projects like InterViews that seemed very promising. People with MS-DOS or GEM or Windows 1/2.x computers were envious.
Later on I used FVWM. Then I switched to KDE in the KDE Beta 3 era. But then (mid-late '90s), Linux on the desktop had already been outrun by Windows 95 and Mac OS. The level of integration amongst services and components wasn't that of a coherent system like it was for Mac OS and Windows; the Linux "computing is a network" philosophy—very good for things like business and scientific computing—was obvious in comparison.
When KDE 4 was released, I tried to use it for a while but it got in my way. I had to rebuild my entire desktop over and over again as objects were lost, lost their properties, etc. After about two weeks on KDE 4 during which I mostly nursed KDE along rather than doing my actual work, I switched to GNOME 2.x. I see that as something of a golden age for desktop Linux—basic parity with what was going on in the Mac and Windows worlds if you used a polished distribution like Fedora. Install was different, equally demanding of skills, but the actual install and setup process for the desktop OS on a bare machine involved approximately the same amount of work as was true for Windows, and the result was basic feature and experience parity.
Then, the bottom fell out. I suspect that a lot of the need for the Linux desktop with experience parity to Windows was met by an increasingly revived Mac OS, and users flocked there. Myself included, in the end.
GNOME 3 came out and KDE 4 was finally becoming usable and there was something of a battle, but both were behind the curve relative to the stability and seamlessness of OS X, and OS X had end-user application developers already. They screamed and moaned during the transition from legacy Mac OS, but most of them hung on and redeveloped their applications for OS X, and there were a bunch of new application developers to boot.
On top of that, the major applications of the business and academic worlds made their way out for OS X as it became a viable platform. You now had a seamless desktop OS that offered all the big brands in user applications, plus stability, plus easy access to a *nix environment and command line if you wanted it.
I was busy fighting Linux during that "instability era" just as KDE4/GNOME3 happened and duked it out. Things were changing very quickly in many facets of the Linux base installs, in hardware, etc. and every update seemed to break my Thinkpad T60 which at the time ran on Fedora. I was spending a lot of time fixing dotfiles and scripts and trying to solve dependency problems, etc. Meanwhile, lots of new things that were starting to become commonplace needs (cloud services, mobile devices, etc.) didn't yet work well with Linux without lots of command line hacking and compiling of alpha-quality stuff from source.
A couple of fellow academics kept telling me to try Mac OS. Finally I did, I installed a hackintosh partition on my T60. By mid-2010, I realized that I was using my OS X boot, along with the GNU tools environment from MacPorts, far more than I was using the Linux partition, and that there were Mac applications that I was *dying* to start using on a daily basis, but ha
Linux is of age (Score:4, Interesting)
I switched to Kubuntu in April on my main laptop. I am running 16.04 and it works great. I have not found anything I cannot do. I switched after I realized that Microsoft had renamed and re-enabled the telemetry service with a forced automatic update. You can put up with that kind of control from Redmond if you like but I will have none of it.
I keep a VMWare Player VM of Windows 7 around just in case but have not fired it up in a good while.
I am also a gamer and I have about 140 games in my steam account that work on Linux and for those that don't I stream them from my Windows 7 media center PC. I have not gotten rid of MS entirely but at least finally there are real transition solutions available.
The thing I would like to see is the tech class to wake up and throw off the yoke of Redmond and go ahead and switch at this point. A truly open OS with real competition between distros is the only solution to corporations trying to take over your computing experience for their benefit. I think if my fellow techies realized that we could start a real step change on the desktop. That would result in better support for Linux overall (drivers and apps) . The Linux Desktop OS is ready as near as I can tell. Just the people who aren't.
You probably are using Linux and don't know it. (Score:2)
I think a lot of people use Linux based Operating Systems and don't know it.
Android is, at least sorta Linux.
A lot of your set top boxes and routers are running Linux. There's a lot of embedded stuff running Linux too like your Nest thermostat and possibly that new refrigerator you bought.
Chances are those websites you visit everyday are running Linux too.
I am turning traitor (Score:3)
It is like someone at MS woke up and said, "Hey maybe we should listen to our customers and stop focusing entirely on all this enterprise crap. Also maybe the developers out there are influencers vs a blip on the percentage radar. That said, I am still going to develop for linux as my primary server environment, but I can now do that from Visual Source safe. I can use git, I can use github, I can use gdb, and python.
I fully intend on using linux on robots and just about anywhere embedded, but my desktop is looking like I may very well return to Windows.
Most developers that I know are all saying roughly the same thing; developers who have usually apple and sometimes linux desktops.
I, for one, did not see this coming.
I still would rather eat shit than use
Of course I do! (Score:2)
And I love it!
[This post was written with WIndows 10]
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you're funny, really serious accounting software runs on Unix(tm) and Linux
QuickBooks...haha
well back to setting up this AIX box for Lawson...couldn't talk finance into the Linux version, they're so 1990
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Or an OS inheriting some ideas and design characteristics from Mica [bitsavers.org], Mica being an OS that inherited some ideas and design characteristics from VMS - not surprisingly, given that Cutler was involved with all three.
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What's wrong with ctrl-alt-del logins? Do you even know why there's a special key sequence for that function? Do you know why this sequence was chosen?
Hint: Security was a thing even back in the early 90s.
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Linux is not a Unix. The proper term is "Unix-like". Same for QNX and some others. Unix-like OSes are not "based" on Unix, they do not share source with Unix. They do have a compatible API though. And that is really the success-story here: The Unix kernel API (and the GNU tools that use it). Lean and mean without the bloat and > 1000 API calls (most redundant) that the Windows kernel comes with.
Re:When will it get a "real" memory manager? (Score:4, Informative)
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When will Windows get rid of the registry?
Windows has 'the registry'...which for all its hate and faults is, from an objective standpoint, about as difficult to work with as .conf files.
And what is it about this GUI obsession with you millennials?
The GUI changes the paradigm from 'fill in the blank' to 'multiple choice'. I can find what I want to do and figure it out pretty simply, between programs, even ones I haven't used before. The CLI is great when you know all the switches, but I personally can never remember if it's chmod 644 -R /dev/null, or chmod -R 644 /dev/null. CLIs don't scale down well - someth
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Yes - (www.imagemagick.org) - batch processing instead of doing the same thing over and over to many images.
It runs on several platforms.
I've used it a lot in situations such as where someone has scanned hundreds of text documents at maximum resolution and people are complaining that they take a long time to load.
I actually agree. (Score:3)
The height of Linux usability and parity was Red Hat 6 through Red Hat 9. Those were the pinnace of Linux operating systems in terms of comparability to and competitiveness with other contemporary systems.
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I have just about everyone in my workplace on CentOS 6 because they can still use their RedHat9 desktop settings as if there was no change.