Note:The following is a reply to Golodh’s comment on Mono as Infectious Disease. He is commenting on my post here, Why Linux is Better than Mac. I messed up my comment post (I put <quote> instead of <blockquote>), and couldn’t edit it later, so I re-posted it here. Sorry about the repeat.
Goldoh wrote:
I agree that Macs are best for end-users who want to spent their time working in apps instead of working on aps. There is a niche for this sort of people, and it only comprises about 95% of the market. That doesn’t mean that Linux shouldn’t cater for the remaining 5%, but if it wants to dominate the desktop (something I believe is possible) then it needs to do just as well for those other 95%.
I don’t think Macs are best for “end-users who…etc” – I think Macs are best for you (the family member who is always called for tech support), if you don’t want to deal with their computer issues.
not “interface” or “working on applications” (all of which, in my opinion, are easier and better in Ubuntu w/ Gnome than on either Mac or Windows). No… a new Linux user’s biggest issue is unsupported, killer apps. If you can get iTunes (with DRM and store), Photoshop, and the latest MS Office working on Linux without issues, then users will defect in droves. (I know Wine and Crossover try, but they’re not there yet. (PS: If Mono gets us any closer to that goal, no matter what the patent issues, I say, “hurray!” Quick show of hands, who reading this in the U.S. doesn’t have libdvdcss installed on their boxes? Or paid for mp3 support? Of course, I raised my hand for both, because I think all of these software patents are legit.)
My point about Linux is that there is a natural progression from novice to expert, even for the 95%, and it requires no additional desire or frustration more than what an average user experiences in any operating system. The only difference is, in Linux, users can do something about their negative experiences, and there are tools that are easy to use and people willing to help.
I’m using SuSE linux 11.1 (not Kubuntu) and I have had my share of broken library dependencies. I had never heard of “sudo apt-get build-dep”. My loss apparently, but then I rarely stray beyond the packages that come with the SuSE distribution and can be installed through YAST.
How can I say this politely?… WhyTF are you still using SuSE? SuSE is Diet Windows using Yast as an artificial sweetener. Pick Coke or Pepsi, and drink that! (More like pick corn-starch or sugar sweetened.)
In my opinion, if you are mostly a server guy, you ought to go RedHat/CentOS, just because it is what most people use on servers. If you are mainly doing desktop work, give regular Ubuntu a shot, and then apt-get install kubuntu-desktop once you are used to the “Debian way of doing things.” But I know recommending a distro is “fight’n words”, so I’ll stop now before the entire board comes to give me a beat-down.
This is another problem with Linux: there isn’t just *one* standard package manager that does everything (and does it so well that you never want anything else), there are at least two.
As opposed to Windows and Mac where there are… NONE. If you give Ubuntu a shot, I think apt is what you are looking for. Get all that SuSE junk out of your head. I think the multiple package managers is a very strong advantage for Linux.
The fact that there is “two or three of everything” (KDE and Gnome, yum and apt, rpm and deb, Grub and LILO, ext3 and ReiserFS or whatever is the other one now, Thunderbird and Evolution and Kmail, OpenOffice and KOffice and Gnome loosely affiliated applications) means that there is a rapid pace of innovation between competing communities. Desktop distributions (with the exception of SuSE, which is geared towards Windows Power Users) are very good at hiding the sheer number of choices available to beginning users so they don’t get overwhelmed. If someone hands you an Ubuntu or Mint CD, and you install it, you won’t even know about KDE until you start fiddling around inside the system because you get curious.
I disagree with scottgrizzard about Linux being for users by users though. If you need to get beyond what’s pre-cooked, you’ll need to consult a book like Frish, A. (1995) Essential system administration. O’Reilly & Associates. System administration is never for end-users, and the trick is to ensure you needn’t get involved in it. For better or worse, MS Windows goes further to make sure you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
Yes, in 1995 you needed a book to learn about system administration. Since then, we all got broadband and started blogging/list-serving/wiki-ing night and day (especially night). You don’t need books to learn Linux – what you need is a desire to change something about your system and an Internet connection. (For serious tweaking, a spare box or a virtual machine doesn’t hurt, but only if you are playing with the core system.)
My first admin job was for my apartment complex in grad school. They wanted a Samba Domain Controller (they didn’t know that – what they knew was that the last guy had installed a pirated version of Windows 2000 on their old server which a bolt of lightning had eaten). They gave me a month’s rent free to do it, “for $700 in hardware” when I told them it could be done using free software. I set them up with a SuSE 10.0 Domain Controller that they could manage using webmin. (Yes, I used SuSE at one point, but if you can admit you have a problem, recovery is possible.) It took me two weeks (off and on) to set up, but I did it with the aid of the online helps, the mailing list, and the IRC chat room. The owner hired me part-time after that.
You don’t need to keep regular users out of system administration; you just need to not require them to get into system administration until they want to do something sysadmin-like. Then, you need to let them pick off the piece they want, without making them get involved in everything else. The good Linux distros do this, letting the user install a “server package” with the same graphical ease that they install a chess program. (With the exception of anything involving SELinux, but someone was on crack with that one but it should be hard, because SELinux was designed by the NSA for high security, and no one has ever been terminated with extreme prejudice by mildly disgruntled Fedora users.)
My points (and I do have two) are that Linux is for everyone, (unless you are in some niche like graphics design, in which case someone needs to crack the whip under the CrossOver folks), and stop using SuSE! While it may be evil, even more importantly, it’s lousy software!
PS: I just copyrighted the Yast as artificial sweetener line, before I posted it here. It’s mine… (evil laugh).
indifference-curve-demonstrator.ods
