Of Microsoft, Fanboys and the need for a Single Linux Distriubution

[Favu]

I think MS are now so engrained in what people consider to be a "PC" that they can make a whole range of mistakes, and people will still go with them - vista is just an example, in a competitive market, I don't think it would fair well in competition with OSX or Linux variants.

However people buy it because it is what their new computers come with, because it is what they are used to and essentially just because it is WINDOWS. And this is just your normal average person, who is no computer enthusiast.

The Microsoft fanboys (and yes, they do exist, everyone knows one, as they say) make things ten times worse, singing the praises of the latest and greatest, without actually considering if it is anything other than what MS PR wing wants them to believe. Convincing people perhaps less computer savvy that might have considered "one of those apple computers" or "that Dell with the other software on it" that they do, in fact, want windows.

It doesn't matter that the majority of their arguments hold no water (vista is not easier to use than OSX, does not work as well as good Linux install, you can work with people on other operating systems...), it is the sheer viral, infecting properties of the fanboy and the blank unquestioning approach of the average user (remember when people thought a 2.66Ghz Celeron was faster than a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4?) that make them the driving force behind windows.

I think the only way to really combat MS would be to start a counter attack on the same level, pick OSX or compromise on a Linux distro that works well (sorry, but BSD and the like are better left in the server room for now) and give it your full backing, convince your friends to try it, your neighbours, sing it's praises in meetings, use it on your laptop, never say it isn't working or you don't know how to do something. I think that with this approach within a few years MS could be shaken from it's pedestal.

There is just one major problem with this plan however - the sheer number of Linux distributions, and people's opinions towards them - I personally don't like Ubuntu, openSuSE is too slow, fedora was not appealing to me, Gentoo is like Lego with text-based instructions... you can see where this is going. In the end I settled on Debian, for now. It is very stable, works well, and is easy to use. However, I don't think Debian is the distribution to lead the crusade, purely because out of the box, it isn't pretty enough out of the box (Compiz is still in unstable), and the your average computer user is very much impressed by pretty graphics.

So, I ask you, which Linux distribution do you think should lead the Charge? Are you willing to compromise on what may not be your favourite distro, but back it anyway, for the greater good?

Favu out!

[kellamne]

Couldnt comment on which is "the" linux to have - but quite impressed with the Eee Xandros(?) variant for out of the box ease of use. Will probably still dual boot with XP however at some stage - not because its needed but because I can.

[Samuknow]

I still say, once the gaming world make it possible to game in linux "easily", the world will look to linux. Most people do not want to dual boot if the only reason is to play games. Not even the casual gamer.

[Áedán]

Gentoo from stage one, as if you can't manage it, you shouldn't be doing anything with a computer. Debian annoyed me last time I tried it.

Linux has problems though - When was the last time you had to upgrade all your drivers just because you updated the kernel? Windows manages not to break things in such a way...

[chrisbard]

My fav version of Linux will be version 7 also known as Blackcomb/Vienna and it will support every damn game I will want to play

[Áedán]

Chrisbard, I think you're confused between Linux and Windows. Whilst it might support every game you want to play, I've noted it doesn't support a whole bunch of games that I want to play...

[ccperf721p]

I don't think any Linux distro on it's own is ready to lead the crusade against Windows. Devs are spread far too thin within too many distributions, all with different ideas of what makes a good 'nix OS.

Most distributions are using the quantity of applications approach to building an OS, not the approach I care for as most of the apps included are either unnecessary or just not that good. Add in the time it takes to update a "quantity" OS, plus the amount of bugs that many updates can introduce and it will get tiresome for most people real fast. A better approach would be to spend some time on the package manager, indexing the stupid list into something other than alphabetical would be a good start. How about indexing it as to the apps function. ie, web apps, cd/dvd tools, media players etc etc. It's a pretty simple idea yet it hasn't been implemented in an easy to move through GUI.

Linux could really use some work on it's core right now, there is a big push for something new and better, unfortunately they are trying to build this new and better on top of something that could use some improvements, going all the way back to Linus himself.

I doubt I would back a distro based solely on it's being Linux. Convincing people to blindly follow is how it got this way in the first place. I promote linux as a whole and let people know there is an option to windows in some instances. When they are ready to give it a go I do what I can to make it a decent experience for them. Let's face it, companies such as Dell and HP make money by installing Windows on new computers (bloatware advertising, trial software etc) which allows them to adjust prices to make computers affordable to 90% of the population. Neither the companies or the consumer is going to allow this to change. I'd rather not have Linux become commercial software.

[Áedán]

OpenBSD works just fine, and is quality software.

[ccperf721p]

Originally Posted by Áedán

Gentoo from stage one, as if you can't manage it, you shouldn't be doing anything with a computer. Debian annoyed me last time I tried it.

Linux has problems though - When was the last time you had to upgrade all your drivers just because you updated the kernel? Windows manages not to break things in such a way...

While I have to agree with Gentoo Stage1 from a personal standpoint, I cannot agree with the "if you can't manage it" portion. Most people could not manage it, some might be able to follow a guide, but would be stuck at either partitioning or the first emerge failure when going from stage2 to 3. (Which reminds that I need to update my guide to reflect this weeks emerge failures.)

[dsio]

Originally Posted by Áedán

OpenBSD works just fine, and is quality software.

Though I do use it on a few machines and agree, Theo is too much of an arsehole for me to get behind it.

One of the reasons I like Linux is that Linus isn't a bitter, egotistical arse.

All that's really needed is an extended cooperation between distribution vendors to aid compatibility. My motivation behind choosing Fedora remains the fact that most of my servers and the majority of specialty hosting software is designed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or CentOS, same diff) and as a sysadmin its extremely helpful to be using the same environment on your desktop as you run on your servers (Boss runs Ubuntu and sometimes has issues such as the versions of vim being different, which is a major pain when you spend your day typing at high speed in one version of vim and then find another version has different commands).

My Fedora is extremely heavily customized, to the point where you couldn't recognize it being Fedora unless someone told you, and ultimately any distro should be a starting point, rather than a fixed environment.

With respect to drivers, package management takes care of everything, and I haven't had to upgrade any drivers for a very long time (since Fedora 7 from memory). With the huge amount of pressure on Nvidia from OEMs over open sourcing their drivers (including HP and Dell making it clear to Nvidia that they will prioritize vendors with open source drivers) I don't think its too unreasonable to opine that there will be open drivers for Nvidia ATI and Intel cards in a year, all of good quality.

When I say good quality, I mean usable, and probably better quality than the Nvidia Vista drivers which supposedly cause 30% of all Vista crashes.

The wireless stack used to be a steaming pile of ****. The new one, is actually quite good and since updating my kernel I now have iwl4965 drivers in the kernel out of the box, and have not had a single problem with it since.

The next thing to fix? yea... ALSA. ALSA is the next piece of **** that needs overhauling, and I have no doubt it will happen, its just a matter of time.

If they fixed ALSA... not a great deal left to fix.

As for gaming, hey, I do it. I play World Of Warcraft extensively using Cedega, Quake 4 (native linux), UT2004 (native linux).

Valve have recently announced that they are porting Source based games to Linux [Phoronix] Valve's Source Engine Coming To Linux

All in all, I'm happy. Gizmo, who switched his workstation to Linux a fair while ago now seams happy with his machine, there have been the odd hiccup, but most are easily fixed, and you're left with a stable, fast, flexible, secure, and free operating system that lets you do everything you need to do to get by.

Ultimately thats what it comes down to. Can you do everything on Linux that you need to?

For me, this is WoW, Q4, UT2K4, development work, programming, sysadmin work, university studies, AOA, general amusement and entertainment, and multimedia. Not a single one of those things was difficult, so came down to which operating system I would rather use, whether I'd want to pay large sums of money for something I could get for free, which one was more reliable in the long term etc.

For me, Windows lost. Badly.

[Redroar]

Favu: If you like Debian, perhaps you will enjoy Arch. Better packaging (in my opinion), though a bit more CLI-based than Debian. It's got newer packages and is lighter.

Dsio: Have you tried OSSv4 yet? Many people are saying that it's better than ALSA. Not quite as well integrated, but better quality and performance.

Honestly, I can't see a 'single' distro. If all effort poured into say Ubuntu, then it would be one hell of a distro for the average Joe. But then, I, for example, don't want Ubuntu (even if it was the best it could be). I've learned to enjoy the amount of control that knowing things at a low level gives you. The spread of distros is probably too wide. There are several that aim for the same goal that could be merged, but won't for various reasons.

I mean, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, MEPIS, Linux Mint, and several others have pretty much the same goal: make an 'average Joe' distro as polished and useful as possible. But will they all merge? Almost certainly not. Like Novell and Canonical will ever team up....

Ah well. I'm happy with Arch, and so long as they keep the packages up-to-date I'll use it.

[danrok]

The only way I can see that we will ever have a standard flavour of Linux, for home and small office use, would be if a company like Dell installed it on every PC they sell. So, if you opted to have Windows, you would get a dual-boot machine with Linux as well.

Once there are millions of PCs out there, all with this version of Linux, then software developers would start to produce applications and games for it.

[dsio]

Na I'm personally happy with ALSA when it works, and when I'm using supported hardware. Its just when it doesn't work that it is a nightmare to diagnose the problem and fix it.

dsio: Alsa's fubared... again
ALSA developer: OK what you need to do is download alsa driver, alsa lib, alsa utils, build them all and install them using the latest hg version.
(30 minutes later)
dsio: Nope, that didn't do it.
ALSA developer: Run this script, pastebin the output.
dsio: K heres the output
ALSA developer: OK, repeat what I said before.
(30 minutes later)
dsio: Nope that didn't work.

In this unique case, it wasn't ALSA's fault. It turns out that the card in question, an Audigy 2 PCI card was installed in a slot with one of those Thermaltake case zero screw plastic clamps (they don't hold anywhere near as well as screws) and when unplugging a stiff RCA cable from the back, I'd pulled the card slightly out of its socket, not enough to make the card appear dead, but far enough to stop it working propperly.

So lspci said it was a "generic EMU10K1 based device" and reported the PCI-ID as FFFF with a vendor ID of FFFF. ALSA detected the card, but it wouldn't work.

Reseating the card fixed the problem, and a strategically placed bulldog clip now stops the flimsy plastic clip from coming loose.

Once again, this was not ALSA's fault, this was Thermaltake's fault for considering 1mm plastic to be a load bearing material, but is a tribute to how much I hate sound card problems in a more general sense.

[Gizmo]

Here's an example of perception and reality being very very different.

Windows is Windows.

WRONG!

Virtually every version of Windows in existence has different things in different places, or has things missing in one version that are present in another version.

From a practical standpoint, I have to support, right now, 4 versions of Windows:

2000
XP
XP SP2
Vista

Within those versions, I have to deal with mixtures of various versions of DirectX, system APIs, etc. In addition, I'm still having to deal with limited support of NT4, Windows ME, and Windows 98 SE, which actually brings my support list up to 7 versions of Windows.

ALL of these Windows versions have various differences and idiosyncrasies that I have to take into account, either in support (exercise: find the ODBC administration tool on each of those versions of Windows without dropping to the command-line), or in software development (exercise: make a call to the DirectX PlaySound function on each of those versions of OS and observe how they behave differently, even for supposedly identical versions of DirectX).

The fact is, if we started just calling it all 'Linux', and stopped distinguishing distros, most people wouldn't know the difference, and the appearance of this large fragmented community would vanish. In reality, Linux really is no more fragmented than Windows; it's just more obvious.

[Áedán]

Don't forget service packs too... For some of the stuff I do to be effective, I need to know what service pack as well as what version of Windows.

That said, the behind the scenes work really shouldn't need to be visible to the end user, as it shouldn't really be impacting on them.

[danrok]

Look on the bright side, MS has made a stack of cash out of the situation!

[Daniel ~]

I think one of the biggest obstacle Linux faces in gaining wide spread support might be found in one of RedRoar's remarks:

I've learned to enjoy the amount of control that knowing things at a low level gives you.

Those who can...Do. Those who can't must wait for those who can to make a way for them. And they are! Happily!

But there is an inherent diversity of interest I think. Those who can relish the control that gets those who can't into trouble by offering choices those who can't will never really understand unless it's fully spelled out and they have to read it for a grade in school.":O}

We who can't don't want to know why or how, just where to go and click to get it done! ":O}

I think it's pretty hard to fail with Fedora if your motivated, Most of the time it's easy enough to figure out without losing the joy of learning... when it isn't... you guys have never been slow to help me out! ":O}

What really helped my attitude was having it sink in that I was no longer "Dealing with the enemy" so to speak. There are no hidden agendas. If Fedora says your better off doing such and such, you probably are!