What Linux needs 13528

On Thursday 03 November 2005 16:27, Daveman750 stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

A few things...: (1) GNU-Linux is not being advertised like Windows is, simply because those who commercially offer a GNU-Linux distribution cannot afford the billion dollar advertising campaigns Microsoft is funding.

Additionally, GNU-Linux is not a commercial operating system, despite the fact that there are those commercial distributions I spoke of.

(2) Microsoft makes OEM vendors purchase a number of licenses in advance, before their computers are even sold. Therefore, the vendors have to start selling those licenses.

If they choose to sell computers without an operating system installed or with GNU-Linux installed, Microsoft can either revoke their OEM reseller license or can suddenly charge them a lot more.

However, some new machines are already being shipped with GNU-Linux, and the vendors of those will typically not invest in bulk OEM licenses of Windows to push onto their customers.

(3) Microsoft goes out of its way to make sure that GNU-Linux receives a bad reputation by false advertising, forged TCO statistics, threats - cfr. Korea - FUD campaigns in the corporate environments, etc.

In addition, anyone who has used Windows for a number of years and hasn't gotten a genuine IT education is thoroughly miseducated and conditioned regarding what a computer is and how it's supposed to behave.

(4) GNU-Linux is usable as a desktop operating system for home and office use, but it was never intended for such usage. Its roots lie in there are other computers in the world but commodity PC's.

It is only a nightmare if you think "the Microsoft way". There is documentation on how to load a driver, and most hardware - unless it is the typical "designed for Windows XP" hardware - is supported.

Windows is a joke compared to GNU-Linux, and if you want to keep it more or less safe from spyware, viruses etc. you will also have to perform a lot of work, and far more even than in GNU-Linux - and no, it's not easier to do that on Windows; in fact it's a lot harder.

That depends. It's a chicken and egg situation. Many hardware vendors are still waiting until GNU-Linux becomes more widespread in the commodity PC market before they will release such drivers, and GNU-Linux will unjustly keep on having the reputation of having no hardware drivers until it gains more of a commodity userbase.

Yet a lot of companies - and notably the serious ones - are releasing drivers for GNU-Linux. Typically, those drivers are even already part of the plain vanilla kernel tree.

Other vendors are releasing proprietary drivers for their newest products, such as nVidia or ATI - their slightly older products are already supported by FOSS drivers.

Wow! And how exactly did you think drivers are being loaded now? As source code, pumped through a C interpreter?

Every driver in the runtime Linux kernel is a binary, and Linux supports binary drivers of other types than the ELF format. If those drivers are proprietary, the kernel will however report them as a "tainting". After all, Linux - i.e. the kernel - is released under the GPL, and any loaded driver becomes part of the runtime kernel.

Yet I have a feeling that you mean that Linux should be supporting Windows binaries. While this is technically a Bad Idea(TM), there is a utility calledndiswrapperthat allows for a Windows binary driver to be used for network adapters.

Yet, aside from the technical objections and the GPL-based objections, there is also the practical objection that if you start doing that, people are going to use GNU-Linux to start running Windows drivers and Windows software.

The point is that if you want Windows, then you'll either have to stick with Windows, or await the further development of Freedows or ReactOS, both of which are Open Source Windows clones. At the moment, they don't have NTFS support yet, and given how easily Microsoft changes the already closed source NTFS specifications, they may never get there.

The current standard kernel interface is 2.6, but it's different from the 2.4 kernels, which is why a number of proprietary hardware vendors have stopped writing drivers for the Linux kernel. I happen to have such a videocard in my system right now.

If you want a point & click operating system, then stick with Windows, await Freedows or ReactOS, or go for a MacIntosh. I'm serious.

You are trying to turn an operating system that happens to run just as well on the x86 platform as it does on other architectures where the word "Windows" has no more meaning means a glbutt pane in wall into a Windows replacement. Don't. It was never meant to be that.

You would be surprised how many drivers the vanilla kernel tree already supports...

This is no different for Windows. There, they call it "DLL Hell". Often you need to download other stuff in order for the stuff you wanted to install first to work - especially in the Windows world.

In GNU-Linux, everything is dynamically linked, or at least, it should be. Some applications do come with statically linked libraries, but that's rare.

Go tell that to the people in Africa, the Australian outback, China, etc.

Not always, but if it does, it's because Windows software is usually supplied on a CD-ROM, while GNU-Linux software is usually downloaded from the Internet - distributions already come with all their libraries on the CD-ROM's-DVD.

See above...

GNU-Linux has no ambition to become a strong desktop OS. GNU-Linux is a multi-user client-server OS that has its uses on the home and office desktop, but those two markets are only a small section of the tasks GNU-Linux was designed to be able to do.

Please stop thinking of GNU-Linux as a compebreastor for Windows. It was never, is not, and never will be a compebreastor for that platform. It platforms are usually used for, i.e. servers, development workstations, mainframes, supercomputers, minicomputers, and aside from the two other deployments you are fixating on, also embedded devices.

The system was not developed for commercial purposes. It was developed to work, in the deployment fields I have mentioned here above. It does not need to become any more user-friendly - the user has to become

Microsoft has totally screwed up the perception of people. It is time to unlearn all that indoctrination again, and start anew. You're stepping on board of the space shuttle and you're complaining that there's no automatic gearshift...

Non sequitur...

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)