My Professor Says Linux Sucks and Is Not Real Unix. 2870

Sure, they're fragmented.

While they "dip into many of the same streams," each, by virtue of being distinct, has ways in which it does NOT dip into the same streams.

Generally speaking, each distribution has its own customizations to its install system, to its package management system, and, most importantly, each distribution separately manages its own patches to integrate packages into the respective systems.

It is useful to contrast this with, say, FreeBSD, where the combination of CORE + Ports is fairly much a single CVS archive.

Nonsense. Plenty aren't.

And shrinkwrap is *way* less available than it was back in about 2000-2001 when you could commonly find some combination of Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Linux, and Caldera on store shelves.

It's the usual "Linux isn't there yet" for some desktop purposes (which *is* true) being projected into "Oh, it has totally FAILED!!!"

That's got to be a tad depressing for people working on "desktop" projects.

On the other hand, for many, many of us, the *point* of using Linux is that we find utility in it. The fact that it is useful (including for some 'desktop-like' purposes) gives us good success, irrespective of someone crying 'failure.'

Indeed. Macs running Intel chips won't likely be cheaper as Chris ducks and ignores the notion of there being some objective metric here ;-).

Macs will still maintain a significant price premium because Apple can successfully demand premium prices.

From what I can tell, the reason for the Intel "leap" is actually on the laptop side of things. Apple has had a hard time getting low-powered PPC chips; Intel has done a better job than IBM-Motorola in building power-economic chips that allow battery life to thrive.

That leads to being able to buy faster, more powerful iBook and PowerBook laptops that will still command their traditional premium prices...

And when something isn't sold, economic measures that require *sales* in order for there to be anything for them to detect simply can't work.

One of the vital reasons for Linux's popularity (and the reason why it buried Mark Williams' "Coherent" some years ago) is the fact that Linux licenses come at no cost. (When you buy RHAS-RHES-SuSE licenses, you're buying the service contracts...) Which makes measuring its "economic significance" more than just a little troublesome. -- Necessity is the mother of invention. Insanity is the mother of straitjackets.