Pointer: blog post, "RANT: Is the Linux dream a myth?"

[blnchflr]

I came across this blog post in the openSUSE forums: RANT: Is the Linux dream a myth?

I've met a few characters that are living the Linux dream or at least claiming to. But here's the rub... is there anyone who's exclusively using it? I don't mean "I've got Linux installed on my USB stick" or "I dual boot". Is there anyone who is actually using Linux as there sole operating system. Booting into everyday to check their email, write their documents, develop their code, surf the web and yes.. play their games. I fear there is not.

Having used Linux exclusively for almost a year, and knowing people who've been Linux-exclusive for longer than that, not to mention MAC USERS, the author seems naive or sheltered. Which surprises me, as he's a coder - apparently I'm prejudiced about coders :o)

Comments

[dragonwolf]

As far as Windows OSes go, 7 is probably one of the best they've come out with, and it's certainly heads and shoulders above ME Vista. They've finally learned to trim down the resource usage of the new Longhorn-family stuff (Aero, desktop window manager, etc), and made the user account control stuff not so annoying (not as good as Ubuntu/Linux's access control, but not as horrendous as Vista's). They're also starting to put their foot down on native support of ancient stuff (IE6 and other ancient programs don't work on 7 unless you know about/can enable "XP mode" or whatever it's called, which is kind of like MS's version of WINE exclusively for stuff that's only compatible as far up as XP), which is like the light at the end of the tunnel for those of us in web design.

While the OS itself isn't too bad, I guess they added a thing to their "Windows Genuine Advantage" software that requires the computer to report to the servers every 90 days or so to make sure it's "still genuine" I guess. How a previously "genuine" copy of an OS can suddenly become "not genuine" and still maintain all the exact information is beyond me, so the point of this other than another draconian DRM move is also beyond me.

[dragonwolf]

In Denmark it's legal to break encryption if you have no other way of reading/playing a file - they specifically mention Linux systems \o/ !

That is awesome. Here in America, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is along the lines of "it's legal to make a copy for archival purposes, as long as you don't break the DRM on it"... the programs are done in such a way that in order to make said copy, you have to break the DRM... *facepalm*

As for the ATI cards, it seems to me that the HD series in general is having problems with the available drivers. The OSS community doesn't seem to have made a lot of progress with it, and the ATI drivers, from what I've seen, suck.

I know a lot of people who rail against nVidia for not going open source, but frankly, their drivers have worked for me. I'd rather a company provide closed Linux drivers than open them up and basically say "go for it, but we're not going to help you and our own drivers for you will be garbage," and watch as the community flounders to get around the parts that aren't open (ATI's drivers aren't fully opened, only parts of them are, for "trade secret" reasons).

[dragonwolf]

My friend has his entire family on exclusively Linux, and I'm pretty sure he's pretty hardcore OSS. No flash, no MP3, no nothing unless it's completely FLOSS. He's been that way for longer than I've known him and I met him a good seven or eight years ago.

As for myself, I run solely Linux on both my desktop and my laptop. I do have a virtual machine for testing on IE, and to make occasional use of Visual Studio, because I'm a web developer (there is no way in hell that I would disgrace my Linux installs with the atrocity that is IE, especially in the rare case that I have to test on IE6, so IE stays locked in VMs, to fire up only when needed).

I consider myself somewhat of a gamer. I played World of Warcraft until about 6 weeks ago (and might pick it back up when the next expansion comes out), and it arguably ran better under Linux than it did under Windows (especially with OpenGL enabled). I've also had Diablo 2, Starcraft, Supreme Commander, and Sins of a Solar Empire running under Linux. The rest of the games I play are console games, so those are moot.

I've actually found Linux more convenient than Windows for a recent web server setup that I did through SSH. It's possible I did it the hard way, but it taught me a ton about terminal commands, and it was as simple as firing up a terminal window. No need for other software, like PuTTy, to get going. It was also nice that I happened to be running the same OS as the server, so a lot of stuff mapped to the same places and the naming schemes were all the same, so I didn't have to deal with remembering with file system scheme I was typing in for which half of the command.

I actually feel like I'm cheating on my current Grad school course. It's a web development course and the first assignment is to create a basic web page (to be built on through the course), to be done in a basic text editor. The school assumes you're running Windows, so they assume "basic text editor" equals "Notepad", but since I'm on Linux, "basic text editor" equals gedit, which means I still get the code highlighting that's part of the reason a real code editor isn't supposed to be used yet.

[holyschist]

they are often so much less convenient there.

I'm not terribly surprised.

[darkemeralds]

I'm actually not very troubled by the prospect of breaking encryption on audiobook files that I've paid for, but I have yet to find an audiobook player as good as the one that Audible provides. I'd use it to play all my podfic, too, if I could. Playing long audiobooks as MP3s is really unsatisfactory because you can't set bookmarks.

Thanks for the links--the second one doesn't seem to be valid, but I drilled through and found some good stuff. Looks like I might be able rig up something.

[blnchflr]

I wouldn't mind having easy access to testing webpages in IE, because I do want my websites to be accessible to all browsers. I write xhtml 1.0 strict, and validate - but that isn't always enough to make sure IE doesn't do cooky things to it. However, I couldn't live with Vista taking up 29GB of my hd, when I wasn't using it for anything else.

since I'm on Linux, "basic text editor" equals gedit, which means I still get the code highlighting that's part of the reason a real code editor isn't supposed to be used yet.
:oD

[blnchflr]

That is awesome. Here in America, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is along the lines of "it's legal to make a copy for archival purposes, as long as you don't break the DRM on it"... the programs are done in such a way that in order to make said copy, you have to break the DRM... *facepalm*
Yeah, we've been lucky in this respect!

[blnchflr]

Best of luck - if you get it to work, you should post the solution.

[blnchflr]

it's certainly heads and shoulders above ME Vista
Don't knock ME! Sure it sucked in some respects, and there was so much software that didn't work on it, especially after XP. But I would have preferred ME on my new computer compared to Vista; I bet it would have been super-fast! Not to mention: I ran ME for 7-8 years without reinstalling - ok, so mostly because I didn't know about reinstalling. But while a reinstalling surely would have tightened things up, it really didn't run half-bad on 122 MB RAM!

Tangent, in case you like such things: <del> is the new valid html for deleted text <3

[blnchflr]

I don't get the impression they're chasing the money - more that they think you can't do it any other way, *hands*.

[blnchflr]

I guess I should just try it out!

[blnchflr]

I really haven't - the last time I was on a Mac with a mouse was probably 10 years ago!

[blnchflr]

I love SuperTuxKart, myself, but it runs crappily on my computer - I assume it's my graphics card :o(

I go through phases of playing Frozen Bubble a lot, too.

[dragonwolf]

However, I couldn't live with Vista taking up 29GB of my hd, when I wasn't using it for anything else.

I know how that goes. I actually have XP running in my VMs, in part because I've ended up with a zillion copies of it over the years (I got free software packs and downloads courtesy of my school, and rationalized by the fact that it's in my tuition anyway). Granted, I gave it 40Gigs of space, but that's because it's also doubling as my development environment for .NET apps when I need them (and thanks to Sun's little feature in their disk creation/allocation system, it doesn't actually take up that much space until it's actually using that much space, so the drive file is only about a quarter of that size). Of course, I also have an entire TB drive dedicated to holding data, so even 40GB is pretty trivial.

[dragonwolf]

Yeah. I have a theory that one of the requirements to accepting a high-level government job in this country is getting a lobotomy...

[dragonwolf]

Tangent, in case you like such things: <del> is the new valid html for deleted text <3

Hah, good to know. I don't generally use it, so it's one tag I don't keep up with. Seems rather arbitrary to change that, but *shrug*.

[dragonwolf]

Oh, so you mean the little round mice that came with the iMac Blueberries? ;) (Those were awesome, in their own right, in my opinion, simply because they were so different from typical mice.)

But yeah, the new Magic Mouse is really cool. The basic software that currently comes with a Mac only enables it to do basic things, such as right click and one- and two-finger swiping (one for scrolling, in all directions; two for forward and back navigation). The right click is a little awkward because it doesn't always pick up that you're clicking with the right finger (it's based off touching with both, then lifting the left up and clicking with the other), but the scrolling, especially is really cool, particularly when image editing. Then, there's third-party software that allows it to do all sorts of stuff. A coworker of mine had the software and he had it opening files with particular touches and such. It's like having a second keyboard solely for shortcuts, for those that are into that.

It's also blue-tooth and has pretty damn good battery life (that batteries that came with it lasted two and a half months).

[blnchflr]

I use it a lot for humorous purposes online :o) ! It is my understanding it is meant to be used in conjunction with <ins>, in which case I'm still using it wrong, as I never bother with <ins>. At any rate, also in my understanding, <s>/<strike> was always pure formatting, like <i> and <b>, whereas <del> is recognized by screenreaders? So it's an accessibility thing, which I'm all for.

[dragonwolf]

That makes sense.

<3 your icon, by the way. :)

[blnchflr]

Oh, so you mean the little round mice that came with the iMac Blueberries? ;)
If this thing, yes! I can't remember the Mac mice they had at my uni - but since then, I've only been on my friend's Mac laptop, and she doesn't use a mouse at all, *hyperventilates*.

A coworker of mine had the software and he had it opening files with particular touches and such. It's like having a second keyboard solely for shortcuts, for those that are into that.
Oooh, that is cool!

[blnchflr]

Thanks, I'm fond of it, even though the font type (and slightly too high positioning) bothers me now. It was made on the horrenduous image manipping software that came with ME - for one thing, it could only add text to high-res images; no matter what you started out with (say, a nicely cropped 100x100 icon, which just needed the finishing touch of text), the software would scale the image to 2048x[at least 2048]. Scaling back down, text often looked crap.

I think I need a "Awww, ME, you don't deserve your bad rep. Except you totally do. But still, *pets*" icon :o)

[dragonwolf]

Two words: "vendor lock-in."

I don't know about business level (and this might be getting better, since Dell theoretically sells computers with Linux), but I know as a consumer, finding computers that come from the OEM with Linux on them is a pain (and, from what I've been able to find, more expensive for some stupid reason). That means that they'll come with Windows, and, of course, the easiest way to network Windows computers is on a Windows-based (Active Directory) network (plus, you get support from the software vendor). Then, that gets you into MS Office, so you can have Outlook (to go with the Outlook Web Access). ....And, before you know it, you're stuck with them for X number of years, renewing every time you get new Windows computers (and, like cell phone contracts, you're bound to need to upgrade before said contract runs out).

Ironically, free market kind of works against the Enterprise Level Open Source industry, because there are almost too many options for support for a given piece of open source software, and it becomes daunting to IT departments (or, probably more accurately, the tech-illiterate suits that govern them). Plus, you have to retrain everyone if you're switching, which companies don't like to do. The bitter irony to that was/is the need to retrain people for Vista/7 and MS Office 2007.

One nice thing, though, is that a lot of small government departments are integrating open source software into their businesses (the ODF became the standard doc format in some states in the US, and other countries are looking at using OSS in general)...unless someone does something like this

[dragonwolf]

Yep, that's the one. :D

Mac people are weird like that, I noticed. They could practically give up the mouse altogether and wouldn't miss it.

Magic Mouse info, in case you're curious.

[dragonwolf]

Ew at the software thing, but then, that was circa 2000 and crappy software.

ROFL at the icon idea.

[dragonwolf]

Sun VirtualBox, FTW! :D