Interesting Article for the Penguin's | The Coffeehouse

This article in Information Week talks about Linux's Achilles heel, interesting:

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=18901660

~ Knute

sbc

Perhaps most Linux users aren't bothered about sound? After all many jobs do not require it - many business PC's don't even have speakers, so it is not really a drawback for most.

I wonder if he tried Knoppix - a free to download distro (which apparently puts commercial developers to shame with its hardware detection). There are very few unsatified users (A Google search bring up over a million matches for 'knoppix').

What jobs require the use of sound anyway? Apart from multimedia (interactive CD's, Games, DVD, audio CD's) developer (who often use a Mac anyway). If I had no sound card it wouldn't make a difference at all (except I couldn't hear the Channel9 videos)

Hardware support is often the poorest part of Linux - mostly due to the fact it is in the minority. That will change over time and get better as Linux gets more widely adopted.

IBM is now gradually migrating to Linux as is Novell. It is possible a few companies are doing it (as if IBM do it, it must be a good OS) - but not rushing it. A few years later and the market share for Windows will have dropped. What do people think about this?

Knute

Outside of programming I do some digital music creation using Sonar, Project 5 and GigaStudio. I have had some problems getting all this to work in my windows enviro and I don't want to have to buy a Mac. Some of the latest patches have cured some of the ills.

My point is this, If linux wants to compete they need to provide the home user with the same type of functionality that Windows provides out of the box. This has not happened so I will stay with what works for now.

~ Knute

sbc

I think they are still a long way from competing on the home user side. Home users invariably need sound due to games and many interactive CD's and DVD's. They are doing a lot better on the business side as some businesses just want the bare minimum (Word processing) - the presence of multimedia and the internet may make some users less productive.

Jeremy W.

I'd give Linux top marks in servers, hands down. On workstations (corporate environment) there's still a ways to go, both in terms of management and in terms of user-friendliness. It's doable, but it's a touch sell, and an even tougher launch to make.

This is easily shown by the fact that many of the larger Linux conversions that make the news actually switch back to Windows in 6 months. I don't doubt those groups will try again in a year or two, but they simply realised it was too big of an adjustment.

I really don't see Linux hitting the home market with any kind of severity in the next 5 years. Anything's possible, but unless someone pulls an Apple and releases something truly userfriendly I just don't see it happening.

It will happen, eventually, and I can't wait for when it does. I'm entirely sure that having 200,000 developers working in the same space (home and workstation) will improve every OS in that space.

FrankCarr

I agree that this is a weak point. Not so much as the drivers aren't there, they probably can be found for most devices, but that the finding them is often a major undertaking. Not only do you have to hop around to many sites trying to find them but you have to put up with being flamed as a "Windoze Loser" on some support forums. Not a very consumer friendly process although I've heard it's better than it was when I went through this process a while back.

I see the Linux desktop market as something with potential but that lacks a consumer focus and a killer reason to switch. If they get this together and if Microsoft drops the ball in any number of ways they could gain significant market share against Windows.

sbc

There is a company called Element Computer that is working the same way as Apple (selling Linux with their own hardware). Could prove to be good for Linux and may drive down the price of Mac's (as the OS, ION is also based on Debian)

http://elementcomputer.com/

Tom Malone

Jeremy W. wrote:

I'd give Linux top marks in servers, hands down. On workstations (corporate environment) there's still a ways to go, both in terms of management and in terms of user-friendliness. It's doable, but it's a touch sell, and an even tougher launch to make.

This is easily shown by the fact that many of the larger Linux conversions that make the news actually switch back to Windows in 6 months. I don't doubt those groups will try again in a year or two, but they simply realised it was too big of an adjustment.

I really don't see Linux hitting the home market with any kind of severity in the next 5 years. Anything's possible, but unless someone pulls an Apple and releases something truly userfriendly I just don't see it happening.

It will happen, eventually, and I can't wait for when it does. I'm entirely sure that having 200,000 developers working in the same space (home and workstation) will improve every OS in that space.

I agree with everything, linux i thinks has a lot of good points and alot of problems hardware combatibility if one of linuxs major problems and for the near future will be. The sound card probably didn't work because it is too old, and I think the reason the alsa sound went away after a reboot is probaly caused by a malformed init script. Saying all this i thinks linux rise to public knowledge has caused compition which i think by recent innovation at redmond microsoft if revelling in it, i think the fact linux is more secure is being dealt with and i can't wait for longhorn. I am not sure about .net as from what i have seen i still thinks java is better, and as 67% of all webservers run apache, i wonder if it will take off.

Jeremy W.

Tom,

Feel free to read the article in question. It was a brand-new machine, with a standard Intel Mobo, with standard Intel on-board sound. Essentially the same sound that's been around for years.

It was listed as supported by the distro he bought (and likely supported by the other 9 he tried). He even called into paid tech support.

I guess my problem with all of this is that he was making a point about how usable Linux is in a consumer environment. On the forums he's been flamed because he's talking authoritatively about Linux when he's obviously not a Linux guy...

But that's kind of the point. He's approaching it from a "normal user' perspective. And it's not like he just threw up his hands. He searched on Google, Usenet, asked support groups, called paid tech support and tried 9 different distros.

I'm sure he could have gone to greater lengths, but it's not like he just gave up after 20 minutes. He spent a weekend on it, doing his best.

Again, I'm not bashing Linux, just saying that in this case, sound was a big deal (and, the point of the article is that sound worked out of the box on Windows 95).

I'm fully behind Linux's headways in the server market, a bit tepid in the corporate environment... But there's no way I'm going to support my friends and family putting Linux on their home PC's. I mean, these are people who call me because they can't login when the caps lock is on.

Tom Malone

Your right of course, the hardware support is poor, and applicatin support is agian poor, but there is also a lot to be said for it, if nothing more than to keep microsoft on their toes. Also why use .net, java seems so much better, from what i've read it faster, this admittly is from the sun website so if i am wrong please let me know, but also is only on one platform.

Jeremy W.

I'm not knocking Linux, don't worry Smiley

As far as Java and .NET, as with anything, it's debatable. TheServerSide.NET did a big comparison, which was a really good read, and showed .NET to be faster.

They're both great platforms. There's a lot of flack from both communities to both communities, though Sun regularly gets flack for not investing enough into Java and letting it rot for 5 years.

Some things have changed recently.

.NET made a convert out of me, but I was coming from a Delphi type of background so it's easy to see why Wink

jamie

Who cares if your sound card doesnt work - when in switching to Linux you have to throw away many applications.. you know little ones like:

PHOTOSHOP
ILLUSTRATOR
INDESIGN
QUARK
CORELDRAW
FLASH
FRONTPAGE
3D STUDIO
OFFICE ( the standard busiess suite)
IE!!!!!
SOUND FORGE
CAKEWALK/SONOR
GIGA SAMPLER

Knute

That's a couple thousand down the toilet

~ Knute

sbc

jamie wrote:

Who cares if your sound card doesnt work - when in switching to Linux you have to throw away many applications.. you know little ones like:

PHOTOSHOP
ILLUSTRATOR
INDESIGN
QUARK
CORELDRAW
FLASH
FRONTPAGE
3D STUDIO
OFFICE ( the standard busiess suite)
IE!!!!!
SOUND FORGE
CAKEWALK/SONOR
GIGA SAMPLER

But you do get:

OpenOffice (Office Suite, MS Office alternative)
GIMP (photoshop alternative)
Film-GIMP / CinePaint (used for touching up movies - apparently used on Scooby Doo and Harry Potter)
Sodipodi (vector graphics, Illustrator alternative)
dia (diagramming software, Visio alternative)
Mozilla (web browser)
Audacity (sound editor)
gCAD (Computer Aided Design)

The software is there, but you could argue it is not as good as what Windows has. Most software for Windows has an alternative in Linux.

One thing missing is a decent WYSWIWYG editor (most Linux web developers probably hand code anyway). NVU is the closest thing to FrontPage and Dreamweaver - very early alpha though. Sponsored by Lindows/Linspire.

You would probably use a Mac if you were seriously into graphics design and multimedia production anyway.

jamie

re "You would probably use a Mac if you were seriously into graphics design and multimedia production anyway."

Just cause you're a designer does not always mean you like to pay double for hardware and software Tongue Out

Macs (n) PCs (y) !

* if wish theyd make the emoticons work in all sections of this site !

Jeremy W.

Yeah, in a past life I was a senior graphic designer working on huge magazines, videos and websites.

Macs are for some, but since all the apps are on PC as well it doesn't really matter.

As far as the big list of software sbc posted, really very little of it is as mature as the closed source alternatives (or the Windows ones). Most of them are free, so the quality is fantastic for what you get, but things like the GIMP are more like Paint Shop Pro alternatives than Photoshop. Ditto on Film-GIMP, Sodipodi, dia, Audacity and gCAD. The Mac / PC apps are much more polished and professional in that regard.

Linux is fine for people who need it, but when you are doing professional media stuff, by and large it isn't (yet, this is already changing at a dramatic pace, and I'm expecting Adobe to release a Linux version of Photoshop / Illustrator in the next release cycle).