Topic: What happened to Linux ?

[raVen]

With the vista release , there is a lot of buzz on the net . A few of them receptive , most of them ridiculing but , curiously all comparisons are to MacOS  . How the Mac is so better than Vista or How Mac will eventually kill Vista etc .

Even slashdot has been pretty quiet , They are still bashing MSFT but more along the lines of ,In Jan 2004  Jim Alchen [The top guy for Windows] sent out an Email stating "I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. " SlashDot Article

If I remember right , in the pre ipod world Linux was supposed to be the windows killer  . not MacOS . What happened ? . What changed ?

Your thoughts ?

[mephisto_kur]

Linux will never challenge MS in its present form.  The Linux community is too fractured, and when there is a flag to rally behind, that group is shunned as "too" something, like "too much like windows" or "too commercial."  The Linux community has always had its head up its ass.  Instead of fixing problems, they leave in a huff and make their own distro.

So, to answer your question, only Linux people thought that Linux would be a Windows killer, and nothing has changed.

[bR3Rd | seaWOLF]

i have played w/ linux for a while, SuSE 10.1 and Fedora 6 but in my opinion linux is widely spread, its so wide that no one is gonna be winner, unless one company under liunx comes up w/ magical OS to break windows into pieces, i don't c it happening. besides, last i heard, MS bought novell linux or something and gaining control over linux. lets face it, MS is not just software giant, its loaded w/ huge amounts of $$! so if linux goes for sale, i bet u MS is gonna try to buy it out.

[quorn]

I use ubuntu with the fluxbox desktop on my old laptop.  It works great, has a small memory footprint, and is easy to use.  It was, however, a female dog to set up, and the ready-made distributions were too doggone bloated for my tastes.

The coolest thing about linux is, in my opinion, also what prohibits its widespread adoption on the desktop.  It's too configurable.  Most folks just want to plug-and-play.  Deciding to use linux as your OS means also deciding what you really want out of your computer.  Most people don't have a clue what a computer does or can do, so they surely don't know what they want out of it, and as a result they take what's given to them.

But don't discount linux yet--remember that it is a serious player in serverland, with the weight of some big players behind it.  And if both Apple and Microsoft continue trying to transform the PC into an expensive end-point for advertisement delivery, I'll drop Windows and quit playing games.

Oh yeah, and what Meph said.

[DAwG]

idk, we use Linux in our NetAdmin class and I have to say, after playing around with the command line, I'm sick of it!

[tylerwillingham]

I do like Linux for messing around with but as far as attempting to be a "power-user" of a computer, Linux never really did it for me. Lack of mainstream apps didn't help either. It became a headache after a while. Mac's never did that for me and Windows is only a headache when it messes up at random or goes slow.

[DAwG]

I was checking online and there are thousands of different distributions of linux, some of them look like they could be pretty cool, you could plug in a flashdrive and boot your computer up into a multi-media center.

[tylerwillingham]

Yeah, I like Ubuntu and Mandriva the most myself but there are some other ones that I want to try out.
It's cool seeing an OS that's being distributed for free, but it would be a lot cooler to see more stuff out for it. I don't see that happening though.

[DAwG]

yeah its just going in too many directions, if it's going to go anywhere they need to consolidate

[Focused Moments]

I have one of these guys running in my basement.  Hack it up so you can use the underlying linux os underneath, it's great

Link:  http://www.nslu2-linux.org/

Pic:

[Kyord]

Linux will never challenge MS in its present form.  The Linux community is too fractured, and when there is a flag to rally behind, that group is shunned as "too" something, like "too much like windows" or "too commercial."  The Linux community has always had its head up its ass.  Instead of fixing problems, they leave in a huff and make their own distro.

So, to answer your question, only Linux people thought that Linux would be a Windows killer, and nothing has changed.

I couldn't agree more, and I wish that wasn't the case.  Most Kernel developers and distro builders have an ego the size of Montana, and they don't like to submit, hence the 8993939 flavors out there.   The other major driving factor is, the large distro executives (Redhat and Novel really) haven't taken the same spin as M$ has...  there is no money in building hardware to support Linux, so the opensource software(OSS) community always has to play catchup when it comes to writing drivers and such.   With that said, Microsoft has been partnering and giving cutbacks to hardware manufacturers to build around their OS! (M$ killed the Serial and Parallel port on laptops and tables by the way    Worse yet, they pay them to keep driver source locked, and crush OSS attempts to catch up.   Steve Jobs knows this, why do you think Apple still bothers with hardware?   

[quorn]

M$ killed the Serial and Parallel port on laptops and tables by the way

Huh?

[Kyord]

Huh?

Laptops and "mobile tablets" like this: http://www.motioncomputing.com/products/index.asp  used to have DB9 Serial and DB25 Parallel ports(COM and LPT ports) onboard to make them more PC Like.  Well, Microsoft approached a lot of these vendors, and asked them to remove these "legacy" ports, because it inhibited their marketing strategy.   That strategy being, WE CAN START OUR OS IN 2 SECONDS!#$ or "Win-XP can standby/hibernate and/or return from hibernate or standby in less than 3 seconds.  That was impossible with the Serial/Paralell port due to the driver and port type. (Takes longer to disable the port and make sure its off, and worse yet, you ever see a PC come back from hibernate after it was using the com port? It goes NUTS)

...so, with that said, 99% of tablets today don't have those ports today, and most laptop manufacturers are removing them too.

The comment didn't have anything to do with Linux directly, it was just an example of Microsoft's influence. 

[DAwG]

If someone could point me to a free good gaming distro I'd like to try something out in vmware

[Kyord]

If someone could point me to a free good gaming distro I'd like to try something out in vmware

huh??  Good Gaming being board games? or 3D openGL/DirectX games??  also, you want to run VMware ON linux, or linux in a VM??