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Simon Roberts schreef:
| OK, I've been wanting to answer this question for ages, but there's
just so much to say. In the end, I've given up trying to say everything
completely cohesively, and I'm just going to allow myself to ramble and
hope it helps some. First, a little background. I have a pretty good
computer background. I wrote 6502, Z80, 8088, 68000 and other machine
languages starting 25 years ago. I was a programmer for 15 years,
writing network protocol software before the TCP stack was generally
available, Unix device drivers, and a bunch of distributed control
systems. Eventually I moved to corporate teaching, which I still do. I
was using Linux to teach TCP and Unix system administration in 1994, and
other than Linux, I'm mostly a Solaris body. I have 3 Linux systems at
home, two of which dual-boot with windows so I can run Photoshop in a
color managed environment. I use VMWare for some other windows stuff
that's less crucial to me. I also have a dual processor
| SPARC/Solaris 10 system. I loath and detest bill gates and everything
he stands for. I regularly point out to my students that his company is
a marketing company (very effective one, sadly) not a technology
company. I believe they've never invented anything good, and have
damaged many, if not most, of the ideas they've "appropriated". Until
about 6 months ago, I was on a one man crusade to try to get my friends
all using Linux. Around about then (after one success,yay! :) I finally
gave up :( I can't begin to tell you the heartache, sadness, and sense
of failure I felt when I reached that decision. Anway, what follows are
some of the key/memorable personal experiences that wore me down and
made me give up. Please remember that I love Linux, I love the people
who put their effort into creating and maintaining it, and I think it
has improved tremendously in recent years. I blame nobody for the
"weaknesses" outlined below, other than what I see as bill
| gates' unreasonable and amoral (but sadly, probably entirely legal)
practices.
|
| 1) Hardware issues.
| If you just walk into a store and ask for a machine that will be
good to go with Linux, they'll look at you blankly. It's a major effort
to check the details yourself. Most off the shelf machines don't tell
you exactly what cards they contain, and then it's often hard to find
the devices in the HCLs.
| New hardware--inevitably--is most likely to be unsupported or buggy.
| Finding the HCLs used to be hard. I just checked, and this seems to
have been fixed (thanks someone! :)
| HCL is online, and I don't usually have access to the internet when
I'm in a store browsing!
| Whichever way you slice it, having to care about the exact hardware
is a pain. I don't see any way (other than having the leverage of
micky$loth) to get round this, and I certainly laud the efforts that
have been made to improve life
|
| 2) Photography related. I use Windows to run Photoshop CS2 in a color
managed workflow. In this, Linux doesn't cut it for two reasons:
|
| Color management. I tried to work out how to do the LCMS stuff, and
a bunch of related color management options I though I was looking at,
and just gave up, too much like hard work. Also, I seem to have the
wrong colorimeter hardware already and am not willing to pay all over
again for something else.
|
| GIMP is only 8 bit. That's fire in theory, but when you mess with
stuff much, you quickly run into posterization (I see this even in some
professional's work and while those in question don't seem to care, I
personally hate it).
|
| 3) Irritations with web plugins. Idiots out there keep writing stuff
that's windows only, and there always seems to be trouble trying to get
the latest Flash player. When it's available, it's tricky to install.
|
| 4) Palm pilot-:
| Several versions of palm device just don't sync, needless to say,
this includes some that matter to me.
| I don't know how to sync my palm and evolution-etc. with web
calendars like google or yahoo. That's important to me. I gave up using
my palm pilot because of this. Consequently, I'm appallingly badly
organized and regularly double book myself and miss meetings.
|
| 5) Video; I have failed repeatedly to build a system that plays all
reasonable kinds of video. Mostly this seems to be a deliberate policy
on bill gates' part (and the lawyers and the evil patent system, of
course). I've reached the point where I can do most file types with the
exception of AVI with the type 9 codec.
|
| 6) Strange inconsistencies ("That can't happen"):
|
| These are really hard, time-consuming, and often fruitless to debug.
My laptop (dual core 64bit Intel) won't shut down without crashing the
kernel. It will hibernate, and the file system journaling means that
I've been able to kill it when I have to shut it down completely, but
it's still irritating, and I long-ago gave up trying to fix it.
|
| Updates that break things, the various methods that I've found my
systems using to auto-patch seem prone to failure. Usually complaining
about something incompatible. I have one machine (admittedly running
9.3) which has been trying to upgrade Mozilla for the last two years. I
can't seem to stop it trying, the warning blob thingy always says
updates are ready. I don't really care, but it's not reassuring.
|
| Biggest pain for me is that it seems like every time I decide I want
to use/install/build a new piece of software, I have trouble with
dependencies. I fetch a package, but then it won't install because
something is missing, or the wrong version. I try to find the required
stuff, but that won't install because something else is missing, or it's
incompatible with something I already have. It might well be that I'm
doing it all wrong, but I only have so much time to give to this stuff.
Mostly I want a machine to just work. Usually, I give up and accept that
I'm going to live without whatever new function it was that seemed exciting.
|
| All of which sounds like I'm really unimpressed with Linux. That's not
the case. I know what work goes into this stuff, and I use it as much as
possible anyway (the only things I do with Windows are run Photoshop,
for the reasons given, and one check-writing program that I run under
VMWare, because I always did, and GNUCash was too complicated to bother
finding out about, and too much like hard work to migrate to). My
problem, which is a huge personal disappointment, is that I realized
about 6 months ago that I can't ask my friends to move to Linux. They
just don't have what it takes still to cope. Me, sure, I can muddle
through, but then again, I don't like to make this effort and I tend to
accept restricted functionality as the price I pay to take my moral high
ground and reject gates as much as possible. I also prefer the relative
security that I get from avoiding "the Internet's petri dish"
|
| Generally, I would prefer to see less effort on "improvement" and more
on stabilization. Pin down the compatibility issues (remember the Unix
wars?--I do.) between versions of libblahdyblah or whatever, so I can
just fetch a package and use it. Meanwhile, Linux seems to me to be a
good choice for companies where one install effort can be rolled out to
hundreds of users, but less viable for intermediate home users who want
to do interesting and different things, but aren't able to help
themselves. The really basic users, who browse, send email, write the
odd document, and look at jpeg images from their cameras have no
problem. I have one such friend that is completely computer illiterate
and quite happy using OpenSUSE 10.1 with ICE window manager (old, weak
hardware, couldn't run Gnome or KDE adequately). All other attempts to
migrate my friends were met with legitimate objections that I couldn't
counter.
|
| With thanks to all who've made this what it is, and with continuing
faith that one day it'll be what it deserves to be, and have the
acceptance and mainstream support it deserves. Hope this ramble helps,
| $0.02
| Simon
|
|
|
|
Dear Simon,
Beautifull to see, how a man with your knowledge, and accordingly to
that knowledge, has too little time for himself, to 'fix stuff
properly'..merely ironic, life is indeed not without a sense of humor. ;-)
The things you lay your finger upon, *are* the things that are going on...
Sometimes it feels to me, somebody messed with time, and there are less
hours in a day then there were before, but somehow, i am not able to
prove it.. ;-), and i don't kow who to blame either...
Maybe we are all responsible, and victims at the same time...
There is a turn towards Linux noticeable: AMD, NVidia, Ati, HP, others
will follow...
You mention the proprietary, and the licensed stuff, truly a pain in the
ass, but with some, (magic word) *Extra-time*, all(most) everything in
your list is solvable...
Old and new hardware is very very useable, even the newest Dual and
Quad-core machines run, but the software ahs to be written, as with 64bit.
But that functions apart from some off the things you also mentioned.
Apart from Photoshop, there are Cad like: Solid works, and Inventor
which licenses are very expensive, but you have to use them on a M$
platform...
Well, i am very glad, there is not only M$, because i than would stop
using a computer... ;-)
- --
Have a nice day,
M9. Now, is the only time that exists.
~ OS: Linux 2.6.24-rc8-git2-3-default x86_64
~ Huidige gebruiker: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
~ Systeem: openSUSE 11.0 (x86_64) Alpha1
~ KDE: 3.5.8 "release 36"
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