Guest post by “Linus Torvalds just can’t help but be a thorn in Microsoft’s side. First, he created an open source project that completely upset Microsoft’s business model. And now, he has helped shoot down an important Microsoft patent in Redmond’s crusade to wring licensing dollars out of Google Android and other versions of Linux.”
“completely upset” is a bit strong. What’s the market share of linux on desktop after 20 years of “rough competition against evil microsoft”? 1%?
Where does Microsoft make the most money: server or desktop? Desktop you say? There we go…
Microsoft 2011 Revenue:
Business Software: $5.78B
Windows: $4.74B
Server: $4.64B
Entertainment: $1.49B
Online: $662m
Just saying, its pretty damn close…
Ya, Linux has never been a serious threat to Microsoft on the desktop and never will be. But on servers, it’s a different story …
It will be. But not today yet.
No it won’t.
Fragmented Environments.
Fragmented Distros.
Bugs that are never fixed.
Constant Churn with hardware support.
Constant Churn with APIs.
Far too much choice.
I could go on.
can I say this? FUCK YOU and your non-arguments!
You mean like the Metro start screen vs. the traditional desktop, neither of which can run each other’s programs, in Windows 8?
You mean like how I can boot up Windows 7 right now, start five different Microsoft-supplied programs, and find five completely different UI:s?
Ribbon here, toolbar there. Menus? No menus? Who knows! XP this, Windows 3.1 that, and oh look, Windows Media Player has a custom bitmap skin! And so does Outlook! And wow, this new Visual Studio sure looks like NO OTHER WINDOWS APP. Cool!
It gets even worse if we’re including commonly used things like Photoshop and Firefox, which draw their own widgets and ignore many OS conventions. Or how about anti-virus? There are a trillion anti-virus apps, but is there ONE that adheres to the Windows UX guidelines?
So: I’m going to say with a straight face that my XFCE/GTK based desktop is much cleaner and more consistent across applications. I couldn’t say that ten years ago, when Windows looked better and Linux looked worse, but there it is. Windows in 2012 is an UI fragmentation disaster on a level unheard of, and it’s only going to get worse in 8.
If you happen to use XFCE and XFCE apps it is consistent.
And as everything being not consistent on Windows o’rly …
http://i.imgur.com/fpGQ4.jpg
HMM lots of common UI between applications.
Up until the release of 8 the Windows UI has worked exactly the same as it did from Windows 95 with some minor changes in 7 with the taskbar.
If AV programs and the new Metro interface is all you can really bring up than tbh you are just grabbing the lowest hanging fruit.
Even if the UI was the problem (It isn’t).
There are soo many damn forks of what is exactly the same thing. Sooo many other problems and most of the development money is being put into server not the desktop.
Right in that screenshot: why does Task Manager have a different menu bar than Visual Studio, to begin with? What’s with the orange Firefox menu in the top left; what guidelines of anything ever does THAT conform to?
I’d adress some other things, particularly with Visual Studio, but what you’ve taken a picture of is close to a best-case scenario so I’m not going to bother. Instead, I’m going to play your game and pull up some other common apps:
http://i.imgur.com/Sg5LH.jpg
Let’s see what we have here:
* Security Essentials draws its own UI that looks like… I don’t even know.
* Outlook draws not only its own widgets that do not conform to the system theme, but even its own title bar and close/minimize/maximize buttons
* So does Photoshop (whose UI is a mess of Flash and other non-compliant random stuff that looks more like Mac OS 7 than anything)
* The standard colour picker is still identical to the one in Windows 3.0 (1989) — note the font. MS Sans Serif.
* Log viewer has toolbars and XP-style icons & layout. And where do these gradients come from exactly?
* Paint has ribbons that do not honour system colour/style settings
* You can have fun counting the number of different UI fonts used if you want! I spot at least Segoe UI, MS Sans Serif, Tahoma, and that Adobe UI font. Can you find more?!
This is a MESS. It looks like GARBAGE.
Edited 2012-03-28 07:37 UTC
And you have chosen the worst examples. I choose 4 different programs from 4 different devs that all pretty look to me about the same and have similar UI concepts.
The orange icon on firefox, really that is a complaint? You got the crap outlook theme from 2007 loaded (Word btw looks amazing). And PhotoShop … Oh comon.
You are using Office 2007, Office 2010 fits perfectly in with Windows 7 theme.
Your only argument is the colours, not the fact that there are many of the same UI paradigms with the same look and feel across applications.
If you use on Linux GTK apps with XFCE, things looks good. If you have a dark theme, Eclipse looks like arse and pretty much anything that isn’t GTK, because it won’t pick up your theme. Which is basically the complaint you are making about Windows.
Then with pretty much every GTK and QT app there is this weird mouse feedback when clicking anything (you need to be much more precise than on Windows), that I can’t really put my finger on that feels pretty odd.
Lets not pretend that from my original post all the other points still stand.
This is what pisses me off about Linux supporters, the dodge themeing on Windows is one of the very few problems of the OS (if it is a problem at all).
However most of the problems with Linux can be found throughout the system and is confounded by the almost limitless choice.
The only places Linux is anygood is on embedded and server. The latter because it doesn’t pretend not to be unix and the former because it completely hides the underlying OS much like MacOSX/iOS hides the fact that it is still unix.
Edited 2012-03-28 09:06 UTC
I’ve chosen very common apps, some of which I work in daily. Admittedly I don’t use Log Viewer much, and I launched Paint because it was the first example of a ribbon UI I could think of — but the point of showing those is that these are apps that are included with the OS and it is reasonable to assume that they should therefore adhere to Windows UI standards. If Microsoft does not care about its own standards, why should Adobe or Mozilla or anyone else?
That is not an excuse. Applications that run on multiple OS versions should look like the host OS and adhere to its guidelines. They should not just look like whatever crap the app dev team feels like, or whatever the latest OS version looks like at their time of release.
Nope. There are clearly different paradigms, too. Some apps have replaced menu bars with other systems, some haven’t. Some have tool bars, some have ribbons, some have neither. There’s functional, not just aesthetic discrepancy.
I will agree that the look and feel split between GTK+ and QT is a problem. Not for me personally so much, as almost everything I use in Linux is GTK+ except VirtualBox and maybe something else that uses QT.
But sure, it is a problem and I don’t think I’ve ever said that it’s not. It used to be worse not long ago, though, when you had to consider GTK 1 vs 2, QT, Motif, TK, FLTK, Athena… At this point, there are only 2 major toolkits in use, and the major distributions are working to consolidate their user experiences into something coherent.
Yes, but it was one of the things you singled out as being bad about desktop Linux, so I wanted to demonstrate that the grass is not necessarily greener in Windowsland. Indeed, I think Windows 7 is mostly okay otherwise.
I don’t intend to argue those points, in my opinion they have varying degrees of validity but UI design is a favourite topic of mine so that is what I chose to focus on
MSPAINT is not a commonly used application. Not is the Windows Log … Might be common to you buy I certainly don’t use it often.
The whole argument is bullshit.
The applications should looks like the host OS guidelines … can’t their ever be any progress or originality?
Most of the apps that you said at worst case has similar UI paradigms that were easily recognisable.
Concentrating on one of my complaints to a generic complaint that was aimed at someone that was saying “we will win eventually” … oh well this is OSAlert … you can’t say anything without a ton of bullshit coming your way.
No! Not now, that i was following both argumentations with some interest!
So basically you are saying “ok, i’m out of arguments and will start saying carp out of my mouth”. Good for you, i guess.
Edited 2012-03-28 20:14 UTC
I read Wayland prefers client side decorations.
Won’t Linux have this problem when Wayland is adopted? (applications choosing how they want to look).
Edited 2012-03-28 17:46 UTC
Yes, that’s exactly what he means. Windows 8 is a huge clusterf**k of an OS, and if there was any time for Linux to make some headway, it would be now. Unfortunately, there is no ‘Linux’. There’s only 900 different distros all competing with each other. If all these distro makers would combine their efforts and make a nice, cohesive experience, where ALL apps work under one or two distros, using ONE desktop environment to rule them all, they could probably carve out a nice chunk of the desktop for themselves. Unfortunately, they either clearly do not want this to happen, or just lack the vision to make it happen.
I don’t know what Linux Evangelists expect to happen on the desktop, but whatever the case, they’ve done little to nothing up to this point, and I don’t see any rabbits being pulled out of hats. If MS loses market share to anyone, it’ll probably either be to tablets like the iPad, or to OSX. On the desktop, Linux is a joke. A great OS with all kinds of potential, but way too many cooks in the kitchen, and no unified direction whatsoever.
Edited 2012-03-28 08:15 UTC
I had a larger reply going, but I don’t think it is worth posting. These are common arguments, and while I can understand them I have a hard time relating to them personally, so I’m just going to address this little gem:
Really? You’re going to claim this? When I started using Linux on the desktop (1998-ish,) it was pretty gosh-darn bad and often looked much like this:
http://fvwm95.sourceforge.net/screenshot-full.gif
http://xwinman.org/screenshots/fvwm95-daBorg.gif
There has been a LOT of progress, and although I personally think some of the newer developments are detrimental (Unity, GNOME 3, the pulseaudio mess), consistency and usability of the Linux desktop now is lightyears beyond what it was even five or ten years ago.
Lol…!
Thank you for the screenshots! They made me sentimental for my first Linux installation, which would have been Slackware (version 7 if amnesia serves me correct). Considering it was 1998, the shots don’t look much/any worse than Win95/98 at the time.
You really don’t seem to get it the distro’s are the OSes and Linux a kernel. There is no reason why they should all join together and would be worse off if they did. It is good that you can use Parted Magic for partition/disk management, Ubuntu on the Desktop or Mint or Fedora and Backtrack for penetration testing or Android on a phone/pad. This is good and something you can’t do in Windows.
Wrong – Linux on the desktop has come a long way over the last few years KDE is a very good Desktop and whatever one thinks of Unity, Ubuntu and Canonical certainly are heading in a determined direction and has a unified vision of what it wants. It does make me wonder if you have used Linux in the last five years
Ubuntu etc are not simply distro’s they are OSes
Really? Have you seen their market share lately?
And why do you need different distros for that?
Oh yeah, what do they have… like 5 more users than they did in 1996?
Yeah, that’s what I mean… 900 distros/operating systems competing for a very distant 3rd behind Windows and OSX. What a waste.
Hi,
It’s sad when people lack the ability to do more than simply shoot the messenger, and I expect the same will happen to me, but…
What you’re describing are only symptoms of the real problem.
The real problem is that, for the “bazaar” model it’s nearly impossible to achieve consensus. If 10 different people have 10 different ideas about how something should be implemented, you end up with 10 different/competing implementations. It only really works when there’s a strong leader (Linus, Google) or no decisions are involved (e.g. cloning existing software rather than developing something new). In theory, eventually (after a large amount of wasted effort on implementations that are discarded/superseded) the best ideas should float to the top; yet in practice this process of attrition is likely to take several hundred years of “churn” and may never really stabilize.
For someone like Apple or Microsoft, someone near the top of the hierarchy can say “this is how it will be”, and all the developers have no choice but to create software that is consistent with their decision. Essentially, consensus is enforced. This is far more efficient, and should produce much better/consistent results in the short term (but isn’t likely to produce results that are as good as the “bazaar” model in the “very long term”).
– Brendan
Shoot the messenger … that is how it is really?
They are genuine complaints, until anyone fixes those the Linux desktop will be a minority and a shitty experience until the end of time.
Edited 2012-03-28 17:51 UTC
And how many years have we been hearing this? Since the 1990s?
“Desktop linux” is a mess of ideas and projects that may be good for progress and testing out new concepts but as a platform to develop for it’s a failure by nature.
EDIT: By “develop for” i mean the for the big guys. Adobe, avid, autodesk, the whole friggin gaming/entertainment software industry.
Edited 2012-03-28 17:57 UTC
Off course Linux is a thread to Microsoft and always has been. Why else would Bill Gates call it a cancer on society back in 98.
Microsoft has kept its position by paying off hardware manufactures and politicians. Denmark where I come from is a prime example of this.
Edited 2012-03-28 07:02 UTC
It is an unpopulair subject on OSAlert and I’m not a big fan of it either.
But the share of desktop-machine use is getting smaller.
So maybe Linux won’t ever have the year of the Linux desktop. But maybe the desktop computer market will eventually end up as a niche market. Like workstations for CAD/CAM. If that still is a market at all, maybe that is now part of the normal desktop market ?
Edited 2012-03-28 20:53 UTC
Read the full linked article, not just the summary. This has little to do with GNU/Linux on the desktop, rather with Android and the various lawsuits Microsoft has against phone makers. Microsoft knows they can’t go after an open source project directly, so they target hardware manufacturers that seek to incorporate the project into their phones (which of course are designed with the Android platform in mind).
If the outcome of this case is not in Microsoft’s favor, then presumably they will no longer be able to use a specific patent related to long file names against Android phone vendors, and therefore will also not be able to extort patent royalties.
If that happens, I’m also hoping for a snowball effect regarding software patents in general, though I’m not holding my breath.
Too late, some peoples interest is only Linux on the desktop, and ‘M$’.
These people tend to post a lot. And they tend to be of “the Opinion won’t be changed, and won’t let you change the subject” school of thought.
I disagree with that and think we should chat about desktops some more
Let’s not.
The common user often doesn’t even know what version of Windows he’s using. For us technical people it’s hard to imagine someone can use the same OS for years and not know what it is, but people are like that.
Years ago people bought computers, because they wanted a computer. Today people buy computers, because they want to do stuff on the Internet or work with some program. The computer isn’t a goal anymore, it’s just something you apparently need to do what your really want to do.
The result is that people have no idea what they have, nor any interest to learn it.
Don’t believe the penguins, Linux is more difficult than Windows. Worse, things are (very different) between distributions and even between version of the same distro. Ubunto for example swapped Gnome for Unity, completely changing the user interaction.
If people can’t figure out what version of Windows they have and well, can’t figure out all the other basic stuff how on earth can they figure out how Linux works? It’s difficult enough to talk someone through basic Windows stuff on the phone when you know where everything is or should be, imagine how mission impossible it is when you don’t.
Sure they can use it if they have a geeky family member who can set up the system, install what they need and give them some training, but those users will be stuck in that situation and would never upgrade their system.
It’s a reason, amongst others, why Linux on the desktop has utterly failed, yet blossomed on the server (where able IT people have to work with it). Android phones are in a way just like the geek family member. The manufacturer does the install, adds the apps and provides an “easy” interface.
The thing is, GNU/Linux was never really meant for the desktop. The kernel started out as a free alternative to Minix, throw in some GNU and you have a usable operating system. As it has grown and adapted over the years, it has begun to shine in the server, mobile and embedded spaces where it generally outperforms the competition in several ways.
It wasn’t until the early 2000s that we really started to see consumer oriented GNU/Linux based distributions come to the forefront. Until then it had been Red Hat, Corel, Slackware, Mandrake and similar enterprise-level distros leading the pack. The earliest purely consumer oriented distro I remember was Lindows, and it was terrible! It wasn’t even a suitable replacement for Windows 95, let alone Windows ME/XP that it targeted. Mandrake slowly began a consumer focus, and as always Debian was a dark horse, considered an obscure hacker’s distro in the OSS circles I ran in back then but slowly becoming more mainstream.
Then Ubuntu burst onto the scene in 2004, and suddenly you started to see Linux commercials on TV, Microsoft really started to ramp up their FUD campaign, and the SCO lawsuit filed the year before began making headlines.
Now I’m not saying it’s solely due to Ubuntu’s popularity that we talk about “Linux on the desktop”; that particular topic had been thrown about long before I first heard of the OS in the mid 90s. And my answer to the question of “when will it ever be ready for the desktop”? There is no definite answer; it’s completely dependent on the individual user’s needs. That’s not a cop-out, it’s pure common sense.
For my desktop needs, Arch Linux, Slackware and occasionally Ubuntu all suit me just fine. For others, it’s Ubuntu or nothing. Still others wouldn’t function properly without their beloved Fedora/Mandriva/PCLinuxOS/{insert distro here}. And a great many gave up on trying to make GNU/Linux work for them in any form, and went back to whatever commercial OS they despise but can’t function without.
Linus created Linux to use UNIX on his desktop PC, but he’d probably (guessing ‘n’ assuming here) he wanted to use it as a CLI based system.
I have often wondered what would have happened if there had been less choice. While we in general think of having a choice is good, the Linux world offered a lot of bad and shaky choices. How many of us have had periods where we changed Linux distribution, changed GUIs and hoped the new version would get things right.
Had there been one desktop Linux with just one GUI all devs could have concentrated on it, made sure their apps worked fine with it. Users could recognize a Linux system, learn to use it, help others out.
When I install, let’s say Ubuntu, it looks okay. But the moment I install a different theme some icons don’t play along. Things already go wrong there. And it gets worse when you install software using the Ubuntu software tool. Stuff that refuses to start, stuff that gets installed, but doesn’t show up in the menu, stuff that doesn’t crash but doesn’t work either. A sharp contrast with the Apple app store for example.
But it seems it’s the GUI software that’s often bad ‘n’ buggy, CLI based stuff is often excellent.
The Linux world needs to get realistic. No matter how great they think Linux is, if people don’t want it for free something must be wrong with it. Those people do fork out a lot of money for an iPhone or iPad.
I just don’t think this free ‘n’ fun way of the open source Linux world is an effective way of creating stuff on a large scale. It would probably work a single application level, with a few people. But loads of people with loads of projects with no accountability to anyone, all with they own ideas and preferences… to get them all on the same playing field isn’t easy. Nor is Linus a leader that can unite the bunch, he’s far too rude to be political.
While I agree with you that the choice in Linux is a double edged sword, I don’t think you can argue that the success of Windows is due to it’s single release. Over the years there has been plenty of other OSs better than Windows with a single unified interface that have all failed – AmigaOS being one example.
Windows isn’t successful because it’s a single OS, Windows is successful because it’s marketed well.
If you’re installing from the testing repositories, then yeah, you’d have those issues. But the main repositories for most distros are pretty stable.
The soft of people who wouldn’t pay for Linux are the same people who likely pirate Windows and it’s software. I think it’s a great leap of faith to say that users of Linux are only using it because it’s free yet are willing to pay through the nose for Apple gadgets. I think you’re mixing up two completely different types of consumers and casually passing them off as the same.
There’s plenty of large scale open source projects that are highly popular on Windows and OS X as well: Firefox, VLC, XBMC, VirtualBox, and so on.
Plus you’re arguing that the decentralised application development model for Linux development doesn’t work yet that’s how every commercial OS runs as well. Windows and OS X don’t exclusively run Microsoft / Apple software. Users will install Photoshop, Paint.NET or GIMP (two of which are also open source
), their own FTP client (many of which are open source) and a non-MS browser (most of which are either open source or based on open source components).
What’s more, I find it ironic that you mention how the open source model doesn’t work when OS X is built heavily on it.
You mean compared to Steve Job who made a career of shouting at people and Bill Gates who compared Linux to communism?
I don’t think Linus is any ruder than any typical CEO /MD. In fact I’m not even convinced you can manage such a large project nor business by being a nice guy.
My guess is why Windows “won” is because of the PC starting to dominate business in the 80s/90s and then moving from there in to people’s homes. Windows was the natural upgrade from DOS. OS/2 didn’t put up much of a fight and there didn’t seem to be anything else.
As I recall it were the non-real-computer users, the boring older people, who started using PCs at home, while we the cool kids watched Commodore, Atari and Sinclair disappear leaving us without much choice but the PC.
Regarding well managed open source stuff, Firefox and Virtual Box are excellent, but they do have some professional organizations behind them. Virtual Box is now owned by Oracle for example.
There are a lot more excellent open source projects out there, but when I find lacking is an operating system they can focus on. With Windows and OS X you know what you get, with Linux you don’t. Some stuff works well in KDE, looks funny in Gnome and behaves strange in XFCE.
And sure OS X depends on open source (a lot), but Apple makes sure it all integrates well. They are the professional force making it work. Ubuntu should do this too, but they don’t.
Steve may have been a yelling lunatic, but people wanted to work for him, even while he often didn’t treat them well. Steve and Bill ran a company and people worked for them. All those open source people don’t work for Linus. They work for IBM, Redhat, Oracle or in their own basement. Linus has no power over them, save for the power of asking really nice.
Linux on the server works rather well, which is mostly thanks to those big companies contributing.
At work we’re finally started to use Linux again and after having to work with Windows servers for some time it feels like heaven.
Sense of humour fail :p
Linux isn’t massively more complicated than Windows. You’re whole argument is based on the assumption that most people can do upgrades on and install Windows etc. In fact most people cannot. Windows comes pre-installed (like Android on smart phones – that was actually a very fair comparison). So really the issue isn’t Linux is hard to set up – it’s that few OEMs ship desktop Linux. If desktop Linux was the pre-installed standard and MS were pushing users to manually install Windows, then I’m sure we’d be having the same discussion about how Windows is too complicated to install (let’s not forget that the default install isn’t secure – you need anti-virus and so on. stuff an average user might struggle with) and that WinPhone7 only works because the OEM acts as the nerdy friend.
The fact is, distro’s like Ubuntu are incredibly easy to install. Just as easy as Win7 and makes updates just as easy too. Installing applications in Ubuntu is actually even easier than in Windows because you don’t have to hunt around the web. Just open your update manager, type an approximation of the soft of app you want and then download whatever has the most votes next to it. It’s as easy as installing on Android or iOS.
Edited 2012-03-30 09:15 UTC
I don’t think I have said people can install Windows, if I made that impression let me say that they probably could if they really tried (and install Linux too), but honestly most won’t as, like you say, Windows comes preinstalled.
I can’t be too harsh on those people I guess. I drive around in a car and have no idea how it works and I won’t change a tire myself even though I probably could.
Most people have no clue regarding Windows, but with clues from other clueless users they can often figure stuff out. With Linux there are no clues from other users. Even if you manage to find another Linux changes are he uses a different flavor.
And at least Windows has stayed pretty consistent regarding its GUI. Just like OS X. They may be a limited choice, but it’s a choice that keeps improving, whereas Linux is a choice that keeps changing (and improving).
We can handle changes, but the common man can not. Well, he probably can if he put in the effort. But hey, I won’t change a tire either.
Yeah, I can’t disagree with any of the points you’ve made there.
Choice is a double edged sword – while I love it, I’d be naive to say it was a win-win scenario
I think choice is good, but only if they are good choices. Like the Monty Python spam sketch. A lot of choice, but all with spam.
Also a lot of choices don’t really matter. When my wife asks me to get a cola from the kitchen I tease her by asking if the wants a small glass or a big one. If she says big I ask it she wants a big one or a really big one. If it’s just a big one I ask her if she wants a certain kind of big glass. In this case the user doesn’t care about choice, the users wants a bloody cola.
Linux has a number of package systems (while some don’t) and a number of location where certain files should be. I really don’t think these are things most users really care about, yet this “choice” has an impact on the usability.
When I was using Red Hat I needed certain RPMs, but which one worked depended on the version of Red Hat. Sometimes I couldn’t find the Red Hat one, but I did find a Mandrake one. That one may or may not work. If it did work it was bound to give problems when doing a distro upgrade.
I’d say this is a choice we never needed. Strict rules about file locations, one package system. Now you have the choice of installing by package or using source. That seems enough for me. With one package system <any package> works on <any Linux distro>.
Your wife is a lucky woman
RPMs are largely supposed to be platform independent due to the rules of LSB (Linux Standard Base).
Plus Mandrake is a derivative of Redhat so I can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work.
Please installing 3rd party packages like you are doing shouldn’t be done by standard users – they should only really install what’s provided in the repos or add another repo to the list of trusted sources. What you’re doing is applying the “Windows method” (TM) to Linux when Linux isn’t intended to be opperated like Windows.
While I will agree that, as sys admins, there maybe non-standard packages that we would want installed – but as sys admins, we (you) should be competent to install 3rd party RPMs and/or install from source if needs be.
So your example doesn’t really work as you’re discussing stuff that only trained server administrators would undertake and comparing it to jobs that the average Joe would be expected to cope with. It’s a little like saying the average Joe should be able to set up NFS on OS X networks or manage Windows Active Directory – which clearly they wouldn’t.
Actually the choice there was needed. Redhat is for servers, Mandrake is for dumb users (it’s the Ubuntu of the Redhat builds). The two are targeted for different users and roles. Having that choice there makes a lot of sense. Plus you also have to remember that Mandrake is one of the original “desktop Linux’s” – it pre-dates Ubuntu by quite some years.
What I don’t agree with is the hundreds of Ubuntu “remixes”, many of which are nothing more than a Ubuntu + “here’s a theme I made earlier”. Utter pointlessness in my opinion.
So the point is some forks make a lot of sense – others don’t. But sadly you can’t allow some forks and not others.
There is:
/home = users home
/root = super users home
/etc = system config files
/dev = system devices
/proc = run time virtual file system
/var/logs = log files
/usr = user installed stuff (rather than core / base installed stuff)
/boot = boot volume
Executables are in bin and sbin directories. sbin generally means binaries run by root only. And while there are rules in place about what subdirectory some executables belong, generally it doesn’t matter as they all land in $PATH and all discoverable by which. Thus most of the time sys
admins don’t care where executables land – end users would want, need nor care where they are.
I’m not saying that the file system is plain English and easy to learn, but that doesn’t change the fact that the common misconception that files are just plonked randomly is completely false. Furthermore, the user doesn’t need to know where programs are installed. This isn’t Windows where 3rd party devs have free reign to install stuff where-ever they want – apps are managed by package managers that adhear to the this standard. Which, by the way, has been formally standardised and is known as the FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard).
There is. LSB (Linux Standard Base) formally states that all LSB compliant distros must support RPM. This means that Slackware, Arch, Debian and even Ubuntu actually support RPMs. The fact that they also have their own preferred package distribution method isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it means that they have well maintained repositories and LSB fallback support. (I guess a little like how Windows will have Install EXE’s created from InstallShield, Nullsoft and Microsoft’s own MSI format. They all work differently but they all work.
Again, you’re dropping in highly technical systems administration functions as “normal day to day activities” for an end user. Please don’t mix up the two types of users because they’re as different as night and day. I don’t kick off that Windows is crap because most end users wouldn’t know how to set up an exchange server nor compile their own C# app, so why make the same silly statement for Linux users?
[edit]
Sorry for the lengthy post, but you’ve given well constructed reasons for your arguments so I felt you at least deserved the same in return for any points I personally disagreed with
Edited 2012-03-30 12:35 UTC
She wasn’t when I pretended that the gate on to the soccer field was locked and she climbed over it after which I walked right through.
I should have quit while you still agreed with me I guess.
BUT! Despite LSB when switching from Linux distro things do tend to be different. While certain stuff is indeed under /etc it could either be in /etc/, /etc/dir/ or /etc/sub/dir.
Sure my examples were more geared towards admins, as I do admin stuff, put they merely served as an example that choices are created which don’t, in my opinion, actually add a useful choice. Admin or user, .deb should and can work for both.
IBM promises Lotus Notes works under Ubuntu, yet it doesn’t without Google and some manual fiddling, and it installs under /opt (one of the rare few apps that do). I’m sure a normal user should be able to install it, which most people can’t.
Reading Linus’ mail that helped invalidate this patent really show how much these patents are stupid.
I mean, take 20 programmers, ask them how they would handle long filenames and you’ll probably get 10 answers pretty close to Linus’ one.
That’s the bonus you get with so called “de-facto industry standards”.
I hope MS trolling on trivial stuff will make HW makers think twice before implementing something that isn’t a proper standard.
Finally going down. Who’d think that Linux himself had the idea before Microsoft?
This one is very important for Microsoft, vFAT is standard for USB keys, and so phones pretending to be one have to pay to MS. Since Windows will not read any other format besides that (or NTFS), companies selling them have no choice but to use vFAT and license the patent (or stick to 8.3 naming). This will strip MS of a significan cash flow, if it is upheld, and is incredibly good news.
The thread started by the @Parazo on the linked page is hilarious.