Comments on: We love our dirty laundry.

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:55:51 +0000

Mine is the one, true OS.

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:15:59 +0000

From my start with Linux some 3 years ago I was more interested in the cultural than the technical because, in my view, there has been no comparable project on the planet with the same potential to provide low cost cross-cultural interaction, both in the sense of the developmental community as well as end users. It’s importance transcends just “how well it works as a desktop OS” so I pay attention to it. And the evolved open production/maintenance model is meaningful to other human-driven projects as well.

IMHO, it’s a shame that the community isn’t more proactively targeting existing low-end machines – those millions of 2.6GH P4-class boxes with 512 MB RAM and, say, Nv6xxx-class on-mobo video. They’re fine XP boxes but have no chance of running Vista or Win7. With a good distro they’d be resurrected with another 5-10 years of service at a performance level equal to or better than their users experienced with XP. There’s some evidence, though, that this IS happening as these boxes turn up by the barge-load in third-world country as (literally) trash. That’s cool too (pretty much).

Then there are the real disappointments….
My nephew stays with us a few nights a week to save travel time (and money) to the nearby tech school. He’s got a fairy new Dell netbook running XP. That’s cool. For giggles I poked around online to see if a Linux install is rational. It turned out that Dell offered an Ubuntu preload version; but it was problematic – not with the Atom or the wifi but with the newer Intel graphics chip. Now, the fix is not a big deal for you or me but for a Linux newbie wanting to make the jump away from Win it’s probably a real bad experience. Point is: Dell should have had their shit together before they put it out or, if Intel made post-startup changes to the firmware, that should have picked it up before it reached street level. Linux, of course, gets the bad rap.

But what the hey…. it’s all good. I’m quite content with my Debian testing. I still want to try Slackware, though, before the community teleports back to their home planet.

By: schwim

schwim — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:49:53 +0000

Hi there, Rick.

I can’t find any fault with your logic and have to admit that some of it seems to be common sense. I fault my inability to remain focused on a single thought for more than a few moments for the reason I miss some of it. I do have a couple of questions and thoughts though…

The problem is that the community expects an absolute win-or-lose outcome on every issue – plant the flag on Ballmer’s dead, scorched body. When that doesn’t happen they can get discouraged.

This seems to strengthen my belief that people have a hard time taking linux seriously. A large portion of our community view the success of linux to be much like a video game, with a destination. It seems like such a short-sighted and deficient thought process, it’s understandable when the outside world laughs at it.

We’re(the community, I’m not really counting myself in the numbers) super geniuses! We’ve developed an operating system that didn’t follow the status quo and still excelled by leaps and bounds, in spite of our disorganized approach. Are we really not intelligent enough to realize that our success is independent of any other OS and their popularity?

I’m not saying I don’t think that an Evil Entity polarizes a community to do great things. I also concede that it’s even necessary(Pearl Harbor springs to mind). I just don’t understand why so many of us consider it to be a comic book superhero win-or-lose situation.

Just like your sister-in-law, I think many of our peers have tunnel vision. They hate MS, so there needs to be some form of dance on a corporate corpse to show that we conquered Evil to take our rightful place on the throne of the one true OS.

> The confusion issues with Linux will likely continue. “All those distro’s” is just the out-in-the-open version of what goes on invisibly within MS or Jobsland. It’s a necessary part of the process that, I think, will start to subside as ernest users subtly gravitate to core distributions (RH, Debian, Slackware) to avoid the downstream gimmicks.

I do look forward to this. I think the power of linux lies in it’s ability to be anything I need it to be. I feel that everyone’s fixation on exploiting that trait to make flavors that cater to Britney Spears fans have done nothing but hurt the adoption rate.

In the end, I’m sure you’re right. We’re no different than any other community. The fact that we don’t have any privacy barriers in place just make us look like more of a tool than the other groups, since we blog about our sexist developer while MS has you sign an NDA about theirs.

And they say open’s always better.

By: Rick

Rick — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:42:04 +0000

Just want to make a few points but it will take a lot of words.
> Linux’s anti-MS stance was understandable; not just because MS was/is a corporation that seeks to extract every possible $ out of it’s product line, but because mobilizing a community is more easily done if there is a villan. MS plays the bad guy perfectly. The problem is that the community expects an absolute win-or-lose outcome on every issue – plant the flag on Ballmer’s dead, scorched body. When that doesn’t happen they can get discouraged. In my view the community leaders perceived this and we saw a major change in demeanor in 2007 – disappointing to many but necessary to move forward. There’s a lot of win/lose guys around who don’t get this and want to groan and moan about failure.
> Consider OLPC: could’a been a simple thing but it became a geopolitical debacle with the OS near the center of it. MS fought tooth and nail to get on board, not because there was any money in it (apart from the tax breaks) but because they wanted those young minds to be indoctrinated in “the Win way”. Very big deal. Habits and beliefs learned as a child tend to remain firmly entrenched for life (take God for example). For all those people already indoctrinated, “change” (as Torvolds correctly asserted) is not only difficult, but downright scarry. And it’s not just the illiterate; it’s the neighborhood “Win Gurus” who battle their way through Vista’s issues to preserve their peer group status – it’s the IT pros who make a living administering MS and don’t want that leave their comfort zone. It’s what I call “single-issue decision making” – they’re just not listening to alternatives that might rock their world.
[Aside: My sister-in-law. Nice woman. Sells guns for a living. In the last election her position was simple: (exact quote) "Obama is a Democrat and they're for gun control and that's communist." (end of discussion, resistance is futile). Now that's understandable since guns are her income source, but this is what's relevant here: her view of any Obama issue, no matter how distant from gun contol, will be determined by that one basic position.]
> Linux vs Windows = Moot Point. Linux has already impacted the world in many direct ways (servers, hand-held devices, other electronics controls) and indirect ways (price pressure on MS, anti-trust legal pressure on MS). But for desktop I’m not sure there will continue to be a “battle”. MS’s biz model is changing. IMHO, Vista is their last OS for big profit. Win7 is intended to be a vehicle to the cloud. There’s money in it, to be sure, but the big bucks are in cloud services; but that’s a whole ‘nuther discussion that (oddly) no one seems to be having.
> The confusion issues with Linux will likely continue. “All those distro’s” is just the out-in-the-open version of what goes on invisibly within MS or Jobsland. It’s a necessary part of the process that, I think, will start to subside as ernest users subtly gravitate to core distributions (RH, Debian, Slackware) to avoid the downstream gimmicks.
> IMHO, developers are probably the worst people to talk about OS development. It seems that the answer is usually “mine’s the best” or you get a dissertation on how to build a computer when all you wanted to know was how to drop in a stick of memory.
> Boobs? Hmmmmmmmm…… don’t know. But I have a growing suspicion that developers and bloggers weren’t breast fed.