[SlugLUG] Linux Is Not A Desktop Solution

[Peter Belew]

Rohan -

I have a number of problems with this.

First, some details.

FreeBSD is an outgrowth of the BSD Unix variants created at Berkeley, to be
sure, but FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD are, like Linux, collaborative
efforts by a number of people around the world. UC itself has little to do
with these efforts any more, aside from some licensing issues.

Steve jobs did not create OS-X. It was created by his engineers. It does
have a lot of nice applications running on it, and is apparently preferred
by a lot of real-world people over Windows. Apple is an important innovator
in fonts and GUI applications. That, by the way, wasn't Steve Jobs' doing -
it was his being taken to Xerox PARC to see what could be done with a
Personal Computer (that's also where the phrase P. C. was created, in the
1970s - I was there when that happened). Also, the OS-X kernel is different
from the other BSD-based kernels in design, for better or for worse. OS
design experts can give you a better evalution than I can, though.

Applications running on LInux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, and most
other *nix operating systems run under X, a basic GUI system which antedates
Linux by a long time and was created at MIT as an improvement over an
earlier system developed at Stanford.

I don't know what you mean by referring to Solaris/SunOS as a 'debacle'.
Ignoring that, I did use Solaris/SunOS for a couple of years, running a GUI
which was X based, and had no complaint about that. The GUI was not much
different from that used by several other commercial UNIX systems, such as
the SCO Unixes. The arrival of the free *nix systems has resulted in a
variety of improved X software.

Currently I use Ubuntu Linux almost exclusively; before that RedHat and
Fedora. I have no problem with the functionality of the OpenOffice
applications that come with most distros, and only have to resort to Windows
to run some tax software which has never been ported to X. My only complaint
with OpenOffice is that programs would load and run faster, probably, if
they were written in native code (C, C++, whatever) rather than in Java, and
possibly segementing apart the various applications would keep the footprint
smaller. Again, other experts can fill in some details about this issue.

In many ways, MS-Windows is a horror. It is slow to update, and the updating
process is more complicated and slower that updating most Linux versions (I
do both XP and Ubuntu updates frequently, so I have experience in that). It
is still unstable.

The one winner in MS-Windows is the GUI. It has been well thought out over a
period of over 20 years. Practically everything can be done from the
keyboard, if one doesn't want to use a mouse, or of something suddenly goes
wrong with one's mouse. Microsoft's user testing has been very thorough, and
it shows.

But the Windows OS, and the programming model, show their roots going back
to Windows 1.0, back before 1984. The code has been hacked on by generation
after generation of inexperienced contract programmers and 6-month interns
since the beginning, and that shows. There has been too much, in the past,
effort to keep the code backward compatible for old applications and old
CPUs. The bug count never goes to zero, and the pressure to ship has been
relentless (I speak as a former Windows core programmer).

The development model of Linux and the x-BSDs will ultimately lead to far
superior user software, as well as the very best server software.

Several governmental bodies around the world have mandated the use of
open-source user software - the city government of Munich, the state or
Massachusetts, Mexican school systems, for example. That will start swinging
the pendulum towards Linux and similar systems.

- Peter Belew



On 4/29/06, Rohan Sheth <rohan at rohan.ws> wrote:
>
> Here's a little piece which I have been working on this past week.  I'd
> love some feedback on changes before I ask an IRC-Buddy to have to
> posted on SlashDot.
>
> Thanks!
> --Rohan
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sluglug mailing list
> Sluglug at sluglug.ucsc.edu
> http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sluglug
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/pipermail/sluglug/attachments/20060429/68ce3e9e/attachment.html