On Saturday 27 August 2016 21:50:52 Greg Bentzinger wrote: > Way back in the early days of EMC2 the first OEM to pick it up was > Sherline. > > Next came Smithy tools. Then nothing new for years until EMC2 morphed > into LinuxCNC by force and matured both in features and hardware > support to the point that the next OEM to pick up LinuxCNC was Tormach > with there own branded version. This was the biggest jump, still > within the pro-sumer market and not a major OEM machine builder. The > best part of this is it exposed many high end hobbyists to LinuxCNC > and many of those had other home conversion CNC equipment that was a > perfect match to expand LinuxCNC use. I admit the Rongfu has also made > LCNC an option on some of its lower end turn key CNC mills. I have yet > to actually see one in the U.S. but the home website claims they are > available. > > > Seriously though, its going to take another major OEM to adopt > LinuxCNC to give us the exposure needed to attract major user share. > Also as our Power users get better, making more custom POST options > which make use of LCNC for Fusion 360 would help dramatically. > > > Seimens and several new noname Chi-com control makers are now gaining > market share in both new machine builds and retrofits.You can give > credit to Microsoft for demonizing Windows XP for the drop in Mach 3 > users - that and the MACH team dropping of further development of that > product. > > > On the other hand FADAL is becoming a footnote in history and there > are alot of those machines out there with no real factory support or > upgrade options. HAAS swallowed up FADAL's market share as they > dropped out of the picture and did it with a more user friendly > control - albeit one which I consider lousy in its actual G-Code > execution when compared to FANUC or MAZAK. I am also not a fan of the > HAAS machines themselves, they had the highest percentage of down time > and highest cost of repairs of any brand I have ever used. That > applies to both the milling and turning centers. > > In one respect LinuxCNC's biggest strength is also it biggest > weakness. The fact that LCNC is a virtual one size fits all means that > most applications are unique. Tormach has only a few configs to deal > with, but is putting out the greatest number of LCNC equipped > machines. > > LCNC requires its machine integrators to do there home work and solve > problems. Lazy people hate homework. Others just are afraid to try > Linux - yet God knows there are enough MAC users out there and most > have no clue whats really happening under the hood of their hardware, > all they know is it mostly works. People fail to believe that Linux is > the same thing, it mostly just works. > > Greg, Out yonder in Colorado.
You left out one vital thing. Linux fixes stuff as its found, all the user has to do it run the update tools to take advantage of that in a time frame that blows the rest of them out of the water. Time wasted is money wasted, and if you fuss loud enough, winderz might fix it on patch tuesday. But the question is which tuesday. Much the same thing can be said of Apple's hacked up BSD. But I've not heard a lot of noise about Apple fixing problems in between releases. A savvy enough programmer can work on BSD and make printing work again, which I find odd since I've known Mike Sweet, aka cups, since he was a starving student named dodgecolt on delphi 30 years ago. The stuff he wrote for the coco for school grades back in the day usually needed help before it ran well. Now he's high in the apple tree, having sold cups to apple several years ago, with him as the head honcho of printing. So my impression is that every new release generally fixes the outstanding problems, but intro's a slew of new ones. In contrast, I have been witness on several occasions of a bug being found in linux, and the fixed source code will usually be in the pipeline by the time you loaded the coffee pot the next morning, or in one case a few years back, in 30 minutes. The big lag, unless you want to build your own, is in the distro's. Everybody and his goat has to pass judgement on the patch, and see how it works with their favorite patches for 2 or more weeks before the deb or rpm might land in the repo's. That lag is BS, but it is what it is. Sure, the src for bsd can be had, but how many branding patches has apple added, so you wait for apple just like you wait for windows. But a savvy programmer doesn't have to wait, he can pull the source files and build/install on his machine in 30 to 45 minutes. I have done that myself probably a hundred times starting with kernel 2.00. But then they started playing 52 pickup with the build tools and my scripts couldn't keep up, so I quit that at about kernel 3.2. But it can be done, and I don't believe another OS can truthfully make that statement. And that right there, is to me, the best sales pitch you can make in favor of linux. It can be fixed faster than any other OS. And I believe it needs less fixing than the others too. FWIW, I looked at that survey form they spammed me with. And backed away and deleted it. They wanted waaaay too much personal info, so while they may have published this, I suspect the real goal was a cd full on machinists personal data to sell to the spammers. That also is what it is. Something has to pay the rent and buy the vitals. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
