On 31/08/06, Rahul Siddharthan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 8/31/06, dereck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [Linux] are copying known work, shooting for a target > that has already been hit. Hit by Mac OS X, perhaps. Which I can't install on my computer even if I wanted to: Apple won't let me. The target -- a user-friendly, reliable unix -- hasn't been hit by anyone else. With today's Ubuntu, for example, I can plug in all the equipment I have -- memory sticks, digital cameras, whatever -- and it just works. If I pop in a CD-ROM it mounts automatically. If I pop in a DVD the DVD player opens. The only exception (out of the box) was my wireless PCMCIA card, but even that worked with ndiswrapper; installing the windows ndis driver was a single command.
Not only that, but a knowledgeable user (on which people who "don't understand computers" would probably rely on for help with Windows too) can probably set up any Linux distro to work the same way with just a little effort. With other systems it's either a lot of effort, or it's simply impossible to do anything with the OS that the designers hadn't thought of. This sort of thing should be seen as essential --
today's computers are dynamic objects with peripherals being plugged in and removed all the time -- but, of the unixen, only Mac OS X handles it so easily. More importantly, the linux people have recognised this goal and worked towards it for years, via hal, dbus, etc, and it shows. Mac OS X hides its unix under the hood, but Linux has managed to reconfigure SysV-style Unix to behave well on modern desktop machines. The significance of this shouldn't be underestimated.
I agree - you CAN live without it, but who wants to go back to a typewriter once they've learnt to use a word processor effectively? But never mind all that: BSD types (I used FreeBSD for
some years and still have Dragonfly on one partition) like to say how much more reliable BSD is. Linux's ext2/ext3 always comes in for particular scorn. Well, I tend to run unstable software and lately my hardware's getting unstable too -- so I have crashes now and then. On FreeBSD with UFS, more than once a crash totally hosed my system: I had to reinstall. People blamed it on ATA write-caching: the standard FreeBSD advice is "use SCSI". With linux/ext3 I've NEVER had a problem with a crash. The only time I got worried with the disk having mysterious timeout errors, it turned out to be bad sectors: a fsck with bad sector scan fixed that and I only lost one unimportant file. From my lurking on various lists, my impression is that UFS+softupdates is a horrendous mess that only Kirk McKusick understands (it seems I'm not the only one to suffer from trashed filesystems). If Linus gets hit by a bus, no problem for Linux, but if Kirk gets hit by a bus, better look for a new filesystem. The filesystem isn't the only thing: FreeBSD's USB drivers are (or were, last I checked) a disaster. You could panic the system just by unplugging at the wrong moment. I've never managed to do that with linux. Some of Linux's progress is indeed from corporate support, but much of it is from very smart individuals, like Stephen Tweedie, Andrew Morton, and, yes, Linus himself.
The only problem I have with corporate support is when it *doesn't* take you where you want to go. If Yahoo (to pick the one big vendor I remember making a big thing of using a BSD) don't reincorporate their changes, perhaps that's because the licence allows them not to? Linus's "world domination" plans sounded
amusing for years, but now it looks entirely possible. With the BSDs I can't see a role on the desktop. Even something like PC-BSD is where Linux was years ago.
That's the one thing that always strikes me when people say "Linux will NEVER conquer the desktop" - no other open-source project would be taken seriously for saying so even by its own users, and most aren't even trying. My 2 pence, Jeff. _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
