In my opinion, which of course is worthless, Linux must continue to improve
stability and power (already good) but absolutely most importantly, it's
ease of use and support. Linux hasn't made much of a dent in the desktop
market and it won't for awhile. I'll explain why in a minute. Where Linux
is doing extremely well is in the back room. The *nix's were taking a
beating from M$ and there garbage operating system. I've yet to find anyone
that likes NT with quotes like "you have to hate it to love it" and "Yes,
but it has the applications". NT's ability to run on fairly common
equipment made it a natural for departmental servers and this naturally grew
as the application grew. The problem is that the OS is really a *itch to
maintain. It's fairly stable if you can avoid making changes, but... As an
application scales up this become more and more apparent. I worked at one
extremely large financial institution and the guy running perhaps a dozen NT
servers was really proud of his settup to keep the system running. Of
course there were redundant machines but there were machines watching the
machines which paged him for errors and reboots. When that wasn't stable
enough he had machines watching the machines watching machines. The
scariest thing was that he had completely lost the idea of building a stable
platform to begin with. He had accepted that the platform would be unstable
and that this was natural. Particularly strange since it was a mainframe
shop and they were used to near 100% availability. He basically got trapped
into it because he felt he had no choice and the departmental solution had
grown.
Linux fills an extremely important niche in the backroom. It allows any old
hardware to be booted up and used to test or prototype. Then when that
application grows it can be scaled up. Take your pick of hardware. Even if
you want to move to a professional *nix your applicaton can generally be
easily moved. This is a powerful argument and is working well now. It is
definately hurting M$. That coupled with their arrogant and heavy handed
attitude, so loudly proclaimed to the DOJ, and their proprietary code has
many many of my customers looking at Linux.
But Linux is still extremely difficult. Yes, I can hear the denials
flooding in but it's true. I've been doing this for twenty years and I KNOW
I know what I'm doing, yet I find it difficult. The scary part is people
come to me for advice ;-) Also, don't get me wrong. I don't want to change
things. But, yes, more intuitive and easy to use configuration tools would
be nice. Excellent progress is being made, but...
Now, a quick word about the desktop. It is certainly the next battlefield.
There is plenty of room for more than one player but M$ will fight that all
the way. The problem is still the killer app. It is easier to keep only
one operating system than two. As long as there is something that you need
to boot to Windows for then M$ will have an advantage. I'm hoping that Wine
will help, but not for it's non-emulation (meaning Wine Is Not an
Emulator). M$ loves to mess around with the API's to mess up competition
but as more and more programs use the API's M$ has less and less ability to
change them. If there was a reasonable choice to Windows, using the same
API's, and M$ tried to change those same API's then they'd shoot themselves
in the foot making any major changes. Hey they do it now moving from NT to
95/98 or W2K. They've tried to kill W98 but can't. I think this will
ultimately work in Linux's favor and the worlds when the API's are stable
and then it will simply be the best applications driving the market.
GGK
Chester Martel wrote:
> The biggest improvement among vendors would be an 'easier' anybody can
> install package and/or better installation documentation. Reading this
> list would indicate that upgrades are not problem free. If possible,
> what got change with the upgrade and might cause problems with the 'new
> version'. That it itself is a tough road to plow. I am a user of IBM's
> AIX and they don't necessarily document all the holes that got closed
> and I pay big bucks for this product. In my last upgrade they did
> provide filesets that captured the original file so that a user could
> use the saved file to modify the new file if needed.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Derek Martin [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > Sent: Monday, January 31, 2000 8:31 AM
> > To: gnhlug; BLU mailing list
> > Subject: The future of linux
> >
> >
> > Having seen Linux go from little more than a fledgeling Unix-like
> > operating system that I could write my shell script homework on to a
> > well-supported OS that I now use for everything, including "desk-top"
> > applications like productivity apps, to games, to internet servers, to
> > [lots of more good stuff here], I wonder what people think is the
> > direction Linux will take from here, and what challenges it should be
> > prepared to face that it currently isn't. Comments anyone?
> >
> >
> > --
> > "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" "Who watches the watchmen?"
> > -Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347
> >
> > Derek D. Martin | Senior UNIX Systems/Network Administrator
> > Arris Interactive | A Nortel Company
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > -------------------------------------------------
> >
> >
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