Odd choice of blurb
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| phsolide Jan 12, 2010 4:46 PM EDT |
That's an odd choice of pull quote/blurb for the article. One almost is tempted to shout "special pleading for MSFT products, right here!' upon reading it. A better pull quote would have been: Quoting: The real reason Linux has not been seen as a desktop solution has very little to do with the quality of the Linux OS or the functionality and look of the desktop interfaces. Now that's more like it! No special pleading for MSFT, no dragging out oft-refuted urban linux legends, no "Now I like Linux as much as the next guy." Just plain old emergent behavior from corporations that don't have the same incentives as the consumers. |
| Kagehi Jan 12, 2010 5:56 PM EDT |
Problem is.. OSS doesn't always have the same incentives as the customer. I use my machine about 80% of the time for games. Of those, maybe *2* have Linux clients, perhaps half will work under WINE, or one of its variations, maybe. In terms of other things.. MS did quote well in making integrated debugging systems and language metrics, to tie all it together. Linux has offered what? Mono, which isn't even theirs, and which doesn't support linkable methods to add script easily to applications? Yeah, I am sure I heard of one other, but its some higher end thing, that *has* a license that isn't OSS. Same goes with 3D stuff, which I work with, etc. Gimp has gotten a lot better, but it still has some issues with layout, and possibly with support of some plugins (especially filters, but then so does PSP X, which I prefer over spending $500 for a glorified paint program), which make it annoying to use. Blender... maybe if I sat down with it a month I might learn enough of its quirks to not pull my hair out trying to remember where stuff is, or playing "Wordstar" with it, trying to remember which 14 keys to press to get a result. If I want Nurbs, its probably going to be Rhino, not an OSS program, which "supports" them to some limited degree, but not really. Same with almost everything else in that category. OSS has a handicap. It gets produced to do what who ever started the project wants, to some extent, locked into interface designs that make no sense, then gets added to, not by people trying to make it easier, but people trying to make it do "more", without necessarily ever doing one thing very very well. And, even when it does, half the time the documentation is the last thing ever bothered with, so you get idiot things like, "Offset - holds the offset rotation.", but with a) no example of how to use it, b) no idea how to set it, etc. There is an entire page in the OSS Imprudence client for OpenSim/Second Life, which contains a list of math functions like that, which you can use in setting values, and ***one*** simplistic example of how to use like 2 of them, which fails to address the most common reason for using them at all, which is things like setting all three values at once, base on an *existing* rotation. (The client uses Euler to show what its set to, but the client uses Quaternion internally, which makes a damn mess, because something like ends up as , when you are done, but ***only*** if you have some way to take and *multiply* it with . This has to be done to "all" rotations at once, in principle, but there is nothing in the examples that tells you how the hell to do that. Euler, by itself, gimble locks, which means setting a rotation never come out "right". The Offset is worse, since there is no way to even enter that, so if you can't enter it, how the client knows what it is, when you use it... And so on.) If you are talking about OSS in terms of shifting people from Office to OpenOffice, or MS Outlook to Firebird, sure.. The rest of us have to work for a damn living, and that means having usable help files, sane documentation, and not having to bloody guess what the hell a parameter actually does, or how to use it, especially when its the feature we *need*. OSS, in this respect, often seriously pisses me off. If its not hidden some place that makes no sense to me, its not documented properly. As bad as MS is, except for something moving things for no damn reason, they, and most of the proprietary people, know that people need to be able to figure out how to use the damn program, not just the 4 people that came up with it on sourceforge, and anyone willing to spend weeks asking each other questions about, "Ok, so what they hell does XGWET do exactly?", never mind the new guy that has to hunt through 4 years of forums posts, error reports, and people going, "I haven't a clue.", before finding the post that explains it. I would love to keep some of the proprietary I have. Sadly, its shackled, using unobtanium and krpytonite, to MS' wrist. And that is a much bigger problem than, "Not enough people use OSS." |
| gus3 Jan 12, 2010 5:56 PM EDT |
"I like Linux as much as the next guy." Depending on which "next guy" they're talking about, that isn't saying much. |
| vainrveenr Jan 13, 2010 2:23 AM EDT |
Quoting:Problem is.. OSS doesn't always have the same incentives as the customer. I use my machine about 80% of the time for games....+ rant, rant, rant Perhaps another type of system that would better suit this customer here is Mac OS X running on one of Apple's high-end product lines. Not OSS and certainly proprietary, but yet quite effective. Quoting:The rest of us have to work for a damn living, and that means having usable help files, sane documentation, and not having to bloody guess what the hell a parameter actually does, or how to use it, especially when its the feature we *need*. OSS, in this respect, often seriously pisses me off....+ rant, rant, rant And yet another type of system that would perhaps better suit this particular customer is one of the BSD OS's -- e.g., FreeBSD -- running on standard commodity hardware. Plusses: - a VERY usable help system - "sane documentation" - other plusses This customer and similar readers might do well to visit Greg Lehey's 'Explaining BSD' found at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/ This could be a good place to start off, given the concerns this customer so vehemently expresses. |
| phsolide Jan 13, 2010 9:14 AM EDT |
The problem is, proprietary software almost never has the same incentives as its customers.Quoting: Problem is.. OSS doesn't always have the same incentives as the customer. I use my machine about 80% of the time for games. I use my machine(s) about 0% of the time for (the usual conception of) games. If you've not going to run games, and you want to figure things out, then you must have usable documentation, customizable interfaces, efficient interfaces, secure computing, stable APIs (not at the whim of marketing or CxOs) and occasionally you have to look at the source code. There's also this little matter of speed being part of usability. The Windows box I have to use at work gradually slowed under the weight of the "security" features to the point of un-usability. It's replacement is on the same path. And all in the name of extracting what the market will bear from the consumer. |
| kozmcrae Jan 13, 2010 10:09 PM EDT |
I predict that 2010 will be the year that tech writers stop saying "Linux enthusiasts are fond of saying this will be the Year of the Linux Desktop". The will do so because it will become apparent that *they* are the only ones repeating that stupid phrase. |
| Bob_Robertson Jan 14, 2010 9:35 AM EDT |
> The will do so because it will become apparent that *they* are the only ones repeating that stupid phrase. That depends upon their not having done this deliberately the entire time. |
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