[Ilugc] Re: Another storm (XXX and Sex Education)
- From: lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Chandrashekar Babu)
- Date: Fri Nov 26 21:47:48 2004
Sriram Krishnan writes:
Joel was probably referring to popular mindshare. He correctly mentions
Apple in the article as the the first GUI-based system to become widely
popular.As for Gnome and KDE and others, they may be great pieces of work
growing very fast, but I doubt whether their numbers are comparable to
Apple's numbers, let alone Microsoft's. Don't believe me? Check out the
archives of Google Zeitgeist.Linux maybe an excellent product - and though a
lot of people have heard of it, not many from the non-techie population are
using it full-time.
Sorry, perhaps the argument moved out of context. I was clearly speaking
about whats good and whats ethical, not whats popular. Just because Windows
is the world's most popular OS today, doesn't make it qualify it to be good
does it ?
Actually, I don't know why Ubuntu was spoken about.Though I'm sure its an
excellent distro, excellence doesn't automatically mean popular
mindshare('popular' as in outside the geek community) . From my personal
experience,the non-techie people who know of Linux mostly know of Redhat and
to a small extent Suse and Mandrake.
Wrong, a lot of non-techie Linux users know about Ubuntu too. I know a lot
of them who do, infact.
Btw, Joel isn't the only one to criticize OSS usability. Check out Eric S
Raymond's article on how he struggled with CUPS.
Eric S Raymond might be a great personality... but even great people make
great blunders at times, and he seemed to have proved it with that article.
Managing CUPS _is_ as easy as navigating a decent website. Dont trust me ?
ask any _sensible_ Linux user on how he sets up a printer. If he struggled
with it, its his fault. The very basic ethic of Open Source - stop whining
and start learning/helping-out/promoting. Thats how communities grow. You
dont like something the way it is ? make it better... you cant do it ? help
some to do it for you and give it back to the community.
Also, see
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/25/1416208&tid=189&tid=1
56 and the forums of www.ok-cancel.com where this was a hotly contested
topic once.
You aren't locked into someone's way of thought... you still have the
freedom of choice and that is what Linux assures you! I would have more than
a 100 different issues personally on Windows UI itself... but do I have a
choice there ?
Usability isn't the only issue here. If Linux *has* made in-roads into
desktop systems, why is it that 30 out of 41 people who responded to the
recent survey on this list dual-boot with Windows? I'm sure they have their
reasons - perhaps the lack of a lot of popular software or games -or maybe
they have some hardware issues - or perhaps they have some documents which
only proprietary software like Photoshop/3DS Max/MS Office would open.
This is what we term as software/technology/vendor lock-in! The users who
use Windows today had no choice back in the 80s and the early 90s. They
were forced to learn Windows/other commercial tools or perish. Even if
choices did exist (on a PC), they were mostly purged by your "friendly
neighbourhood" Microsoft. This explains Microsoft dominance, monopoly and
control over the user's mind-share. Today, a lot of sensible and
well-informed users do keep Linux as an option and use them sometimes in a
dual-boot environment. The drift is happening though.
Regarding hardware issues, if you still live down the dark, Linux already
supports more hardware devices (and painlessly detects them) and _hardware
platforms_ than Windows does, _by default_. Infact, most hardware vendors
these days have consciously taken steps to support Linux anyways. And if you
still think Linux has no games like on Windows, you are seriously mistaken.
All the latest and greatest games run on Linux (yes, Doom3 included).
Yes, people stick to windows simply because they have been locked-in by
proprietary vendors. The tide is slowly shifting, as a lot of well-informed
users have begun to realize the truth behind the business motives
of Microsoft and its allies (and other _commercial_ software vendors even).
This explains the _growing_ Linux popularity. It is slow, but stable and is
surely determined to make a positive impact on the way we percieve software
phasing out the whole generation of "Commercial" software on mainstream
computing environments in the coming years.
The day is not far, when users purge Windows altogether to move onto
Linux permanently. This might take time, but will surely happen.
Whatever be their reasons, the point to note is that those reasons do
exist.If members of a Linux mailing list find themselves unable to live
without Windows, how do you expect the general public to do so?
As I already told you, we belong to the generation who have been locked-in
(and have been forced victims) to Microsoft. A very few of us live in an
environment free of commercial software. I have a home-cum-lab with 11
computers - none of which have any commercial software. All machines share a
combination of various Linux distributions, FreeBSD and Plan 9. My students
use them without any difficulty. I know of a lot of internet parlours and
training institutes in bangalore where there are no such things called
Microsoft Windows on their machines (thanks to NASSCOM and their
anti software-piracy drive).
With a lot of people like me not being interested in voicing our views on
some random survey lists, the recent survey (whatever that is) can be as
bogus as Microsoft's "Get the Facts right" thing.
Anyways, I see where this whole discussion is heading to... and it seems
like a DeJaVu for me again. I guess I'd stop now and move on to play
around with brighter things in life (its been a while listening to loud
music) ;-)
Cheers,
Chandrashekar Babu.
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