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Linux is for people with extra time.
Mon, 05/25/2009 - 15:41 — rendicott
I love attempting to use Linux from time to time but the thing that always sends me packing is the fact that it takes too long to actually get things done. Sure, I can get onto the wireless network at my school if I camp out within range with two computers and figure out how to use wpasupplicant with WPA Enterprise. I work full time and go to school at night so I would rather go home.
Anything can be done in linux with enough time. Unfortunately most people don't have the time or patience to figure things out. Not only does it take too much time but there are way too many different possibilities at your fingertips. When I have Linux running on my laptop I can never get any real work done because I'm always trying to figure out how to do something Linux "just because."
Linux is not for someone who has very little free time, like people with children, people that work, or people that have new puppies, or people with wives.....
hey, saw this website and
hey, saw this website and was amused. I believe the later versions of most linux distros u dont really have to even touch the command line gnome and kde comes with wifi all readily configurable. i had a couple of my friends who have never used linux before try them out and they were able to use it and setup our school network without any help at all.
i suggest using one of the later versions of the distros like ubuntu or fedora and you shouldnt have any trouble mate. good luck !
bijur
I don't doubt that is true.
I don't doubt that is true. I had similar success in setting up Fedora on a Laptop. It did take a bit of figuring out where the GUI tool to switch from wireless to wired networking was, but it was there and it works. All I needed to do, was swap the order of two lines in a config file to get usb external hard drives to be detected.
The argument isn't that Linux is easy to install and that its easy to use the Add/Remove Software through the repositories. It's when you want to go outside that, where the trouble begins. If you want to use software not in the repository, or the latest version (which may not be there). If you want to use third party software, add additional hardware and generally go beyond the initial set up.
I wanted to use rCalc on Fedora 7. I had to recompile from source. All the work seems to have been put into making it easy to install, and to create a way which people could work within a confined sandbox easily. But want to go outside of that, and the learning curve shoots up exponentially.
OK. Imagine if you wanted
OK.
Imagine if you wanted to update to the latest version of Firefox. Firefox pops up a little window, says "A new version is available, would you like to install it" -- sure! I would, but I know I can't.
Imagine a world where in order to get a new version of Firefox, you have to go to Windows Update to get it.
Want a new version of Open Office, you have to go to Windows Update to get it.
Want any software, you go to Windows Update to get it.
Of course you could, maybe compile it yourself, or you could download a binary, and it might work or it might not, but if you want it to work for sure, you use apt-get or rpm or portage or pacman or whatever. And then you go and try to update Firefox, and it wants (needs) to update your your entire system, which is probably going to break X, or at least stands (in my experience, 35-40% chance of breaking X), and take you a while to do.
Installing the latest version of Firefox shouldn't necessarily mean that you have to get a new version of Gnome, or KDE, or anything else.
This is the problem that I don't know how it can be overcome. How does one separate out the apps (Open Office, Evince, Thunderbird, Amarok, Xine, mplayer, etc...) and the libraries, and the rest of the system?
The apps install much, much better if you go through the packaging system (my experience suggests you stand less than a 50% chance of getting any app to work if you don't go through the packaging system), but if you go through the packaging system and your last update was more than, say 2 months ago, you're in for a system upgrade, and count yourself lucky if it doesn't break stuff if you don't do it. Or if you do do it, for that matter!
Ultimately, in order for it to work (and it often doesn't do that 100% if you do it this way every time), you need to think of it as a "blob" -- a snapshot of the entire thing. Everything. Every app, every library, everything. You want to try out a new software program you heard about? System upgrade time. You want a beta version of this or that app? System upgrade time. Want to upgrade to the latest this or that? System upgrade time.
This is just never going to work. It needs to be separated out. Look at Opera. How many "versions" of Opera are there for Linux? Three for Debian, four for Fedora, three for Gentoo, four for RedHat, SEVEN for Ubuntu -- and that's just the i386 32 bit versions of version 9.64.
Contrast that with 2 for OS X, (one for intel and one for universal), or 3 for Windows(choice of installer type and internationalized or not). 6 for Solaris, (your choice of .gz, .bz2, etc...).
I mean, it's basically the same code regardless of which Linux distro (more or less, anyway) -- it seems that one should be just able to download a binary, and install it. Is this ever going to happen? No, I doubt it. So we're basically stuck trying to manage this massive unified snapshot that's heavily dependent on being unified at a singular point in time.
There's just no way around this, this is a problem. It's a pain. It can be dealt with, it can be managed, and of course more bugs get introduced every upgrade, and its' not like Windows updates or software updates for OS X are perfect either -- nothing in this world is perfect. And Linux has a lot of strong points, it's versatile, and it's under constant rapid development. It's an imperfect world.
But still, I don't see any way that Linux is ever going to get to the point where it will be possible to install software from the software vendor's website on an ongoing, updated, basis in any reasonably reliable, non hit-or-miss fashion without tying that in to the distro's packaging system.
I'd like to see a way to install software and have it "just work", say, at least 80% of the time minimum (chalk the rest up to crappy software) without having to even touch the packaging system. Double-click something like an exe or dmg, a self-contained unit, not having to mess with anything else.
But seriously, I don't see this happening. I don't think it's possible. Any ideas? I just don't see how this can be done -- even within just one distro. I'd be nice even if the only lack of unification was between distros. It's not. It's like a different distro depending on the month or something. This is just a deal-breaker going forward for any significant period of time. Eventually one just gets sick of it, even if it costs a couple grand to remedy the situation.
I dunno -- I really like Linux, and this would just be so awesome if there were some way to do this reliably - and maybe I'm missing something, but this expectation of separating out the software and the base OS - this is just something that isn't happening. Unfortunate, really. The software ecosystem would be so much nicer if it could be done that way. I mean, it could, really -- it could. I believe anything is possible with Linux -- it just isn't.
You have accurately stated
You have accurately stated the problem with Linux and the installation of softare, and why I dislike the package system so much. If MS designed Windows so you have to go through MS each time you wanted to install NON-MS software, you would bet your bottom dollar Linux fans would rave about how monopolistic and controlling this is.
But this is the reality with Linux, and rather than seen as the unencessary restriction and encumberance that it is, they just go on about how you can install programs with two less mouse clicks.
Your statements about having to upgrade the whole OS constantly is no exaggeration either. Upgrading is a pain, REGARDLESS of the monetary cost.
However, Linuxers are too engrossed in the thought that everyone should be just as zealously fanatical about the OS as they are, and want to do wholesale formats/re-installs all the time with new distros.
I moved from Windows to Linux beacuse I thought I was moving AWAY from this kind of environment. RAther, I did the opposite, I bought the anti-MS FUD, only to realise its largely crap, false and lies, and that the Linux community care nothing about freedom either, or just dont understand what 99% of people mean by freedom.
There must be a fundamental shift in attitudes from the developers. Without that shift in attitudes, where developers and the community in general embrace what 99% of people want (and what the majorty of non-vocal Linux users want too), instead of thinking that everyone should adopt their worldview, then they could design the system to really allow people freedom.
Without that, every technical solution, like klik, 0install or the LSB is just doomed to failure.
The community believes that
The community believes that users should put a significant portion of time into Linux to learn it. They dont realise that peolpe have a lot of other stuff to do as well. If car manufacturers decided that people should spend weekends learning cars to operate them, if washing machine manufacturers decided the user should be willing to thrash out little details to get it to finally do a wash at a different temperature,if a mobile phone manufacturer thought that users shouldn't be lazy and should be willing to invest hours to learn to configure it to send SMS's, etc, society would get nowhere.
The reason they think we should spend hours up on hours learning it, or spend a couple of hours just to install a piece of software, is probably because thats all they do. After all, look at how many times the same piece of software needs to be repackaged for different distros. What a waste of effort and labour. They could have written good documentation instead.
For softare which claims to be free, they sure don't care about peoples freedom to choose to spend their time doing other things than grappling with the OS.