So far I've read about a third of the posts. I can't read them all because there's a lot. But so far I have not found what I was expecting to see.
No one is claiming that they're staying on Windows because KDE and GNOME look different! There's this sense of urgency in the Linux community that unless there's a unified vanilla desktop, no one is going to want to use Linux. It seems that this is not the case.
But maybe I've missed those posts. So let me ask: is there anyone out there who has genuinely stayed with Windows precisely because KDE and GNOME don't have the same look and feel? [I'm not asking if you want them to have to same look, only if you have honestly refused to use any form of UNIX because of it]
Actually, I consider this to be an important issue. I have played with trying Linux off and on since Red Hat 5.2 and inevitably give up every time after a short while. Part of the frustration is that I don't have anything consistent for interfaces. It's one of the things that MS screwed up with XP, they changed the interface enough that it can be a real pain in the but doing what you've always done. In short, don't discount the whole kde/gnome consistent interface thing. It is important for furthering adoption of Linux beyond a certain crowd that has already embraced it.
In short, I want to be able to "just use it". I want to go to a consistent place every single time and be able to enable a nic to use / not use DHCP regardless of flavor of linux I am on. That and the biggest thing that the linux community needs to do is have a serious attitude adjustment. The whole, holier than thou attitude and general unwillingness to help (with exceptions of course) have ruined it in many portions of society. I was working a very large gov contract position a few years back and when I asked why they didn't have linux in use (despite many of the workers privately using it), I was told bluntly, "because the community can't be bothered to step out of their white tower to help unless your a programmer". "The entire concept of anyone/other/ than a programmer administrating a machine has been lost on them". In short, I should not need to know "C" to admin a box. I am not, and have no interest in becoming a programmer, I simply desire to be an administrator.
In case your wondering if it's the whole CLI interface thing, no it isn't. I've been using computers since the TI80, have 5 years professional experience, and have absolutely no problem with the Cisco CLI. I'm also in school to pick up Solaris, Cisco, and Unix once Linux is finished. Thus I am hardly a newbie that is scared by the lack of a pretty interface. hope this helps.
Yeah, about the interface consistancy thing, if you try RedHat 8 they've done a lot of good work there with BlueCurve for instance. It's too bad there isn't a theming spec so things like BlueCurve and Keramik/Geramik are easier to create, but that'll be addressed with time.
The ivory tower thing: this has to be one of the biggest misunderstandings around. Frequently Linux users (especially in tech support channels) are painted as arrogant and unwilling to help. In my experience (and I give a lot of support on #linuxhelp) this simply isn't true. Usually, when somebody comes to me and says "I got flamed by arrogant geeks in IRC" it turns out they caused the flameage in the first place. A few things that can be done to avoid this (and please don't get me wrong, i'm not suggesting your colleagues did these things, but it's a common problem):
Getting frustrated if your problem isn't solved straight away. I've seen people who start getting angry because after a few mins and a couple of repeats, they still get no answer. Typically if you don't get an answer, it's because nobody who knows one is paying attention to IRC at the moment. It's a common misconception that we all spend our time with our eyes glued to IRC.
Getting frustrated if the solution to your problem seems "too hard". You made a good point about how sometimes Linux users weren't interested in helping you if you weren't a programmer - it can certainly seem this way, but it's not true. More often, there is only an easy solution to the problem if you are a programmer, and because of that users who stamp their feet and say "Why is there no GUI for this like Windows, Linux sucks!" don't get a good response, for obvious reasons
RTFM! No really, please do. It's such a common response that it's become a cliche, but all too often somebody could have found their answer by looking on Google. We're all guilty of it to some extent, sometimes of course you simply need to know the correct phrase or command (and i don't see people getting flamed when this is the case) but sometimes the answer to a problem can be found just by looking for it, as opposed to thinking "it's easier to ask somebody". Note that when you're getting started with Linux, you *will* have to ask questions that could have been found out by researching through the docs, but are easier to simply ask people. I did that a lot, and as long as you're happy with a "man sed" type answer, you can normally get a lot of help from IRC. Sometimes you just need to be pointed in the right direction.
Complaining doesn't get you anywhere. I dunno why, I guess because people are used to phoning commercial tech support and insulting the people on the other end to cool off, but surprise surprise telling people their stuff sucks because you don't want to/can't invest the effort to learn it gets you flamed. In that case, you're the one being arrogant, not them. What's in front of you is the software, nothing is hidden from you. We'd all like for everything to be perfectly easy, but sometimes it isn't, and people who can't seem to accept that are the biggest cause of flamage on IRC.
I hope that little guide helps. Asking experiencied Linux users is one of the fastest ways of getting up to speed, but be careful not to abuse that facility, otherwise you will get burned.
I know there are people out there like yourself. Without question, the people who are willing to help make a world of difference. Please understand that I have written a fair amount of technical materials for various employers over the years, thus personally I am hardly adverse to the idea of RTFM. I think one of the biggest problems, one that I know taco once talked about addressing with a book, is knowing/which/ manaul to read. In short, very good stable tools are out there, but how to know what to ask for? Many of the names (like grep or eth0) are logical for programmers, but don't make a lot of sense for those who aren't.
Without question I have seen people like you describe, those that come demanding answers without bothering to do any research. They are annoying, I won't dispute. Unfortunately, these impatient people talk to other people, and a/perception/ of an ivory tower is created. Right or wrong, people like the managers in my government contract job pay a lot of attention to perception. It's the perception that needs work, and this is not easy to change.
One of the things I have personally found frustrating is that there seems to be an assumption that the user will know what certain things are. In short, it's a matter of knowing what exactly it is that you need. A friend of mine is quite proficeint with linux, and it seems at time I have to use him as a translator. I'll tell him a problem, he tells me the appropriate *nix terminology, and I search online for the answers. Working on more common sense names would help immensely. I think this is the most common method of pointing someone in the right direction for *nix's.
I'm also not at all adverse to linux myself.
I have a mandrake box running duty as a samba file server and another flavor running duty as a firewall.
Complaining doesn't get you anywhere, I couldn't agree more. Unless, that is, someone posts a story to/. asking you to do exactly that:-) In which case I can bring up my complaints. Of note, this could well prove to be the most popular/. story yet - almost 3000 comments upon last check. Believe me, I like many of the concpets of *nix, that's why I'm going to school for it. Unfortunately, it's joe blow six pack that dictates the fortunes in the computer world, and it's joe six pack that needs appealed to.
Short list of the most useful things from my beginner linux perspective.
Translation manuals, the tools are out there, but I need someone to tell what their equivalent to in a windows world so that I know what to ask for.
Consistent interface option. No need to get rid of custom interfaces, but to make available a standard interface that could be brought up (doesn't need to be the only one) to administer the machine, that would be available on all linux flavors would be ungodly useful.
Naming. Many *nix commands are named for programming functionallity since they were designed as programmers tools. Coming up with more familiar names that would also execute the identical function would be useful. For example, grep could also be brought up under "search" or "find".
For me the problem has been that KDE and GNOME both crash on me and dump me out to a command prompt in a console. That's totally unacceptable. And it's been true on my thinkpad, my powerbook, and various desktops I've put various flavors of linux on, so it's not just a bad video card or something.
I've tried simpler window managers such as ice and windowmaker, but in my old age, I really want something that is much more user friendly to configure - no config files for me, please.
Beyond that, the UI inconsistencies, such as when does control-C copy, versus alt-C, versus no accelerator key, in all the different programs - it reminds me of an old apartment I lived in where each sink faucet turned a different direction. It was hell to remember which was which, and though I mostly learned to tell them apart, it's still just not right.
quick dirty fix..you end your x session, you'd have to kill the loopforever pid, but X will not exit because your window manager (the previous and last pid) exited.
For me the problem has been that KDE and GNOME both crash on me and dump me out to a command prompt in a console.
I think your problem is your distribution. Just a guess. I have never had either KDE or GNOME crash on me. I think one of the up and coming problems with Linux is a few shoddy distributions giving the good ones a bad name.
maybe the linux world doesnt get it, its not the unified gui... is that things WORKS! and with a nice gui... if to do my job on windows i got to scratch my balls because of a gui standard, but it worked in almost every application... i will be scratching my balls everytime just fine!... On linux (on gnome, kde, whatever) prima donas of programming seems to make an effort to make an ass of a gui... and not to follow the rules of the gui on their same desktops... it just make me sick...
I've recently moved over to largely using Linux at work, and it is rather fustrating the way that the Linux Desktop is fragmented. The thing is, I imagine that many people use a mix of KDE and Gnome apps. I find it irritating that I have to set up file associations twice and things like that. I wish it could just be unified like Windows. And don't get me started on applications that are still using Motif...
It's not that they don't look and feel the same. I personally think there's a more fundamental problem, and that problem is X.
X was designed, from the start, to be a low-level API to allow different types of UNIX windowing systems to interoperate. It was designed to be quick on the hardware of that day, which was monochrome or paletted, and speedy across network connections like 300 baud. It was designed with the intention of people writing cheap toolkits for it, toolkits like Motif, that were low-bandwidth.
Now why did they go with the client-side toolkit idea? There are a few reasons. One is because the target machine wasn't always of the same architecture, and porting the library to another architecture could be a pain. Another is that it took more bandwidth to transfer the library to the user's side than it did to just send the basic drawing instructions.
Nowadays, we have two solutions to the first problem; we can either use a VM to run our libraries, or we can just compile it for them. (This is where Autoconf, Automake and libtool come in handy.) Worse comes to worst, we can have a fallback that uses an X remeniscient remote painting facility, if they don't have the tk installed.
The second problem is obsolete. Toolkits are now being themed, which means that we have huge numbers of image files being used to "paint" interfaces. If the machine that's the X server isn't the same as the X client, then these images are painted on the client and sent over the network to the server. Eek. Also, these are typically images that aren't natively supported by X (X only supports paletted images) so we need to use an extension, so programmers have some cruft to worry about, here, too. (ie; What if the extension's supported, but poorly, and it fails halfway through the call?)
Now don't tell me that we need to do things this way, because we don't. In the latest release of Windows, XP now has that level of network transparency. If you want to access your home computer's apps from work, it's as simple as logging into it from work. Instantly, your home drives appear in your explorer, and you can access windows on the screen of your home box.
Now why am I making such a big deal about this, you ask? Well, it's because they're not just taking a screenshot of the desktop and sending it. They've taken a page from X's book, and they send the higher-level commands over the network. Essentially, GDI calls. And, from what I understand, you end up with a consistant interface on the accessing end, because it uses the accessor's theme set.
Now this is just my rant about X's networking components. If you want to get into XFree86, I can tell you that I'm not at all pleased with the way they've set it up. X should not be the video driver. When I start my machine, I should not have to load X in order for my graphics card driver to be loaded. It should be loaded, waiting and ready to be accessed, by any application.
The way I see it, the system should come up by loading the graphics driver. It should be a process that's always running. Then there should be a standard library through which anyone can access the graphics driver. The card's state should be in the driver, not X! The driver should be in charge of the card, not X! X should be just another application that people can run to get a windowing environment.
The closest I can find to this idea, right now, is the libGGI/libGII/kgi people. They've got a basic framework for their API down, but it only works with a limited number of cards, and only one of those uses acceleration features so far. If that API were expanded for full 3D support, and a few more recent cards could be added to that list, or bumped up to full acceleration, I think we'd all be a lot better off. Heck, they've already got an Xggi server written--they've had it for years.
As for X on the desktop, GNOME had to hack a CORBA ORB to get the functionality that Windows provides for free. For X, the lack of standardization in the 3rd party object components department has been a huge pain in the ass for anyone interested in combining a KDE part with a GNOME widget in the same program. You end up having to port one of them the other way. If X could be made to have it's own object tracking extension, that would help bandaid the solution, but I think it's just a symptom of a much bigger problem.
X is old. It shows. We need something new; I say make X a plugin for whatever new windowing system we use tomorrow, and that we get started on making that new one soon.
If we want to put a GNU system on every desktop, X as the windowing system just isn't the right solution anymore.
I've pretty much given up on Linux as a desktop OS. I think GNOME and KDE are crap. In my opinion they spend too much time focusing on eye candy and bloat. (Do Konqueror and Nautilus need to do EVERYTHING?)
I used to have the time to play with Linux and tweak it but now I have other things to spend that time on, like my family. The fun thing about Linux was the tweaking and the tuning, trying to shrink that kernel another 2k. If Linux were to ever win the battle for the desktop OS then I would imagine all the stuff that made Linux fun for me would have to go away or at least be very well hidden.
Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.
-- Dave Olson
So far... (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is claiming that they're staying on Windows because KDE and GNOME look different! There's this sense of urgency in the Linux community that unless there's a unified vanilla desktop, no one is going to want to use Linux. It seems that this is not the case.
But maybe I've missed those posts. So let me ask: is there anyone out there who has genuinely stayed with Windows precisely because KDE and GNOME don't have the same look and feel? [I'm not asking if you want them to have to same look, only if you have honestly refused to use any form of UNIX because of it]
Re:So far... (Score:4, Interesting)
In short, I want to be able to "just use it". I want to go to a consistent place every single time and be able to enable a nic to use / not use DHCP regardless of flavor of linux I am on. That and the biggest thing that the linux community needs to do is have a serious attitude adjustment. The whole, holier than thou attitude and general unwillingness to help (with exceptions of course) have ruined it in many portions of society. I was working a very large gov contract position a few years back and when I asked why they didn't have linux in use (despite many of the workers privately using it), I was told bluntly, "because the community can't be bothered to step out of their white tower to help unless your a programmer". "The entire concept of anyone
In case your wondering if it's the whole CLI interface thing, no it isn't. I've been using computers since the TI80, have 5 years professional experience, and have absolutely no problem with the Cisco CLI. I'm also in school to pick up Solaris, Cisco, and Unix once Linux is finished. Thus I am hardly a newbie that is scared by the lack of a pretty interface. hope this helps.
Re:So far... (Score:2)
The ivory tower thing: this has to be one of the biggest misunderstandings around. Frequently Linux users (especially in tech support channels) are painted as arrogant and unwilling to help. In my experience (and I give a lot of support on #linuxhelp) this simply isn't true. Usually, when somebody comes to me and says "I got flamed by arrogant geeks in IRC" it turns out they caused the flameage in the first place. A few things that can be done to avoid this (and please don't get me wrong, i'm not suggesting your colleagues did these things, but it's a common problem) :
I hope that little guide helps. Asking experiencied Linux users is one of the fastest ways of getting up to speed, but be careful not to abuse that facility, otherwise you will get burned.
Re:So far... (Score:2)
Without question I have seen people like you describe, those that come demanding answers without bothering to do any research. They are annoying, I won't dispute. Unfortunately, these impatient people talk to other people, and a /perception/ of an ivory tower is created. Right or wrong, people like the managers in my government contract job pay a lot of attention to perception. It's the perception that needs work, and this is not easy to change.
One of the things I have personally found frustrating is that there seems to be an assumption that the user will know what certain things are. In short, it's a matter of knowing what exactly it is that you need. A friend of mine is quite proficeint with linux, and it seems at time I have to use him as a translator. I'll tell him a problem, he tells me the appropriate *nix terminology, and I search online for the answers. Working on more common sense names would help immensely. I think this is the most common method of pointing someone in the right direction for *nix's.
I'm also not at all adverse to linux myself. I have a mandrake box running duty as a samba file server and another flavor running duty as a firewall.
Complaining doesn't get you anywhere, I couldn't agree more. Unless, that is, someone posts a story to /. asking you to do exactly that :-) In which case I can bring up my complaints. Of note, this could well prove to be the most popular /. story yet - almost 3000 comments upon last check. Believe me, I like many of the concpets of *nix, that's why I'm going to school for it. Unfortunately, it's joe blow six pack that dictates the fortunes in the computer world, and it's joe six pack that needs appealed to.
Short list of the most useful things from my beginner linux perspective.
Translation manuals, the tools are out there, but I need someone to tell what their equivalent to in a windows world so that I know what to ask for.
Consistent interface option. No need to get rid of custom interfaces, but to make available a standard interface that could be brought up (doesn't need to be the only one) to administer the machine, that would be available on all linux flavors would be ungodly useful.
Naming. Many *nix commands are named for programming functionallity since they were designed as programmers tools. Coming up with more familiar names that would also execute the identical function would be useful. For example, grep could also be brought up under "search" or "find".
Re:So far... (Score:1)
Re:So far... (Score:1)
but a fix for that, copy the "while' to "loopforever" and in your ~/.xinitrc file
after your window managers execution command, eg:
#sample
enable-some-kewl-sound-daemon &
startkde &
loopforever
quick dirty fix..you end your x session, you'd have to kill the loopforever pid, but X will not exit because your window manager (the previous and last pid) exited.
Re:So far... (Score:1)
I think your problem is your distribution. Just a guess. I have never had either KDE or GNOME crash on me. I think one of the up and coming problems with Linux is a few shoddy distributions giving the good ones a bad name.
Re:So far... (Score:1)
Actually, that's one of the things... (Score:2)
X is the enemy. (Score:2)
X was designed, from the start, to be a low-level API to allow different types of UNIX windowing systems to interoperate. It was designed to be quick on the hardware of that day, which was monochrome or paletted, and speedy across network connections like 300 baud. It was designed with the intention of people writing cheap toolkits for it, toolkits like Motif, that were low-bandwidth.
Now why did they go with the client-side toolkit idea? There are a few reasons. One is because the target machine wasn't always of the same architecture, and porting the library to another architecture could be a pain. Another is that it took more bandwidth to transfer the library to the user's side than it did to just send the basic drawing instructions.
Nowadays, we have two solutions to the first problem; we can either use a VM to run our libraries, or we can just compile it for them. (This is where Autoconf, Automake and libtool come in handy.) Worse comes to worst, we can have a fallback that uses an X remeniscient remote painting facility, if they don't have the tk installed.
The second problem is obsolete. Toolkits are now being themed, which means that we have huge numbers of image files being used to "paint" interfaces. If the machine that's the X server isn't the same as the X client, then these images are painted on the client and sent over the network to the server. Eek. Also, these are typically images that aren't natively supported by X (X only supports paletted images) so we need to use an extension, so programmers have some cruft to worry about, here, too. (ie; What if the extension's supported, but poorly, and it fails halfway through the call?)
Now don't tell me that we need to do things this way, because we don't. In the latest release of Windows, XP now has that level of network transparency. If you want to access your home computer's apps from work, it's as simple as logging into it from work. Instantly, your home drives appear in your explorer, and you can access windows on the screen of your home box.
Now why am I making such a big deal about this, you ask? Well, it's because they're not just taking a screenshot of the desktop and sending it. They've taken a page from X's book, and they send the higher-level commands over the network. Essentially, GDI calls. And, from what I understand, you end up with a consistant interface on the accessing end, because it uses the accessor's theme set.
Now this is just my rant about X's networking components. If you want to get into XFree86, I can tell you that I'm not at all pleased with the way they've set it up. X should not be the video driver. When I start my machine, I should not have to load X in order for my graphics card driver to be loaded. It should be loaded, waiting and ready to be accessed, by any application.
The way I see it, the system should come up by loading the graphics driver. It should be a process that's always running. Then there should be a standard library through which anyone can access the graphics driver. The card's state should be in the driver, not X! The driver should be in charge of the card, not X! X should be just another application that people can run to get a windowing environment.
The closest I can find to this idea, right now, is the libGGI/libGII/kgi people. They've got a basic framework for their API down, but it only works with a limited number of cards, and only one of those uses acceleration features so far. If that API were expanded for full 3D support, and a few more recent cards could be added to that list, or bumped up to full acceleration, I think we'd all be a lot better off. Heck, they've already got an Xggi server written--they've had it for years.
As for X on the desktop, GNOME had to hack a CORBA ORB to get the functionality that Windows provides for free. For X, the lack of standardization in the 3rd party object components department has been a huge pain in the ass for anyone interested in combining a KDE part with a GNOME widget in the same program. You end up having to port one of them the other way. If X could be made to have it's own object tracking extension, that would help bandaid the solution, but I think it's just a symptom of a much bigger problem.
X is old. It shows. We need something new; I say make X a plugin for whatever new windowing system we use tomorrow, and that we get started on making that new one soon.
If we want to put a GNU system on every desktop, X as the windowing system just isn't the right solution anymore.
And with that, I think I'm done.
Re:So far... (Score:2)
I used to have the time to play with Linux and tweak it but now I have other things to spend that time on, like my family. The fun thing about Linux was the tweaking and the tuning, trying to shrink that kernel another 2k. If Linux were to ever win the battle for the desktop OS then I would imagine all the stuff that made Linux fun for me would have to go away or at least be very well hidden.