Well, sorta kinda. But still! A victory for the open source guys!
Uggggh who am I kidding, even the Mac has a better gaming scene than Linux. At least now some great games are on Mac. I'll expect more good games on LInux, but only TO the quality of Mac gaming, not above it. Still, this will make gaming on different platforms a lot more simple.
Linux only works on the mobile market because there's only a choice of one distro. Until the FOSS kids can stop being so fragmented, they'll get nowhere.
Linux works on the mobile market because there's one distro that's pre-installed on hundreds of devices that are relatively limited in their configurations and usages.
Linux fails on the desktop for several reasons. The biggest one being that they haven't managed to snag the pre-installed market yet. Average Joe doesn't want to change their OS, they probably don't even know they can. So before Linux can succeed, it first needs to come pre-installed on desktops.
There are some companies like Dell which do offer Linux as a choice for the OS, but if you notice, they charge extra for it. Why? Because the OEM loses out on revenue from the pre-installed crapware that they get paid to install under Windows. So it doesn't make sense to a consumer to pay more for this other OS they haven't really heard of before. Instead, go with the devil you know.
Another issue is the support. Steam coming to Linux is a nice first step, but it doesn't mean much for the Average Joe that probably doesn't even use Steam. The Average Gamer does, so this means more for a gamer adopting Linux than it does for Average Joe. When Average Joe plays games on a desktop PC these days, he plays them in a web browser. Or he goes to the store and buys a disc, he goes home and tries to install it, finds out it doesn't work and gets pissed off.
Not to mention that Netflix isn't even supported under Linux. Which brings up another issue, as long as the solution to a problem on Linux begins with "open a terminal" it will NEVER, EVER be successful on the desktop as a mainstream OS.
And honestly, I don't know why Linux geeks are gunning for Linux to be popular on the desktop. Look at what happened to Windows... look at what's happening to Ubuntu... Trust me, Linux is better off remaining a geek OS...
And honestly, I don't know why Linux geeks are gunning for Linux to be popular on the desktop. Look at what happened to Windows... look at what's happening to Ubuntu... Trust me, Linux is better off remaining a geek OS...
You do bring up a good point. Some of what's happening with Ubuntu is kind of cool, but some of the new "features" like the Unity shopping lens are unacceptable.
I am not hoping for Linux to make an entrance into the market as a mainstream desktop operating system, I only hope for further improvements in hardware and software support. (Which have come a long way, especially in Ubuntu, over the last few years.)
I am certainly keeping my eyes open for alternatives. I am currently still a Ubuntu user, but when 12.04's support runs out, I will be making a decision about whether or not to stick with the distro, and I think I'll be basing my decision on how easy it is to remove these bullshit consumer/spyware "features" from the next LTS.
If Windows ever gets to the point where it's unbearable, desktop wise I think I'd rather go to OSX than fuck around with the plethora of useless DEs/window managers that exist on *nix, not to mention the patchwork quilt that is X.org.
But in Mac OS the solution is open a terminal too.. On Windows, the solution is take it to a repair person and drop $100.. or buy a new computer. -.- (For the average user, that is)
Personally I'd just like to see more Linux game and software support. I prefer it staying under the radar, to be honest.
No, the average Windows user just lives with whatever problem they have until their computer stops working and then they either take it to someone or they use the restore CD that came with their computer (assuming their computer came with one) or they get a new computer.
The mac user, if their computer has a problem, they take it to the apple store.
Oh. Yeah pretty true I guess. Either way, some thing will happen with linux. Hell, my mom's used Ubuntu for like 4 years now and loves it. And that's on an age old netbook.
On Debian, I have to go way out of my way to get features like DVD playback and most audio/video codecs working. If Debian had more lenient policies about what made it to the repo's, it would be more like Ubuntu, and in my opinion, better. I don't have the spare time to kill installing things Ubuntu does for me, and until the cost of using Ubuntu is too great compared to Debian to outweigh the benefits, I will stay with Ubuntu.
Yeah, I love Debian for servers, but as a desktop OS, Ubuntu beats it. Even with Unity, which honestly isn't all that bad, though I think I prefer gnome shell.
How's Fedora these days? We standardized on CentOS at my last job and that worked out pretty well for us, but it's a little lacking in the desktop experience. I wonder if Fedora is better.
Fedora is a synonym for clusterfuck, at least in my experience. I gave up on using it when I couldn't get used to it's package management. Plus it had the same issues Debian had.. I'd just assume use Debian and have something I'm familiar with and that's simplified into an easy command line or GUI based too.
Not saying it's bad, just that it's not for me.
I also prefer KDE to the other UIs any day. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I like the basic things like a start menu, and I like QT over GTK+ any day.. the former doesn't look like the 1990's are coming for our souls.
To say I last used Fedora when it was still called Red Hat Linux.
As for Steam on Linux making Windows uses shakey, not really. It might mean people start making full graphics driver sets that work 100% with your graphics and sound hardware. Or am I a few years behind on my Linux and they actually try that now?
Would you get a performance boost, maybe. I couldn't say as I haven't used any *nix flavour for a long time.
Switching to Debian unstable or testing might help a bit with the application availability issue. Debian was designed around stability so you have to keep that in mind. Then there's the fact you can always compile where needed. Most applications have their source available.
Me, I know better. I'm not going to attempt to switch to Linux as a desktop OS unless I want to take the time to build my system, maintain my system, hunt for applications, compile where needed, etc. That's the joy of an "open" solution. There's no central control or responsibility over the product, hence it becomes flexible to the point where it's complicated.
Am I saying there's no room for a reputable company to build a supported, desktop-friendly Linux OS? No. Not at all. I mean that's basically what you get out of OSX/Apple. It's just Unix-based vs. Linux-based.
Me, I know better. I'm not going to attempt to switch to Linux as a desktop OS unless I want to take the time to build my system, maintain my system, hunt for applications, compile where needed, etc. That's the joy of an "open" solution. There's no central control or responsibility over the product, hence it becomes flexible to the point where it's complicated.
Same here... I don't want to fuss about with my OS, I don't even like reinstalling Windows which is why I pretty much never do it. And thanks to some recent sys admin gigs I've had, I now have a couple of nice Windows 7 images I've made which are pre-configured and ready to deploy on a variety of systems, just add drivers and you're good to go... I absolutely love it. You could build a similar thing for Linux which would probably take away some of the complexity, but there's always some thing that's just finicky and requires some fooling around with to get it working.
Am I saying there's no room for a reputable company to build a supported, desktop-friendly Linux OS? No. Not at all. I mean that's basically what you get out of OSX/Apple. It's just Unix-based vs. Linux-based.
Well, I think Canonical / Ubuntu is about as close as Linux seems to get to a supported, desktop-friendly OS. For now anyway.
I used OpenSuSE on the build I converted to an Xmas gift for a friend. It was nice, but much more fidgety than either Ubuntu or Debian. YaST is STILL a little bitch. the Nvidia graphics installer took FOREVER to get working correctly. It does seem fairly stable though. It's like Debian, just a bit more stable and with the most horribly hard to use package manager I've ever used.
How's Fedora these days? We standardized on CentOS at my last job and that worked out pretty well for us, but it's a little lacking in the desktop experience. I wonder if Fedora is better.
Fedora does not seem to follow the standard layout for most linux systems now. Everything seems to be thrown into /usr and all other directories are symlinked back to /usr. Also, I've encountered conf files inside /usr with my standard fedora install. Big problem. I kinda learned the hard way about this when I tried to upgrade my server from Fedora 15 to Fedora 17. I trashed the system trying to follow the upgrade instructions. I gave up and went to Slackware for my server.
Also, systemd. While I think sysV init should be replaced with something modern, I think they really screwed up with systemd. DBus is required for systemd to work properly, which on my server, kept pulling in tons of gnome crap as dependencies during upgrades. A headless server should NOT have stuff like pulseaudio and gconf pulled in as dependencies when they are completely unneeded.
How's Fedora these days? We standardized on CentOS at my last job and that worked out pretty well for us, but it's a little lacking in the desktop experience. I wonder if Fedora is better.
Fedora does not seem to follow the standard layout for most linux systems now. Everything seems to be thrown into /usr and all other directories are symlinked back to /usr. Also, I've encountered conf files inside /usr with my standard fedora install. Big problem. I kinda learned the hard way about this when I tried to upgrade my server from Fedora 15 to Fedora 17. I trashed the system trying to follow the upgrade instructions. I gave up and went to Slackware for my server.
Also, systemd. While I think sysV init should be replaced with something modern, I think they really screwed up with systemd. DBus is required for systemd to work properly, which on my server, kept pulling in tons of gnome crap as dependencies during upgrades. A headless server should NOT have stuff like pulseaudio and gconf pulled in as dependencies when they are completely unneeded.
Yeeeah sounds about right. I used Fedora once, a few years ago. I installed it on a dangerously underpowered machine, but that doesn't change the fact that it was pretty horrible. Debian definitely got the init daemon down right.
Yeeeah sounds about right. I used Fedora once, a few years ago. I installed it on a dangerously underpowered machine, but that doesn't change the fact that it was pretty horrible. Debian definitely got the init daemon down right.
The init daemon that Debian uses is the dated sysV init that every distro has used basically since what seems to be the beginning of time. The only distros that I've seen that don't use that are the Fedora based, including Arch, Mandriva, and OpenSUSE (they use systemd), Ubuntu based distros (they use upstart) and Gentoo based distros (they use openRC).
In terms of performance, I've noticed Ubuntu has the fastest boot time of them all, however I don't agree with the way they alias services if you need to start them from the command line, it was either "service start" or "start service", I forget, Fedora uses "systemctl blahfucks.service start", openRC uses "/etc/init.d/service start" like sysV init). When I used to use Gentoo back in 07, I managed to get boot times less than 10 seconds (hitting enter at GRUB to seeing login screen), which at the time was pretty impressive. I tried Sabayon recently, which is a more non-nightmare form of Gentoo, and had about a 8s start time, Ubuntu on the same machine did it in 5s, Debian in 12s, and Fedora in 8s. Still not as fast I had windows 7/8 start. (I see the full windows logo come together and them I'm at a login screen.)
There's been an outrage basically with the systemd fiasco because the BSD based OSes share the init/gnutils system as linux, and systemd basically tells them all to fuck off and die (it's coded specifically to use the linux kernel) and the fact it's breaking compatibility with older software that might still be used in academia. Also, the requirements for dbus, the fact that udev has now been integrated into systemd, scare the hell out of people, who think that they're going to be restricted to using only specific software (I've seen this called "gnomeOS" by some on IRC)
Really? Ubuntu used to boot faster than Windows on this laptop. I guess it IS a kinda dated platform though, which would explain that.
But either way, I guess I like the sysV init then. It's simple enough, and it works. x3 I'm guessing it's possible to install upstart or something like that with Debian, too, right?
How's Fedora these days? We standardized on CentOS at my last job and that worked out pretty well for us, but it's a little lacking in the desktop experience. I wonder if Fedora is better.
Fedora does not seem to follow the standard layout for most linux systems now. Everything seems to be thrown into /usr and all other directories are symlinked back to /usr. Also, I've encountered conf files inside /usr with my standard fedora install. Big problem. I kinda learned the hard way about this when I tried to upgrade my server from Fedora 15 to Fedora 17. I trashed the system trying to follow the upgrade instructions. I gave up and went to Slackware for my server.
Also, systemd. While I think sysV init should be replaced with something modern, I think they really screwed up with systemd. DBus is required for systemd to work properly, which on my server, kept pulling in tons of gnome crap as dependencies during upgrades. A headless server should NOT have stuff like pulseaudio and gconf pulled in as dependencies when they are completely unneeded.
Really? Ubuntu used to boot faster than Windows on this laptop. I guess it IS a kinda dated platform though, which would explain that.
But either way, I guess I like the sysV init then. It's simple enough, and it works. x3 I'm guessing it's possible to install upstart or something like that with Debian, too, right?
Anyways, sysV has been around for ages, basically it has not been changed in a very long time, which is why people have stuck with it. My tests on start time were done last summer on a Core i5 with 8gb of ram. Results may vary too with start times.
Also, systemd. While I think sysV init should be replaced with something modern, I think they really screwed up with systemd. DBus is required for systemd to work properly, which on my server, kept pulling in tons of gnome crap as dependencies during upgrades. A headless server should NOT have stuff like pulseaudio and gconf pulled in as dependencies when they are completely unneeded.
Josh I've had to deal with your stupidity too many times. You don't NEED Direct X to run games on Linux. Direct X is a windows specific multimedia library that aids game and multimedia application developers. There are replacements for Linux. For example, OpenGL replaces Direct 3D, SDL replaces Direct2D, OpenAL and gstreamer replaces DirectShow and so on.
Comments
Aha no.
Well, sorta kinda. But still! A victory for the open source guys!
Uggggh who am I kidding, even the Mac has a better gaming scene than Linux. At least now some great games are on Mac. I'll expect more good games on LInux, but only TO the quality of Mac gaming, not above it. Still, this will make gaming on different platforms a lot more simple.
Linux fails on the desktop for several reasons. The biggest one being that they haven't managed to snag the pre-installed market yet. Average Joe doesn't want to change their OS, they probably don't even know they can. So before Linux can succeed, it first needs to come pre-installed on desktops.
There are some companies like Dell which do offer Linux as a choice for the OS, but if you notice, they charge extra for it. Why? Because the OEM loses out on revenue from the pre-installed crapware that they get paid to install under Windows. So it doesn't make sense to a consumer to pay more for this other OS they haven't really heard of before. Instead, go with the devil you know.
Another issue is the support. Steam coming to Linux is a nice first step, but it doesn't mean much for the Average Joe that probably doesn't even use Steam. The Average Gamer does, so this means more for a gamer adopting Linux than it does for Average Joe. When Average Joe plays games on a desktop PC these days, he plays them in a web browser. Or he goes to the store and buys a disc, he goes home and tries to install it, finds out it doesn't work and gets pissed off.
Not to mention that Netflix isn't even supported under Linux. Which brings up another issue, as long as the solution to a problem on Linux begins with "open a terminal" it will NEVER, EVER be successful on the desktop as a mainstream OS.
And honestly, I don't know why Linux geeks are gunning for Linux to be popular on the desktop. Look at what happened to Windows... look at what's happening to Ubuntu... Trust me, Linux is better off remaining a geek OS...
You do bring up a good point. Some of what's happening with Ubuntu is kind of cool, but some of the new "features" like the Unity shopping lens are unacceptable.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/onli ... untu-12-10
I am not hoping for Linux to make an entrance into the market as a mainstream desktop operating system, I only hope for further improvements in hardware and software support. (Which have come a long way, especially in Ubuntu, over the last few years.)
I am certainly keeping my eyes open for alternatives. I am currently still a Ubuntu user, but when 12.04's support runs out, I will be making a decision about whether or not to stick with the distro, and I think I'll be basing my decision on how easy it is to remove these bullshit consumer/spyware "features" from the next LTS.
But in Mac OS the solution is open a terminal too.. On Windows, the solution is take it to a repair person and drop $100.. or buy a new computer. -.- (For the average user, that is)
Personally I'd just like to see more Linux game and software support. I prefer it staying under the radar, to be honest.
The mac user, if their computer has a problem, they take it to the apple store.
Not saying it's bad, just that it's not for me.
I also prefer KDE to the other UIs any day. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I like the basic things like a start menu, and I like QT over GTK+ any day.. the former doesn't look like the 1990's are coming for our souls.
As for Steam on Linux making Windows uses shakey, not really. It might mean people start making full graphics driver sets that work 100% with your graphics and sound hardware. Or am I a few years behind on my Linux and they actually try that now?
Would you get a performance boost, maybe. I couldn't say as I haven't used any *nix flavour for a long time.
Me, I know better. I'm not going to attempt to switch to Linux as a desktop OS unless I want to take the time to build my system, maintain my system, hunt for applications, compile where needed, etc. That's the joy of an "open" solution. There's no central control or responsibility over the product, hence it becomes flexible to the point where it's complicated.
Am I saying there's no room for a reputable company to build a supported, desktop-friendly Linux OS? No. Not at all. I mean that's basically what you get out of OSX/Apple. It's just Unix-based vs. Linux-based.
Same here... I don't want to fuss about with my OS, I don't even like reinstalling Windows which is why I pretty much never do it. And thanks to some recent sys admin gigs I've had, I now have a couple of nice Windows 7 images I've made which are pre-configured and ready to deploy on a variety of systems, just add drivers and you're good to go... I absolutely love it. You could build a similar thing for Linux which would probably take away some of the complexity, but there's always some thing that's just finicky and requires some fooling around with to get it working.
Well, I think Canonical / Ubuntu is about as close as Linux seems to get to a supported, desktop-friendly OS. For now anyway.
Also, systemd. While I think sysV init should be replaced with something modern, I think they really screwed up with systemd. DBus is required for systemd to work properly, which on my server, kept pulling in tons of gnome crap as dependencies during upgrades. A headless server should NOT have stuff like pulseaudio and gconf pulled in as dependencies when they are completely unneeded.
Yeeeah sounds about right. I used Fedora once, a few years ago. I installed it on a dangerously underpowered machine, but that doesn't change the fact that it was pretty horrible. Debian definitely got the init daemon down right.
In terms of performance, I've noticed Ubuntu has the fastest boot time of them all, however I don't agree with the way they alias services if you need to start them from the command line, it was either "service start" or "start service", I forget, Fedora uses "systemctl blahfucks.service start", openRC uses "/etc/init.d/service start" like sysV init). When I used to use Gentoo back in 07, I managed to get boot times less than 10 seconds (hitting enter at GRUB to seeing login screen), which at the time was pretty impressive. I tried Sabayon recently, which is a more non-nightmare form of Gentoo, and had about a 8s start time, Ubuntu on the same machine did it in 5s, Debian in 12s, and Fedora in 8s. Still not as fast I had windows 7/8 start. (I see the full windows logo come together and them I'm at a login screen.)
There's been an outrage basically with the systemd fiasco because the BSD based OSes share the init/gnutils system as linux, and systemd basically tells them all to fuck off and die (it's coded specifically to use the linux kernel) and the fact it's breaking compatibility with older software that might still be used in academia. Also, the requirements for dbus, the fact that udev has now been integrated into systemd, scare the hell out of people, who think that they're going to be restricted to using only specific software (I've seen this called "gnomeOS" by some on IRC)
But either way, I guess I like the sysV init then. It's simple enough, and it works. x3 I'm guessing it's possible to install upstart or something like that with Debian, too, right?
Ew. Just ew.
Anyways, sysV has been around for ages, basically it has not been changed in a very long time, which is why people have stuck with it. My tests on start time were done last summer on a Core i5 with 8gb of ram. Results may vary too with start times.
I can't agree more.
Josh I've had to deal with your stupidity too many times. You don't NEED Direct X to run games on Linux. Direct X is a windows specific multimedia library that aids game and multimedia application developers. There are replacements for Linux. For example, OpenGL replaces Direct 3D, SDL replaces Direct2D, OpenAL and gstreamer replaces DirectShow and so on.