Thoughts on Linux

I found this after reading this thread. How to set up Ubuntu Linux on a Mac -- it's easy and free | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog It is a couple of years old but the links work and it is slightly different from the instructions on the website. I have been playing around with Ubuntu for a day or so. not to bad.

I was gonna let Bryan respond to Charlie before I said anything...

I've been using Linux for a long time (early 90's)..and use it primarily from a developer perspective and at that it excels.

I think if you look at it from a purely end user perspective, Linux has come a VERY long way from the 90's where you HAD to be a developer to make it do anything of value. The ease with which the current distributions install and work with nearly every peripheral out there still blows my mind sometimes..

I think Linux has gotten to a point where it offers a great balance of control for the power user and ease for the end user fearing the command line..

Raz0rEdge said:

I was gonna let Bryan respond to Charlie before I said anything...

I've been using Linux for a long time (early 90's)..and use it primarily from a developer perspective and at that it excels.

I think if you look at it from a purely end user perspective, Linux has come a VERY long way from the 90's where you HAD to be a developer to make it do anything of value. The ease with which the current distributions install and work with nearly every peripheral out there still blows my mind sometimes..

I think Linux has gotten to a point where it offers a great balance of control for the power user and ease for the end user fearing the command line..

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I disagree, it's getting there but it's just not quite there... yet. Soon, I think though. Very soon. It's biggest disadvantage, however, is application support.

Dysfunction said:

I disagree, it's getting there but it's just not quite there... yet. Soon, I think though. Very soon. It's biggest disadvantage, however, is application support.

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Any glance at the Ubuntu or Fedora repos will tell you that Linux is surely not lacking in application support. So what application are you talking about? iTunes? Is that a difficiency in Linux or with Apple choosing not to port to Linux?

Raz0rEdge said:

Any glance at the Ubuntu or Fedora repos will tell you that Linux is surely not lacking in application support. So what application are you talking about? iTunes? Is that a difficiency in Linux or with Apple choosing not to port to Linux?

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Let me see, perhaps I should have said PROFESSIONAL application support. Open Office (and I do use it daily) is lacking compared to Office... GIMP, yea, it flat out sucks compared to Photoshop.. etc etc etc. This is the advantage OSX has, it's a professional application supported Unix. (not Unix-like OS).

iTunes? Meh, very low of on my list of things that irritate me. Then again, I'm also not motivated enough to do something about any of these apps. I spend too much of my life looking at code (and traces) as it is.


But, all that said.. I think I'm done with this thread anyway and you and I are are (obviously) just going to have to continue to disagree.

Dysfunction said:

This is the advantage OSX has, it's a professional application supported Unix. (not Unix-like OS).

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This is what drove me to OS X. Prior to my first Mac, I was using a dual-boot Windows/Linux setup to accomplish what I can do with a single OS X install. With OS X, I get Office and Unix, all in once nice package.

Dysfunction said:

Let me see, perhaps I should have said PROFESSIONAL application support. Open Office (and I do use it daily) is lacking compared to Office... GIMP, yea, it flat out sucks compared to Photoshop.. etc etc etc. This is the advantage OSX has, it's a professional application supported Unix. (not Unix-like OS).

iTunes? Meh, very low of on my list of things that irritate me. Then again, I'm also not motivated enough to do something about any of these apps. I spend too much of my life looking at code (and traces) as it is.


But, all that said.. I think I'm done with this thread anyway and you and I are are (obviously) just going to have to continue to disagree.

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The biggest barrier for commercial applications making their way to Linux has predominently been with the user base that is unwilling to pay for pretty much any piece of software on a freely available OS. You'll find that nearly all of the popular applications on Linux are BSD or GPL licensed and usually distributed as sources (or readily available somewhere). A handful of commercial applications have attempted to enter the market, but there is usually a free variant with lesser functionality that people will struggle with as opposed to pay for a commercially made application.

That's just the nature of the Linux world as it always has been..

Linux, I think everyone will agree, excels in the server role and as an embedded developer, I use it a lot of deploy all sorts of equipment. And these are probably it's biggest strengths. For people who are unwilling to switch to OS X for one reason or another, Linux is a reasonable alternative to Windows..

Anywho..I think I've reached the end of this discussion as well..

Raz0rEdge said:

The biggest barrier for commercial applications making their way to Linux has predominently been with the user base that is unwilling to pay for pretty much any piece of software on a freely available OS.

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It should be interesting to see how successful Steam is then. There are certainly those who will embrace it with open arms and those *cough* Stallman *cough* who won't budge from their high and mighty ideological position on free software.

Raz0rEdge said:

A handful of commercial applications have attempted to enter the market, but there is usually a free variant with lesser functionality that people will struggle with as opposed to pay for a commercially made application.

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A great example of this is Chrome/Chromium. Many will download Chrome and enjoy the autoupdating and PDF support while others will happily install Chromium and separately install things like the PDF library (which itself is closed source).

Raz0rEdge said:

Linux, I think everyone will agree, excels in the server role and as an embedded developer, I use it a lot of deploy all sorts of equipment. And these are probably it's biggest strengths.

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Absolutely. It powers most of the world's top supercomputers (92.4% of the top 500 for instance) and is the heart of the most widely used smartphone operating system in the world (Android). I think this quote from Torvalds sums it up nicely:

I think the real strength of Linux is not in any particular area, but in the flexibility. [...] In contrast, look at where Linux is used. Everything from cellphones and other small embedded computers that people wouldn't even think of as computers, to the bulk of the biggest machines on the supercomputer Top-500 list. That is flexibility.

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Clearly Unix (and hence Linux) was and is the "proper" operating system, and Microsoft has a lot to answer for in diverting majority of casual computers away from it. However, it seems to me that the pendulum is swinging back via OSX, Open Office, Gimp, etc

The problem with paying for Linux software is that it sometimes does not live up to it's claims. I prefer to try and then pay if it is what I want. Much of the Linux software has this option, and I think (hope) those who use it have the foresight to contribute to its development. For me that means financial contribution.

I am preparing to go back to Linux after about three years of OSX. By going back, I mean bring up a new machine with pure Linux installed on it. I'm not abandoning Apple - I love my Air and the general use of it on the 'Net and for daily tasks. It's better for that than Linux and lightyears ahead of that other piece of junk from the Northwest US.

But, as a 'nix person, I have noticed that the Apple engineers are gradually moving the underlying BSD OS to something else. Everytime a new version of Cat comes out, or a new update of Xcode, something gets broken down at the core level. Perl gets moved, or the GCC library is gone, nothing compiles, etc.

The latest problem with ML is that the command 'make' was moved into the Xcode bundle and they didn't bother to update any paths to it. This is an original and vital core utility that has lived in /usr/bin for all of recorded history. This problem is fixable (after a long search to find it again) but I have no idea why they would just suddenly decide to move it. To me it is like finding out that the gas cap on my new car is behind the left headlight.

I don't think that Apple is deliberately trying to whipsaw users that step outside of the GUI - I think it is more along the lines of them assuming that any modern programmer would naturally want to use their app. After all, with something like Xcode available for free, who would want to use some ancient language like Python, or Perl, or Ruby?

Hopefully, it won't happen, but I'm not counting on it.

macuser1232 said:

Hey this is going to be a topic where you can post your thoughts on Linux. Here are my thoughts:

Not too long ago, I started getting interested in Linux. A couple months ago I got an old PC desktop(not too bad of a desktop, but not great either) and I installed Ubuntu on it. After messing around with Ubuntu I decided I would install Linux Mint on it instead. From then on, I have had Linux Mint on it and I have used this desktop just to mess around. I have found myself not using the desktop that much and sometimes wish I would use my Linux desktop more. In my mind, Linux is the dominant server kernel and is starting to become more and more popular on the desktop. I would love to learn more about the GNU Project as years go by. Currently, I have no intentions on using Windows. I just use my Macbook Pro and Linux desktop. I do have a Windows 7 desktop but I only use that for anything that I need to do that requires Windows. So yeah what are your thoughts on Linux?

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I use Linux at work along with AIX. Having all day to mess around with rpms, pre-reqs to install things, editing files located in "weird" locations and other fun stuff - I choose Mac OS X for non-professional tasks. Linux doesn't give me, in my personal life, anything OS X does not. Linux is a great tool, but I just don't enjoy it in my off time. It's not that magical, excessively hyped up, do anything server for enterprise on x86 beyond appliance applications and services such as web, file server, syslogging, DNS, NTP, mail, printing, etc... We tried our heavy hitter applications like SAP and Oracle on SLES and RHEL running on x86 and found it just wasn't the best choice for big mission critical stuff. Think trying to migrate multiple 3.2TB DB instances that normally reside on one box with 1TB+ of memory and 8 VIO servers, all with failover and live partition migration, 10GB fiber ethernet... to a clustered x86 setup. Even when it works, it just can't deliver "five nines" as reliably as Power can, and back-porting or dumbing down stuff to save a few bucks on hardware and licensing ain't worth it in the long run. Yes, I know Linux runs on IBM Power systems, but it does not integrate well with IBM features like PowerHA and PowerVM without a ton of handholding and weekly calls to 1800-IBM-SERV. MPIO, ether-channeling and the like are a pain with Linux on Power hardware and HMC managed systems. OS license cost savings for Linux on Power -vs- AIX on Power is negligible over a 4 year hardware lifecycle. It's a "value removed" proposition when you figure in extra support channels, what seem like daily bug/security/stability fixes to be reviewed, legacy application integration and the like... just to get it to play with your existing enterprise apps. So we gained nothing but another OS to support and more service contracts to manage. Some places have great luck with it though and I see it has a place for small outfits, image professionals, standalone CAD workstations and home users. JVMs for web commerce seem to fare OK on Linux as well. Supercomputers do well on Linux as well, but those are generally purpose built custom one-offs and not really production business facing systems - they don't generate revenue or run factories 24/7 for the most part. The people who built and designed each specific server also generally follow them around to service, maintain and upgrade them almost exclusively as well - you don't get that in real life deployments. I just don't see it as the dominant server kernel in many relevant market segments. Maybe Linux wins by sheer number of systems deployed and it's utilization on some pretty cool R&D applications, but I doubt it's dominant if we look at revenue generated per licensed core on a sheer Linux environment -vs- big steel OS's or IMS/zOS shops.

Holy cow... 390... Errr zOS has entered the fray!

safarisurfer said:

I prefer mac to linux. mac just works. The free part of linux i like, but thats pretty much it. osx does everything i need it too.

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One big advantage of Linux is that it will run on a Mac that is so old it can no longer handle the latest Mac OS. That way it extends the life of a Mac. It has done for several of mine.


John F