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Linux is not about choice (2008)

redhat.com

161–170 of 238 posts

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's still relevant and, I guess, that's why you are being downvoted.

Ubuntu has won the Desktop and Server Linux wars so the article is no longer valid. RedHat doesn't even care about Desktop Linux or consumers using Linux.

Desktop, yes. Happy user here.

But server ? That's still Red Hat's game, at least until Canonical becomes profitable.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is such a thing as "The Linux Desktop and Server Wars" I'd rather say that Android and hypervisor virtualization have won them. Which is to say I think it's more about whether or not we were asking the right questions back then. And are we now?

Are you running Android on your Desktop? No. So, no, Android is a great phone OS. It and the whole crappy touch experience have not and will not replace a Desktop.

Even if you don't count phone and tablet mobile devices, I know more people running Android or ChromeOS for their desktop than I do any traditional desktop Linux distro.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#163
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it conveys relevant information. If you were on version 7 and the new version is version 13, a message is conveyed that there have been several major iterations since your last upgrade. Numerical versioning schemes (in general) make it simple to know if you're on a current version, and if not, how far off you are. Now consider trying to make similar determinations if you know you're running "Gingerbread" but…

I can't upvote this enough. At least put the cutsie name in the goddamn uname -a result. Drives me bonkers having to look that shit up.

lsb_release -a is what you want.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#164
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. Unless you have a card without a driver (exceedingly rare, though it's not uncommon to need a recent kernel to use recent hardware) ALSA pretty much Just Works. For complex features like streaming sound over the network you need PulseAudio, which due to its complexity takes more configuration and setup, but that's done out of the box on a fair number of distros. I don't know of any major software tha…

I actually find PulseAudio vs. JACK incredibly annoying. I like to play around with "professional" audio. I don't consider it professional, but more relevantly I like to play with certain apps that require JACK. It's certainly an RTFM thing, but last time I didn't know how to get PulseAudio to go away. I wrote a shell script to keep killing it in a loop (since it restarts itself) long enough to get JACK to take over.…

    > It's certainly an RTFM thing, but last time I didn't know how to get PulseAudio to go away
`pulseaudio -k`

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#165
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it conveys relevant information. If you were on version 7 and the new version is version 13, a message is conveyed that there have been several major iterations since your last upgrade. Numerical versioning schemes (in general) make it simple to know if you're on a current version, and if not, how far off you are. Now consider trying to make similar determinations if you know you're running "Gingerbread" but…

For what it's worth, Ubuntu versions are always Adjectivated Animals (with the adjective and the animal name always starting with the same letter), and ever since 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), they've been sorted alphabetically, incrementing the first letter with every release. So even without any further information, you can easily work out that Raring Ringtail is 9 releases ahead of Intrepid Ibex.

The only good thing about Ubuntu version names is how easy they are to mock. I personally prefer "Onanistic Otter"

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#166
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you do something as drastic as changing the default window manager on a distro you are largely on your own. That's crazy. When did Linux get so _fragile_? A windows manager is the application that handles windows management. Applications (browser, word processor) don't care what WM is running, and neither should utilities. Changing a WM is strait forward. Exit, run 'xwmconfig', then startx and I'm back in. May…

Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years. Ideally you want a full Desktop environment, but at a minimum you need a session manager (for auto-starting everything else, communicating with the * kits, * buses, * agents, and * managers for device integration, etc . . .), a settings daemo…

>Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years.

What distribution does not support startx out of the box. If you boot into terminal (or kill the X service), then startx should just do whatever the system does to start the X server anyway.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#167
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wheezy is a version alias for v7. testing is testing. it points to the version that is on testing, be it 7-wheezy, or 8-whatever. the only exception to the rule is 'sid'. debian sid is always the bleeding edge, it never becomes a proper version. btw, i hate every versioning alias scheme that does not force the number to appear. such as debian, ubuntu, android... it's all just idiotic.

Why is a number more useful than how Ubuntu or Android do things?

Because I don't need a fricking web search to know if 3 comes before or after 4.

Now, this phone runs android Diabetes, and you want a feature introduced in android Cavity. Should I buy this one? I don't f#&$%#& know!

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#168
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years. Ideally you want a full Desktop environment, but at a minimum you need a session manager (for auto-starting everything else, communicating with the * kits, * buses, * agents, and * managers for device integration, etc . . .), a settings daemo…

>Modern Desktop Linux is very fragile because everything has to be configured and managed automatically. You haven't been able to startx without a lot of reconfiguring for years. What distribution does not support startx out of the box. If you boot into terminal (or kill the X service), then startx should just do whatever the system does to start the X server anyway.

startx is a shell script. The vast majority of distributions don't use it at all - they use a display manager that then does most, but not necessarily all, of what the xinit system does (plus some extras, depending on the DM).

startx from a VT should give you an X server. You can get from there to a standard session (minus the DM) by setting the appropriate environment variables and making sure the right session manager is executed.

I don't call that 'no configuration' though. And if you want to startx into Fluxbox you also have to make sure that all of the aforementioned services are run (unless you're totally abandoning your Desktop environment, in which case this whole conversation is pointless).

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#169
post #2

Epic: "But the chain of logic from 'Linux is about choice' to 'ship everything and let the user chose how they want their sound to not work' starts with fallacy and ends with disaster."

Is sound still a problem on Linux? I realize the article is about 5 years old, but Linux has been around for a long time now, and sound is a really basic function I'd expect even obtuse geeks would want to solve. If it is still a problem, seems that's a definitive concise example of why Linux can't win the OS wars: some things must work, even if nobody wants the task of making it work; sometimes the only solution is…

Just to add my two cents here, two things... I'm using a Thinkpad X230 with Fedora 17. Everything was working pretty good, but one of the updates caused sound from VLC to have a lot of static for the first 30 seconds or so after waking from suspend. But only VLC -- no other apps were affected. I reverted to an earlier kernel, problem went away. Seems this was fixed after a couple months on another kernel update (or combination of kernel and VLC update).

Secondly -- I picked up a generic USB 5.1 sound card. All works well, except the center and subwoofer channels are switched. I've seen a few posts here and there on editing some PulseAudio configs, but they don't seem to apply to the version that Fedora 17 ships with. But the proper fix is to register this sound module in the "glitches" section of the appropriate Kernel driver, and have it swap the channel mappings there. Still working on finding which data structures the output channel maps are stored in -- if anyone here has worked with programming these kernel modules, let me know and I'll dig up where I left off.

Re: Linux is not about choice (2008)

#170
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it conveys relevant information. If you were on version 7 and the new version is version 13, a message is conveyed that there have been several major iterations since your last upgrade. Numerical versioning schemes (in general) make it simple to know if you're on a current version, and if not, how far off you are. Now consider trying to make similar determinations if you know you're running "Gingerbread" but…

The unique names really help with googleability. 'debian 7' will return more chaff than 'debian wheezy'. "Where's the 7 on this site? Oh, it's the forum page number" and so forth. Similarly I can ask a dev in a mixed shop "is wheezy or precise on this" and it's easier than saying "is debian 7 or ubuntu 12.04 on this". Ubuntu numbers are unusually regular and unique, which helps their googleability, but other versioni…

wouldn't searching for

  "debian 7"
with the quote marks fix that issue?
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