Re: Giving up on Linux...

xyzzy@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Sunday 22 February 2004 1:05 pm, Paul wrote:

Hi,

I could try the 2.6 kernel (and I have a LOT of experience with
computers), but what's the use? The 2.6 kernel is not ready for
prime-time, not by a long shot, and neither, it seems, is Linux in
general.

Correction. The 2.6.x kernels are ready prime-time. They are far faster
and far more efficient than the 2.4.x kernels and support a far larger
range of devices. It has two very large advantages over anything MS can
offer - one is that it's stable and the second is that it's secure.

I have seen too many bugs and posts on these topics about
SMP/hyperthread/ACPI and other issues that cause the system to lock up
after a time of running or not run at all and no fixes seem to be in
sight - maybe because these problems are intractable without inside
information about ACPI and other things that Intel will give to Microsoft
but not to Open Source developers.

Have you ever thought that people don't complain about MS products for
two reasons - the first is they know it gets sent to /dev/null and
secondly they don't know who to send reports to?

I'll agree with this up to a point. M$ DOES listen in its own fashion, otherwise there wouldn't be any updates.

The big advantage with open source is that the developers listen.

Ok, they listen. Where are the fixes for the latest hardware?

And you expect fixes yesterday???????

This OS/application package called Linux gets fixes far faster than any single OS or application package in the proprietary world.

One of the biggest problems with fixes, as I am sure you know, is the fact that hardware manufacturers are not making the specifications/features of their products readily available to the open source community. This is changing as the use of open source has increased and the vendors are starting to see the advantages of providing needed information to allow software developers to use the hardware as it was designed.

Use your voice and $ to influence the hardware vendors to assist and you will see even faster development on the open source arena.

Intel is a big supporter both financially and materially of the open
source sector. They've even revealed stuff about the centrino processor
which has been kept from MS due to the way Windows works there is little
or no point telling them about as they won't be able to make use of the
technology.

Maybe Redhat just doesn't care. Who knows?

If they didn't care, do you think that those of us using the test
version would take the time to report the problems?

Again, where are the fixes?

I pity the average user that tries to install and run Linux on their
latest hardware. If I, as an experienced software engineer, throw up my
hands, what would a relative newbie who just needs the system to work do?

I bought a brand spanking new, only released onto the UK market last
Monday motherboard which comes with EIDE, RAID, S-ATA and a pile of
other stuff on. Made by AOpen (not exactly God's gift to motherboards,
infact, I wouldn't normally touch them with a dirty barge pole!).
Whacked on the memory, a new P4 (2.8GHz), network and Soundblaster 5.1
(with the front panel). Attached the CDRW, DVD-RW and DVD, Zip, SCSI
card and all the other stuff I had in the old machine, plonked in the
Fedora CDs and an hour later, I had a fully working machine.

I have real problems seeing how Linux is going to make it to the desktop
by 2005 with these kinds of road-blocks.

It is sadder that people think WinXP offers anything more than constant
headaches, broken software and an uncaring despot on the throan.

Religious propaganda aside, the pragmatic bottom line is that for my hardware, WinXP DOES offer a working system out of the box. Linux is what is giving me headaches and broken software. As for uncaring despots, again, where are the fixes? Where are the lines in Bugzilla that say "Fixed in kernel version such and such"??

What I am trying to say here is THIS is the stranglehold that M$ has on the desktop market; i.e., they are able to come out with an O/S that boots off of the install CD, installs, and WORKS (however lousily). Until these problems are addressed and Linux is able to work like this and to react with alacrity to state-of-the-art hardware, it will remain a desktop hobbyist/hacker toy and server software that runs on year-old hardware.

TTFN

Paul