The Difference Engine: Linux's Achilles heel

[Paddy Landau]

Babbage from The Economist posted an interesting article on Linux, "The Difference Engine: Linux's Achilles heel (http://www.economist.com/node/21012729)".

"Open-source Linux operating systems are becoming less fiddly, but non-geek users should not embrace them yet."

[bash]

"Open-source Linux operating systems are becoming less fiddly, but non-geek users should not embrace them yet."

Statements like these are funny, considering Android is making in-roads left and right. I get more and more the feeling that even self-proclaiming informed users and commentators make the mistake of believing "Linux == traditional desktop distribution".

[Sean Moran]

Thank you for the link to the article Mr Landau.

It is great to read an article on anything by someone who knows how to write, (I loved the duet between "veritable" and "venerable" in the finale), but the content made pretty good sense all the same. However, the correspondent must understand that it is bad form to begin a new sentence with "And" or "But".

Nevertheless, it's been that way for me over most of the past year regarding the purchase of GPRS aircards with readymade Linux drivers, and my friend who can no longer move his arms or legs has found it difficult to move to Linux for lack of drivers for his infra-red sensor that works a lot better at sensing head movements to scatter the mouse cursor than anything I've tried that runs of a plain old web-cam, so I can see the point that the correspondent is making quite clearly.

There will be a tomorrow, but that's been said a few times before.

[handy]

So that guy gets paid to write a column in The Economist.

He's a professional who writes what keeps the editor happy. :popcorn:

[nlsthzn]

I have difficulty with this article... basically Mint blows the socks of off XP, it has just about all drivers installed in the kernel, in XP you are stuffed if you don't get them from the CD that came with the hardware or can get on the net... yet Linux is getting a thumbs down due too lack of driver support from 3rd parties... 5 paragraphs of praise and hype and a conclusion paragraph of doom...

[Lucradia]

I'm sorry, but the Differential Patching System is FAR more efficient than replacing every single file with new ones.

Also, including every single driver makes the disk image more "fat," so to speak, also less efficient.

Also, /move2recurring.

[3Miro]

As of October 2010, Windows accounted for 91% of the market (and rising slightly), Apple’s OS X for 5% (and falling steadily), while all the various Linux distributions combined added up to less than 1% (and going nowhere).

Is my math off, or there is a system (or a family of systems) that account for 3% of the market, which is three times the number for Linux and not too far from Apple? 5 out of 4 people have trouble with fractions.



Fortunately for Linux, black-hat programmers find it simply not worth their time to design viruses and other malware for attacking such a minuscule slice of computerdom. As a result, most Linux users do not even bother to install anti-virus software ...


Ignorance through and through. Linux works on very sensitive machines of large Banks and such, how is that not worth the trouble to attack. The strength of Linux security comes from the approach on fixing the existing issues, no system can be take seriously if it requires third party software to keep it safe.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Antivirus

[koenn]

... an interesting article on Linux, ...
not really.
it's page filler.

plus the guy can hardly be considered an authority, judging by the sort of mistakes he makes, like that nonsense about "the telnet port" and that thing about 'it's not stable, it crashed when I messed with it".

[Evil-Ernie]

Interesting article that shows what Linux and Ubuntu is up against in the media reinforcing the attituide that a non-MS or Apple operating system isn't for the general public but only for a hard-core group of boffins.

Many members of the public are using a Linux based operating system without even knowing it (Android for example) but don't make the connection that it could be good to be used on a day to day desktop or laptop computer.

Personally I believe that its only a matter of time when the penny drops, people with smartphones that can do many things their PC can do will ask the question why. When they realise they can have it for free with lots of software that is useful also free it will become illogical to buy an operating system and the software that goes with it...

[Paddy Landau]

My friend converted to Ubuntu about a year ago (dual-boot), and he's never bothered to boot into Windows. When his computer died, he wasn't interested in getting a Windows computer. As he's definitely not computer-literate, it shows that you don't need to be a geek.


When they realise they can have it for free with lots of software that is useful also free it will become illogical to buy an operating system and the software that goes with it...
You have underestimated the power of fear of change. People won't change; because they're scared to change.

[Sean Moran]

You have underestimated the power of fear of change. People won't change; because they're scared to change.


That's true mate. What I saw in the article was just a few little things that adhere to the correspondent's writings, in my own trials with aircards and helping my friend with his infra-red problems. These are not the usual sorts of dilemmas, but I both see the point about the ease of obscure and rarely needed drivers for XP, as well as the simplicity that Ubuntu brings to getting your hardware to dance, in most cases.

[matt_symes]

Hi

Taken from wikipedia admittedly but it shows a completely different set of server figures _with sources_. Where were his sources? Where did he get his numbers from?

servers half way down

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems

The article really says nothing.

And as 3miro espoused, his grasp of basic mathematics really does seem rather poor.

Kind regards

[3Miro]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems


This is even more frustrating. The wiki article has about 7-8% unaccounted for. Windows comes to 83%, which IMO is too low, so 7-8% would probably be mostly windows, however, this number is way too big to be placed on my hunch. One would actually expect for the total number (when you add all percentages) to be slightly higher than 100% if they count the dual-boot machines twice.

They should just come out and say:

We cannot cannot accurately count the windows machines. Probably because of the piracy.
We cannot count the Linux machines, because this is like herding cats.
Maybe we can somewhat count the Apple machines, since there is strong tie between hardware and software. Then again, there is pirated MacOSX as well as Linux and Windows on Apple machines.
For that matter, they probably cannot even count the total number of machines, laptops maybe, but there are way too many people building their own desktops, so how do you count that?

They should stop counting meaningless statistics, it just makes them look bad and they are just confusing people that don't bother to count.

[matt_symes]

Hi

3miro Exactly :)

Maybe you cant blame Canonical for Ubuntu phoning home?

Kind regards

[Mark Phelps]

I just read the article today and basically, if you quit squabbling about minor details like adding up percentage points, the guy is basically correct about fear of change being a major detriment to greatly expanding Linux usage on the desktop.

I've gone through this personally because I maintain an army of machines for my family and friends, and a while back, I set most of them up with dual-boot between XP and Ubuntu.

In ALL cases, everyone chose to stay with XP. Why? Because (1) they were used to how the XP apps worked and did not want to learn anything new, and (2) saw no advantage to what they were doing by switching over to Linux.

Like it or not, there IS a learning curve when switching over to a Linux distro -- the different ones presenting different curves. Unless folks are adventuresome, they generally see no point in climbing that curve.

[Evil-Ernie]

I just read the article today and basically, if you quit squabbling about minor details like adding up percentage points

Strongly disagree here, the facts are wrong and it builds a misleading picture. If it was a minor detail then thats fine but the figures are wrong.



Like it or not, there IS a learning curve when switching over to a Linux distro -- the different ones presenting different curves. Unless folks are adventuresome, they generally see no point in climbing that curve.

Strongly agree on this, it isn't that easy otherwise Linux and Ubuntu would be much more popular than it is. The motto (which I've used before here) to give people who haven't sampled Open Source yet is 'Fear Not Change', when somebody sees it isn't that hard but just a bit of learning curve and the benefits of it they will make up their own minds :)

[MarcusW]

Is it only me who thinks a lot of it points toward him not knowing anything about Linux?

Linux is faster than XP because of smaller "kernel"? Telnet port open? It's never been open for me, I sure haven't touched it.

[3Miro]

if you quit squabbling about minor details like adding up percentage points ...

He is trying to present "facts" on the current situation of the computer market and he totally fails. Also, he has an entire section about viruses, which shows complete ignorance on the subject. How is that minor?

Is fear of change a problem? Yes it is. However, articles that spread bogus information are only making things worse.

[juancarlospaco]

These guy is a PRO, he get payed for writing a pointless wall of text,
you people have to work +8 hours per day, jealous, thats it. ;)

[cyberphrog]

I too have fielded a number of linux machines for family members, using windows pc's that were old and virus-loaded. So far they love ubuntu and miss windows very little/ not at all. Ubuntu is also very easy to load/operate/maintain, even for non-technical type. Even my elderly mother-in-law is able to run updates and do basic trouble shooting on her own with ubuntu.

[marshmallow1304]

Ugh.


...a number of proprietary software packages (normally a big no-no in Linuxland), such as the MP3 decoder for playing music...
Nope (http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/fluendo-mp3-decoder/). Also this (http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/).


Indeed, it has a gaping hole caused by leaving its “telnet port” open for all and sundry to enter.
lolwut? Doesn't matter if nothing's listening on the port.

Ubuntu:


# aptitude search telnet
p inetutils-telnetd - telnet server
p telnetd - The telnet server
p telnetd-ssl - The telnet server with SSL encryption support

Gentoo:


# emerge --search telnet

* net-misc/netkit-telnetd
Latest version available: 0.17-r6
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of files: 155 kB
Homepage: ftp://ftp.uk.linux.org/pub/linux/Networking/netkit/
Description: Standard Linux telnet client and server
License: BSD

* net-misc/telnet-bsd
Latest version available: 1.2-r1
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of files: 189 kB
Homepage: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/kukuk/ipv6/
Description: Telnet and telnetd ported from OpenBSD with IPv6 support
License: BSD

[t0p]

This "Achilles' heel" business really makes me mad. Like Superman and Kryptonite. Why can't people just be invulnerable? It'd make comic books much easier to read.

[linuxforartists]

This quote jumped out at me:

"Ubuntu is more concerned with being true to the open-source ideal."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought one of Ubuntu's defining characteristics was trying to make Linux to be more mainstream and user-friendly. A big part of that was making it easier to install proprietary codecs, a departure from the FOSS philosophy.

Here's an old article: Ubuntu and its leaders set sights on the mainstream (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html) (New York Times)

I wonder if the Economist writer got Ubuntu confused with Debian? That would make sense, since that's what Ubuntu was based on.

[NCLI]

This quote jumped out at me:

"Ubuntu is more concerned with being true to the open-source ideal."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought one of Ubuntu's defining characteristics was trying to make Linux to be more mainstream and user-friendly. A big part of that was making it easier to install proprietary codecs, a departure from the FOSS philosophy.

Here's an old article: Ubuntu and its leaders set sights on the mainstream (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html) (New York Times)

I wonder if the Economist writer got Ubuntu confused with Debian? That would make sense, since that's what Ubuntu was based on.
It is. I think the only reason more blobs aren't installed by default in Ubuntu is because Canonical is afraid of getting sued. Linux Mint, being way smaller, can get away with it, but not Canonical.

[Shining Arcanine]

Babbage from The Economist posted an interesting article on Linux, "The Difference Engine: Linux's Achilles heel (http://www.economist.com/node/21012729)".

"Open-source Linux operating systems are becoming less fiddly, but non-geek users should not embrace them yet."

The article claims that Linux has a telnet port open. Linux is a kernel and no modern desktop distribution based on it has telnet running by default. I stopped reading at that point.

[Lucradia]

Nope (http://lame.sourceforge.net/)

Lame is an encoder, you quoted "decoding." Totem, Parole (gstreamer software), etc. can't use lame to play MP3s.

[Chronon]

Lame is an encoder, you quoted "decoding." Totem, Parole (gstreamer software), etc. can't use lame to play MP3s.

True, should have referenced MAD or another decoder instead.

[marshmallow1304]

Lame is an encoder, you quoted "decoding." Totem, Parole (gstreamer software), etc. can't use lame to play MP3s.

Right you are. Fixed.