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Linux is... by Charles Miller

Just found this by browsing randomly. Very delicious: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/~cmiller/Linux+Is this is a very good summary of the traumatic experience many folks do while being proud of running a cleanly free software.

There are virtues in cleanly free software, and thanks god there are folks that take time to actually endure the woes up-there and that period is over for me since a few years.

The real virtues lie in the realization of the long-term impact of the licensing policies… which has carried a lot of its fruits, e.g. with the realization of the most dominant web-server of the world, or of the biggest collaborative knowledge creation.

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Funny but outdated

Yes, it is funny and was mostly true 5-10 years ago. Modern distributions are very easy to use (most of the time).

Try Ubuntu or Kubuntu for example.

There are still issues with wireless and printing all to often.

Conversely, installing LaTeX on Windows is a pain, while it is very easy on Linux and Mac OSX.

S. Enrico Indiogine Texas A&M University hindiogine@gmail.com http://www.coe.tamu.edu/~enrico

how about plugging a monitor?

One of the most horrible woes I had was with monitors… especially plugging to a video projector. Did this get better?

Also, the need to be root for just about anything, including the choice of network or the ability to burn or shutdown has always made me laugh. Has the MacOSX permission model for devices somehow further propagated as well?

thanks

paul

Linux troubles?

Paul,

Linux was developed as a server OS, thus needing root privileges to shutdown and adding or changing hardware.

However, Ubuntu makes the first normal user have superuser (sudo) privileges automatically. So, with desktops the first user will be the only or principal user and will not have to change to root. The user password is the sudo password.

This can be changed for a server installation or a normal root user can be created during installation.

Video hardware is handled much better now by Linux. However, with “non standard” hardware there are problems because often the hardware manufactures did not release drivers for Linux and they have to be reverse engineered by volunteers.

Also, for really strange hardware or obsolete hardware you have a much better chance of it being recognized than in Windows.

S. Enrico Indiogine Texas A&M University hindiogine@gmail.com http://www.coe.tamu.edu/~enrico