The Briefing Room
General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => Topic started by: Blizzardnh on August 14, 2016, 12:16:46 pm
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Over the years, I've heard some people claim that Linux is finally ready for the masses. I would suggest that outside of a completely locked down OS such as ChromeOS (which is Linux powered), no OS is genuinely ready for the masses. Instead, it has been my experience that the masses should stick to tablets and Chromebooks.
Smartphones make us dumb
I can see how my view of most computer users would seem a bit harsh. But I'd also be the first to point out that using smartphones have made all of us "dumb" in the sense that our complacency is at an all time high. Comparatively speaking, the difference between smartphones and PCs in terms of root access is night and day.
On a computer, running Linux...root is a mere command away from any terminal. With iOS or Android, you must gain access to a deeper level of the phone in order to have this sort of power. It's not nearly as simple and therein lays the comparative difference.
Most people believe their smartphones are completely safe from exploits and other malicious behavior because they have never experienced it on these devices. Mind you, I didn't claim this was a valid point of view. Rather, this is simply a widespread interpretation of how safe smartphones are. These devices also present a minimal learning curve for most people, so there is little to no reason to learn anything new about them.
Excerpt:
http://www.datamation.com/open-source/is-linux-too-dumbed-down.html
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(http://i1185.photobucket.com/albums/z347/ShadowAce1800/Tech_Ping_1.png)
@BikkFire @geronl @Smokin Joe @roamer_1 @Blizzardnh @markomalley
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$99... better than a Pi??
http://www.zdnet.com/article/meet-utilite-new-raspberry-pi-rival/
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Then perhaps a flavor of linux should be released that will make it harder to get to the superuser. Just as the superadministrator account in Windows can be accessed, but is not automatically available.
This could, perhaps, be implemented through an appropriate GUI. I say this because the average retail user will never be able to handle command-line access to an OS and will stick with the GUI. Those that eventually do will have gone through a learning process by having to figure out how to get to the command-line and the additional powers/abilities that unlocks which should make them more aware of the dangers of going superuser.
As far as being ready for RTM, I do think that some of the linux distros are there, or almost there; some of the GUIs are quite impressive.
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They have come a long way from start x
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They have come a long way from start x
That's for sure!
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Just read about your biking accident on TOS - Sure hope you are doing better - Day late and a dollar short, I know, but I hardly go there anymore, and didn't get the ping.
@ShadowAce
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(http://i1185.photobucket.com/albums/z347/ShadowAce1800/Tech_Ping_1.png)
Great to see you here! I was a lurker over at TOS, and I enjoyed coming across your posts.
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Just read about your biking accident on TOS - Sure hope you are doing better - Day late and a dollar short, I know, but I hardly go there anymore, and didn't get the ping.
@roamer_1
Thanks! I'm back at work now--was out of the office for 8 weeks, but I'm down to only one issue left with my injuries.
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The first time I tried linux, about 10 years ago, I got so frustrated - I was coming from a WinXP background - I actually got suspended from an online forum for 4 days for generally nasty behavior (in retrospect, I think the suspension was too gracious by half). I think the big problems were (a) not sufficiently appreciating the differences between the two, such as the file structure, and (b) having no real experience with a real command-line interface because Windows' CMD interface barely qualifies as a real interface, let alone an interface from which real work can be done.
Last year I set up another installation of a recently released version, and was reasonably comfortable with it. I have it running on a homebrew server that I can only access remotely, so I haven't made a lot of use of it, particularly of late since I'm working so much, but I did enjoy it and would be tempted to make it my primary OS if I were using a desktop, particularly one that was a few years old.
I would contribute my more successful second experience to two things:
(a) I am much more proficient with a command-line interface; I've been working extensively with Windows powershell for about 8 years now, and can now do quite a bit from that interface (btw, powershell is much, much more than just an interface; it has access to most of the .NET assemblies in the OS and can effectively be used as a programming language. I have written several programs I used fairly frequently, including one that displays a file in 16-column two-digit hexadecimal format with header numbers and column numbers, one that extracts EXIF data from jpg image files, and one that can parse pdf files up to about version 1.5, extract the text, and display it in a plain text format that is more or less representative of the text as it is displayed in the pdf itself); and
(b) the vast development of the GUIs that now sit on top of linux. In the fullness of time I expect to be able to do just about everything from command-line, however, the GUI is a great way to familiarize yourself with the layout in a very high level view, and in a way that is recognizable to a Windows user, which facilitates the transition process immensely.
Hopefully, when I finally get some more personal time, I'll be able to really learn, and enjoy, linux. I don't think I'll ever get to the level of rolling my own flavor of linux, but I do hope to be able to do everything I do on Windows now, as well as some more extensive programming.
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Our house has three laptops and two desk tops and they all run linux , with one desktop duel booting with win 10. for the rare times we need windows.
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@roamer_1
Thanks! I'm back at work now--was out of the office for 8 weeks, but I'm down to only one issue left with my injuries.
'One issue left' could be good or bad - Hopefully not a serious thing... But one way or the other, I'm pullin for ya, and I hope you're back to square one ASAP.
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@roamer_1
Thanks! I'm back at work now--was out of the office for 8 weeks, but I'm down to only one issue left with my injuries.
Glad to hear you are on the mend.
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Over the years, I've heard some people claim that Linux is finally ready for the masses. I would suggest that outside of a completely locked down OS such as ChromeOS (which is Linux powered), no OS is genuinely ready for the masses. Instead, it has been my experience that the masses should stick to tablets and Chromebooks.
Smartphones make us dumb
I can see how my view of most computer users would seem a bit harsh. But I'd also be the first to point out that using smartphones have made all of us "dumb" in the sense that our complacency is at an all time high. Comparatively speaking, the difference between smartphones and PCs in terms of root access is night and day.
On a computer, running Linux...root is a mere command away from any terminal. With iOS or Android, you must gain access to a deeper level of the phone in order to have this sort of power. It's not nearly as simple and therein lays the comparative difference.
Most people believe their smartphones are completely safe from exploits and other malicious behavior because they have never experienced it on these devices. Mind you, I didn't claim this was a valid point of view. Rather, this is simply a widespread interpretation of how safe smartphones are. These devices also present a minimal learning curve for most people, so there is little to no reason to learn anything new about them.
Excerpt:
http://www.datamation.com/open-source/is-linux-too-dumbed-down.html
My goal is to get where I never have to use a computer again (without going to jail). Not to learn more about the flavor of the month.
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I do unix/linux all day at work on a command line. When linux can easily play Call of Duty and Battlefield, I'll think about it. Until then, it stays in a VM at home.
My sister gave me a laptop that was slow. I deleted the heavily infected Windows Vista and installed Linux Mint Cinnamon. It's is blazingly fast.
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I do unix/linux all day at work on a command line. When linux can easily play Call of Duty and Battlefield, I'll think about it. Until then, it stays in a VM at home.
There are some good games that play on Linux, its just my old Ubuntu machine has 2 gigs of RAM... if it had 8, I'd be playing things like WAR THUNDER on it!
I play War Thunder on this Win 8.1 machine though.
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There are some good games that play on Linux, its just my old Ubuntu machine has 2 gigs of RAM... if it had 8, I'd be playing things like WAR THUNDER on it!
I play War Thunder on this Win 8.1 machine though.
I play on steam and have 2 gig of ram and you are right , more ram is needed
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I play on steam and have 2 gig of ram and you are right , more ram is needed
(http://www.startrek.com/legacy_media/images/200307/scott02/320x240.jpg)
We need more RAM, Captain!
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Fedora is a great user interface for Linux.
I know more about Unix/Linux than I will ever know about Windows. So for me, I live on the command line down in the guts.
But Fedora is pretty good for people who need that windows-ish look-and-feel.
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I play on steam and have 2 gig of ram and you are right , more ram is needed
The same company (from Russia) that does War Thunder also does Star Conflict, a sci-fi game where you fly around shooting other players on the other team.
Apparently Star Conflict is also available on Linux via STEAM
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(a) I am much more proficient with a command-line interface; I've been working extensively with Windows powershell for about 8 years now, and can now do quite a bit from that interface (btw, powershell is much, much more than just an interface; it has access to most of the .NET assemblies in the OS and can effectively be used as a programming language. I have written several programs I used fairly frequently, including one that displays a file in 16-column two-digit hexadecimal format with header numbers and column numbers, one that extracts EXIF data from jpg image files, and one that can parse pdf files up to about version 1.5, extract the text, and display it in a plain text format that is more or less representative of the text as it is displayed in the pdf itself);
Not intending to start any kind of flame war, but in the Linux/Unix world we call that shell scripting, and we've been doing it for at least 20 years. Just saying...
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Fedora is a great user interface for Linux.
Well, Fedora is a distro, not a user interface, but I agree its GUI isn't bad at all. As you say, I never bothered with GUIs on any of the servers or network devices I admined, but for desktop and laptop systems they're quite nice. (I'm on a Linux Mint system at the moment).
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Not intending to start any kind of flame war, but in the Linux/Unix world we call that shell scripting, and we've been doing it for at least 20 years. Just saying...
I wouldn't take it that way. That's the thing about Windows: until Powershell was developed you basically couldn't do scripting worth a hill of beans. CMD was basically useful for setting a few things up to go off at a certain time and doing simple file rename/copy/move/delete chores, but any more sophisticated scripting was out of the question. One of the main developers of Powershell, Bruce Payette, did a really good job in his book Windows Powershell in Action of discussing CMD's deficiencies, how Powershell was designed to fix them, and then how, once they had the bit in their teeth, they took it to the next level. I would tend to consider powershell along the lines of a full-fledged interpreted (as opposed to compiled) programming language, akin, in that conceptual framework, to the old BASIC programming language, that was also interpreted.
And I know that the *nix systems have pretty much had that capacity for ages and ages. I haven't really had the time to get as deep into linux shell scripting as I did with Powershell, but I have the books and etc - I'm still a paper pages kind of person when it comes to learning things - and as/when I have the time I want to work on it.
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http://www.ostechnix.com/how-to-install-windows-powershell-in-linux/
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http://www.ostechnix.com/how-to-install-windows-powershell-in-linux/
Ni-i-i-i-i-i-ce!!!
Just out of curiosity, does the installation come with a full installation of .NET as well, or does that have to be installed directly? Or is this version of Powershell rewritten to access the underlying linux libraries instead?
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http://www.ostechnix.com/how-to-install-windows-powershell-in-linux/
I skimmed that link, and I'm curious--is there any advantage to PowerShell over BASH or csh? In other words, would Linux users who are already familiar with shell scripting get anything new from PowerShell? I can see if experienced Windows PowerShell users wanted to have a familiar interface on non-Windows systems, but is there any benefit for the rest of us?
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I wouldn't take it that way. That's the thing about Windows: until Powershell was developed you basically couldn't do scripting worth a hill of beans. CMD was basically useful for setting a few things up to go off at a certain time and doing simple file rename/copy/move/delete chores, but any more sophisticated scripting was out of the question.
I'll take exception to that - I love the DOS/CMD environment... I am probably to be considered native there. It is a different approach than bash, but that doesn't make that approach invalid.
One of my complaints in learning to live with *nix is the plethora of arcane switches built into the executables - Yes the executables are far more powerful, inevitably, there are many switches in each one that I will never use. But so many options were very hard for me to remember - even to this day, I have to hit the man pages to figure out what I want anything to do.
DOS, and later CMD, are not as robust - that is certainly true. But I find cmd to be more usable on the fly, because I DO know (in my head) it's capabilities. And what grew out of the Win/DOS ecosystem, was a less deliberate, but more facile way - I don't expect the cmd line to do all I want - I write what I want and add that to the basic system. Every DOShead I know has an extensive toy box somewhere on the PATH. Some of those are staples in the DOS community (Schaeffer's WBAT was in my kit from DOS 6 through to XP SP-2) others are custom (I wrote LSTFile.exe specifically as a list processing tool and bang-counter, and like many others, I also wrote an INIFile.exe as a means of accessing, changing, and remembering storable options.)
Now, all that makes for a less portable system - One has to be ever aware of dependencies (and break your batches if they are not found) and there is a big problem keeping up with the OS - I had over 300 batches and executables break over the DOS to NT switch in Win2k, and the same happened again in XP SP-2...
But even with that, I much prefer DOS/CMD. I find powershell to be just as cumbersome as bash is. Maybe that's because my environment is so very customized to the way I do things - It is very personalized to !ME! I prefer that to conforming myself to thinking that I don't naturally define for myself.
So in summary, like I said, I don't think one or the other is superior - They are different, with different mindsets - Somehow, I was able, for all those many years, to work script magic in DOS and CMD to make it do things no one thought it could. Even today, there's a cmd box open at all times - And the tools I write tend to be in the no man's land, with one foot in Windows and the other on the cmdline.
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Not intending to start any kind of flame war, but in the Linux/Unix world we call that shell scripting, and we've been doing it for at least 20 years. Just saying...
Just twenty years? Wow, a noob! :laugh:
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Have tried several Linux distros... my favorite is Linux Mint. Of all the ones I tried, it has all the important features that just worked without extra tweaking or config file editing. You can still do all the command line stuff you want, but for my purposes, don't have a need for that.
My home file server I use as a media center and file storage is running Mint. Sharing was simple to setup and it has been running solid for about 3 months set it up, stuck it in a corner and just pretty much forget about it.
Not trying to pat myself on the back, just sharing what is possible.
I occasionally pickup and fix old computers and give to people who need them. Usually they are old windows xp era computers. Fixed one last month installed Mint, set it to autoupdate and gave it away. I didn't install windows because of the cost. But the person I gave it to, had never used Linux had no idea what it is, and couldn't be happier.
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I wouldn't take it that way. That's the thing about Windows: until Powershell was developed you basically couldn't do scripting worth a hill of beans.
Completely untrue. VBS and wscript was just Windows preferred method of scripting until Powershell came along.
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Have tried several Linux distros... my favorite is Linux Mint. Of all the ones I tried, it has all the important features that just worked without extra tweaking or config file editing. You can still do all the command line stuff you want, but for my purposes, don't have a need for that.
My home file server I use as a media center and file storage is running Mint. Sharing was simple to setup and it has been running solid for about 3 months set it up, stuck it in a corner and just pretty much forget about it.
Not trying to pat myself on the back, just sharing what is possible.
I occasionally pickup and fix old computers and give to people who need them. Usually they are old windows xp era computers. Fixed one last month installed Mint, set it to autoupdate and gave it away. I didn't install windows because of the cost. But the person I gave it to, had never used Linux had no idea what it is, and couldn't be happier.
I tried Linux Mint and did not have a good experience. Drivers were lacking, especially the bluetooth audio drivers. Also had the same problem many LInux distros have with sleep/wake.
Ubuntu is about the only Linux desktop I've used that is adequate.
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I tried Linux Mint and did not have a good experience. Drivers were lacking, especially the bluetooth audio drivers. Also had the same problem many LInux distros have with sleep/wake.
Ubuntu is about the only Linux desktop I've used that is adequate.
did you try Ubuntu Studio? It's more media oriented.
https://ubuntustudio.org/