The Marriage of Microsoft and Linux

Skybird · 09-28-16, 04:42 AM

I just would wish that after two decades any Linux GUI finally would decide to go all the way instead of stoppig halfway, turn to the side and disappear between the bushes and trees, leaving the ordinary user behind and alone.

Cinnamon/Mint is probably the most advanced GUI for Linux - but even this can have you ending up with a need to face Terminal quite easily.

And if you are no holy priest, you do not find the entrance to this "temple" then. You end up pöaste-andcopying magicla spoeels you get form others without you knowing what you are doing there, and why. And you can end up in even deeper trouble that way.

This way, every user who was just a user under Windows, again needs to bcome a professional insider like 30 years ago. This expectation is unrealistic. In business. Amongst most gamers. In private households.

I think this is the one most dominant reason that will prevent Linux for another 20 years to keep up with Windows, Android, iOS. I mean since 20 years I get told how great Linux is and that it is about to take over. But the market share it has with users still is clearly below the 2% mark.

Instead of always breaking loose another fork and an other variation, developers should really consider to sit together and work on going all the way. It would be a first under Linux. But as long as Terminal - or however the CLI is called in different Linux derivates - becomes a necessity to use it so often and easily as it now is the case - and I say that after beign with Linux for almost tne months now - , as long I see no realistic chance that Linux will taske major shares from Windows. Peoiple will or will not turn away from Windiws, due to the W10 mess. But for the most they will not move to Linux. They move towards Android, Chrome and iOS.

Don't get me wrong, I am still with Linux and like it, and recommend to switch Windows PCs to Linux. But i do not ignore the problems that also are there. Its not all rosy in Linux land.

BarracudaUAK · 10-04-16, 05:13 AM

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Originally Posted by BarracudaUAK

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P.S. I forgot to mention this but, LINUX is the Kernel, it is the "Command Line". The GUI is built on top of that, so unless the 'Desktop' has gone through and made a Graphical interface for each and every program running on Linux, then some things will REQUIRE the use of the CL.
Depending on how they interface with the desktop and program, they might not work with all desktops.
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Quote:

Originally Posted by Skybird

I just would wish that after two decades any Linux GUI finally would decide to go all the way instead of stoppig halfway, turn to the side and disappear between the bushes and trees, leaving the ordinary user behind and alone.

Cinnamon/Mint is probably the most advanced GUI for Linux - but even this can have you ending up with a need to face Terminal quite easily.
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Skybird,

I can sympathize with your feelings on this, however I feel I should bring something to your attention.

In Linux, work is never duplicated. You do not need to re-code something that has already been coded.

Think of it similar to Windows using dotnet, for example.
Let's take S3D as our example program. In order to run S3D, we need to have dotnet 2.0 installed. Why? Because some of the code necessary to allow S3D to do what it does, is contained in dotnet, and this is referenced by S3D.

This allows S3D, and other programs to all access the same "code" and therefore be smaller.
Let's assume we make some new mod tools for the SH series.
We will call them:
Silent Hunter Editor, "SH-E" for Silent Hunter,
SH-E2, for Silent Hunter 2,
and so-on and so forth, so we have SH-E, SH-E2, SH-E3, SH-E4, and lastly, SH-E5.

Now if we assume that the base code is 10MB, and the databases for each game is 10MB, and the graphical interface is 5MB each.

Then each editor comes to 25MB. If we have all 5 installed, then we have 125MB of hard drive space used...

Now if we use a common "base", 10MB, and we use a common graphical interface, which includes all variations, it would be larger, about 7.5MB.

So to RUN, and USE, the editors, we have only used 17.5MB of space on the drive.
Now we have 50MB of database files, 10 for each of the 5 editors.

10MB base files,
7.5MB GUI files,
+50MB database files,
67.5MB total.

So we have just saved 57.5MB of hard drive space by NOT duplicating work.
This is what Linux does from the kernel all the way down to the widgets on your desktop telling you how much RAM you have used.

This is why MANY things in Linux do not have a GUI version. At most it will be a Graphical "front-end" for the non-graphical "back-end" program.

Check the update/install program for your distro, it probably has graphical interfaces for command line programs. Fedora has MANY of them listed. I'm sure Ubuntu/Mint will as well.

One of my biggest complaints with all windows versions, was that for a little bit of "polish" the install size jumped, for example 300MB for Win98, to ~2GB for WinXP.

When you install a new program from the package manager (forget what it is in Cinamon), notice that it tells you what "dependancies" that the program has. And asks for permission to install these.
The 'dependancies' are because the program lacks the data.

Best example I can give is this: I installed a server version of Fedora 24. No GUI, but I needed to keep the RAID 0 intact so I could copy the files to another drive.
so I installed KDE, and then tried to run it.
This FAILED MISERABLY.

Why? Because I forgot to install "X" so KDE has something to actually draw the GUI with.

This is why RR mentioned in one of the threads around here, that in a few seconds he can swap desktops.

"X" takes care of the "how to draw", the desktop takes care of the "what to draw".
No duplicating. Much less "mess".

Barracuda

P.S. As far as the need to be an expert on using Linux... Look at the bright side, learning new things help keep "some-timers" from turning into "old-timers" and eventually "all-timers"!

Skybird · 10-05-16, 05:30 AM

Your explanation depicts, in more detail, what I already believed to have understood. And I cannot argue with it. However, using Cinnamon, which is probbaly the most advanced Linux GUI out there, my point was slightly different. That is that if you come to Linux, and use Mint and Cinnamon, you may get greeted by this GUI and think "Oh, nice, easy, all is easy going", but that all too easily oyu may run into issues, problems, things you want or need to do, where you enter ground no longer covered by this GUI. Then its Terminal time. And that is a problem. Most users do not want to understand - thus: learn and study - DOS just to operate Windows. And it should not even be expected and needed that ordinary users have such deep-rooting knowledge - and learning a CLI language and syntax IS studying.

You do not want to need to become a mechanic just to drive your car. You want to be a driver, not a mechanic. A user, and most of us: just that, not more.

And I think here is the reason, one of the two major reasons (the other is software comoatability and the dominance Windows has here), why Linux never really got out of the starting block when comeeting against Windows for private end users market shares.

Finally, I am quite good at Windows, status version 7, now. But this knoweldge and experience got colected over almost two decades of using it, and for sim-tuning doing quite some non-rutine background tweaking. You cnanot learn such things from a book, reading it once and then you are there. Its more an experience than learning thing. Or learning by doing. A good modern OS-GUI should cut that short. Thats why many of us find it unproblematic to switch to iOS, to Android. We get a device, and intuitively navigate the unknwon waters and learn how things are to be done.

That is possible with Linux only as far as the GUI guides you. And when the GUI's reahc end, then you are all of a sudden in pitch-black darkness. Like Windows 95 22 years ago, which had a fully-fledged CLI-based DOS-interface still installed. And remmeber: back then Windows was in a state so that DOS still was needed not rarely. Not to mention that it did many things much faster.

Moonlight · 10-05-16, 02:38 PM

This^ is what is putting me off Linux cinnamon, I started with ms dos and upgraded to win 95 and now I'm using win 7, I'm not going to take a step backwards and re-learn console commands all over again.
When this Win7 operating system has reached its sell by date my time on the internet will be over, it was great while it lasted but MS has stepped over the line with Win 10 and its privacy data theft, goodbye Microsoft and good riddance.
ML

Rockin Robbins · 10-05-16, 06:59 PM

I hate to burst everyone's bubble, but there is plenty of ground that is not covered by Windows GUI. We'll get to that in a minute.

But first, Linux Mint is not a GUI. Linux Mint can use the entire family of GUIs that any Linux can use. Mint was the first Ubuntu derivative to use the MATE desktop, and MATE is nothing but an implementation of something that resembles the GNOME 2 desktop as faithfully as it can. It is NOT advanced, it is a 2006 GUI. It is built on the precept of organizing an operating system by the use of a menu tree. It works very well, but not better than LXDE or GNOME 2 or Lubuntu or XFCE or Cinnamon, all adaptations of the original GNOME 2 concept: menu based operating systems. They work well. They are not advanced. They are old fashioned and I like 'em that way.

If you want an advanced system you want KDE Plasma. Now THAT's an advanced GUI. It looks incredible. It works well, although there's a little paradigm warp you have to get your brain to conform to. When someone sees you running a computer with KDE Plasma they say WOW! What's that? KDE might be ahead of the curve right now with wow factor actually ahead of its efficiency but who cares?

GNOME 3 is also a beautiful GUI, set up like a smart phone before there ever WERE smart phones. Fabulous looking icons, lots of sorting and filtering options: it is what Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 copied just enough to be barely functional about and twice as much again. GNOME 3 is what Windows wants to be when and if it grows up.

Then there's Canonical's Unity, the GUI that everybody loved to hate. Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, and they wanted a GUI all their own, which no Linux distro really has or had. And when it first came out it was an ugly unmitigated disaster. That's where Mint, Peppermint, Elementary OS and a host of other Ubuntu derivatives came from: Unity hate. But you can install any GUI in Ubuntu, so who cares?

Why have a lesser derivative, like Mint, when you can have the much better supported Ubuntu and install the GUI of your choice. Mint without the Ubuntu repositories is trash. What makes the Ubuntu derivatives great is their ability to use the Ubuntu and Debian repositories, the largest, most comprehensive and best policed and maintained software repositories in the world.

So Ubuntu chooses the Nautilus file manager. KDE in any distribution normally uses Dolphin. LXDE uses the PCMan File Manager. OpenBox uses Thunar. I like 'em all. There are lots of them and people define their Linux distribution partly by which file manager they picked. Who cares? I can use any file manager in any distribution!

Same with web browser, text editor, screen compositor, sound system, every aspect of the operating system is just a software choice. You are ALWAYS free to make your own choices. Linux is all about freedom to make choices and that makes arguments about which distribution you run a bit silly.

But let's blow the lid off Windows GUI being all inclusive. It is no more inclusive than Linux GUIs and maybe less so. Lets take something as simple as copying a directory tree. Windows falls down and can't get up. I was copying a directory tree for a Minecraft save from Windows to Ubuntu with Windows Explorer. The tree goes dozens of layers deep and has dozens of files per directory. Windows file manager takes many hours to copy about 40 megabytes because it chokes on the directory tree. The only solution is either to boot up Linux or go the the command window and do an xcopy function from the command line. What takes many hours in Windows happens in fifteen minutes from the command line.

That's only a simple example. Most registration changes are command line operations that can't be done from the GUI. At best you make your script in Notebook and then execute the script on the command line. This fantasy that Windows GUI is all inclusive is just silly. Can you write a GUI shell for anything you want to do on the command line? Sure. For Windows and Linux that is true.

But at least in Linux, there is an underlying process that can be understood and manipulated. You aren't stuck using an opaque GUI that gives you no idea what is going on. Let me illustrate.

A friend of mine at work brought in his laptop with Windows 7 on it. It was slow as can be and he was about to drop it off a cliff but cliffs are illegal in Florida so he brought it to me. I asked him what he did with the computer and when he said browsed the web, listened to music, e-mail and forums I told him he was a perfect candidate for Linux.

So I wiped his system clean, divided it in two and gave him an Ubuntu/Windows dual installation with GRUB bootup to choose between the two operating systems. First boot into Ubuntu. Ubuntu tells you in text on screen every step it does during the boot process and the first line told all: Computer running too hot, throttling CPU. Bingo! His computer didn't run slow because it was full of malware, it was running hot and the CPU was protecting itself! Windows didn't say crap about it. To be fair, we could have installed software that would have sniffed that one out.

But Ubuntu told him before the operating system was even started! It was as simple matter to double the speed of his machine. He was totally sold on Linux in 20 seconds, on the first boot before the operating system was even running.

Why? The command line, which is always underpinning whatever GUI you are running. Windows ran from that and we can trace the atrophy of Windows from the elimination of DOS. When somebody brings a Windows computer to me with problems the first thing I do is plug in a Linux Live CD and find out what the story is. It's that superior.

With Windows you run the aptly named Wizard and it works or not. With Linux you run the diagnostic/repair program and it tells you what is wrong, what it proposes to do and you choose. Windows System Repair disk is a cruel joke that keeps you in the dark and feeds you stuff that comes out the back end of cows. "The system may reboot several times while the repair is in process. If the repair works you can restart your system normally after that." And you'll never know the first thing the repair routine tried to do so you can figure out something else if it doesn't work. That because it is the GUI which is the black box, not the command line. You are afraid of the wrong thing.

BarracudaUAK · 10-06-16, 02:06 AM

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