Posted on 10/15/2014 4:21:30 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Since its inception, there has always been a base level of friction within the Linux community.
For the most part, this friction has led to new ideas that have provided ease of use and in some instances, improved functionality. Distros such as Ubuntu best showcase this example, despite the grief it gets from parts of the Linux community. Digging deeper beyond the surface, however, some of this friction has proven to be more divisive than productive.
One of the most divisive situations I've seen in the Linux space is how proprietary code within the Linux space is viewed. For someone like Richard Stallman, there is no debate. His view is that Linux (or GNU/Linux) must be free of any proprietary code and anything that is misaligned with the GNU philosophy.
On the opposite side, Linus Torvalds believes in the "best tool for the job" philosophy. Linus points out that his desire to use open source software comes from his need to sometimes tweak an application to better suit his needs. Linus cares about the end result of the software provided, whereas Richard cares about the perceived ethics of software. Sometimes this leads to the two men using the same tools, yet they are using them for very different reasons.
Where does this leave the casual user? While this point will undoubtedly be disputed, I believe most people use Linux on the desktop for reasons closer to what Linus finds to be worthwhile. Yes, there are ample folks who feel the same way as Richard Stallman, but in the end, I believe most people see Linux as a layer that enables us to "do stuff" and get work done on our computers. I myself fall into this camp.
In my eyes, both men have made significant contributions to getting an alternative to Microsoft and Apple software to the end users. But in recent years, Linus' contributions appear to be having a far greater impact for those of us looking to simply get stuff done. Richard, by contrast, contributes these days by sharing his vision as to the dangers of relying on anything to do with DRM and proprietary software.
As to who's contribution is more important? That's a question that can't be answered for everyone in the Linux community as a whole. But instead, something that would require each one of us to reflect on at a personal level.
Over the past few years, the debate has largely grown around practical areas surrounding the Linux desktop. One of my personal favorites is whether or not PulseAudio was a good idea or even needed.
Most people I have spoken to on the matter dislike it and claim it doesn't work right. Others still, myself included, have found it to be rock-solid stable in its recent releases and prefer the granular sound card control it provides. Going further, I have experienced nothing but success using multiple devices with PulseAudio. With it, I can finally enjoy diverse audio destination options to the devices of my choosing, without opening up a text editor.
To be fair, I have seen first hand how others have had legitimate problems using the PulseAudio server. So I would be remiss if I didn't address this head on. There have been instances where PulseAudio fails to capture, say, a line-in device despite showing up correctly under the ALSA mixer. Honestly, most of the time this is a toggle on/off issue that is left to something not GUI-based to trigger.
Does stuff like this fall directly onto PulseAudio? If you've been struggling with it for hours, I can see how it might feel that way. But in reality, PulseAudio remains the king for advanced audio routing. That's not just my opinion, it's based on years of recording, playing and enjoying audio on my Linux boxes.
The next Linux debate involves video and, more specifically, video drivers. To date, there are still those who believe that open source video drivers are good enough for most purposes. Excluding gaming, I would whole heartily agree that most PCs will run Linux applications just fine using open source video drivers.
Where things in this space begin to break down is when we talk about gaming. Factually, proprietary video drivers outshine those of the open source variety in providing a vastly superior level of video game performance. In years past, this wasn't really a big deal until Linux gaming received a serious shot in the arm from the Valve Corporation. Once Valve brought Steam onto the Linux platform, an already heated debate about Linux gaming became a whole lot louder.
My view of this issue is this: if you don't play video games under Linux, you're free to use the open source video driver without issue. On my writing rig, I'm connected to a dual monitors and happen to be using the AMD compatible open source driver. Thanks to my desktop environment's display configuration GUI, I was able to do this quite easily.
So what about users concerned about gaming and using the proprietary driver for your video card? Are you working for the enemy and feel like you're pushing back Linux goodness into the dark ages?
In my opinion, no, that is just silly. The fact is, you'd be installing the proprietary driver by choice and are free to uninstall it at any time should your conscience get the best of you. No one is making anyone game or use proprietary code.
Is Linus setting a bad example? No, I'm not talking about one of his rants or flipping off video card vendors. I'm alluding to the fact that he doesn't throw a fit over distributions providing binary blobs to their distributions. These distributions date back to Linspire and this practice is still being used today with Ubuntu (among others). The trade off is you accept that your hardware device receives the firmware support it needs in exchange for overlooking the fact that the firmware is proprietary in nature.
From a practical point of view, this means you end up with a working network device, or whatever the device may be. Unfortunately, from an idealistic point of view, this is a slap in the face to the Free Software movement set forth by Richard Stallman. The repeating theme you'll see popping up again and again is principles vs practicality. Neither idea is more important than the other, since in my opinion running proprietary code isn't killing anything or dropping planes from the sky. But both sides have validity.
No matter how much I might wish we as a community might put aside angry factions pitting folks against a desktop environment, a sound server, or the inclusion of proprietary code, arguments remain. The one thing we as a community can do is to push forth the positive.
Do you think that Steam coming to Linux is awesome, and find the idea of being able to Skype friends within Linux to be awesome? Great, spend your time promoting the joy it brings, instead of blogging how backward-thinking FoSS advocates can be.
The same must be said of FoSS advocates who think that trademarks and proprietary code users should be faulted for preferring a different desktop experience than you. Instead, share your positive experiences using a "Libre" desktop and support those who make that happen.
If we as a collective Linux community did a bit more of the positive and a little less of the berating of one another, our Linux enthusiast community would be a whole lot more welcoming to newcomers. Because if there is one thing I see in my inbox every single day, it's another blog post from some "figurehead" making a big deal about something most Linux users honestly don't have a stake in.
That last statement might seem a bit extreme, but to be honest, I for one am tired of the ongoing bickering about stuff that the community will decide the fate of anyway. Trust the community's vision and let's begin quelling the divisive nature of the desktop Linux community.
Things are fine the way they are. The Stallman people can sweat, providing free, open drivers and software. They also provide needed workarounds for some of the more egregious DRM issues. The “best tool” folks will actually use the system for more than a toy or development tool.
The fact is that the best of the “open” products are building on ideas and presentations that are or were proprietary. Of course, all of these open people who aren’t using dumb terminals are relying on non-open code in the hardware devices themselves, unless they are using and old Qume daisy wheel printer or some such.
However, I also see the open-source-only crowd as being the alpha developers/testers for better software down the road.
One thing the author mentions only in passing but I think is very important to remember is this. Most people don’t use Linux. They use their computer to get things done. Sure, Windows is the “default” for most systems so users have to make a conscious choice and expend a little effort to become Linux users. But almost nobody is thinking “I’m going to go play with Mint, or Ubuntu, or Red Hat today.” No, they are thinking, I want to check my email, drop in on Free Republic, look for some funny fail videos, find a good recipe for... The OSes job is to facilitate the applications that make those things happen. All the debates over technical and legal issues are just noise to the users. They just want to get stuff done.
Agreed. It’s a lot like arguments over the best car. Every make has its fans, but in the end, most people just want to go to work or run errands.
I use Mint at home. I'll admit I chose Linux years ago for 3 main reasons. One is simply cost. Two is that I'm less likely to get viruses and malware. (still have to be careful) Three is that for a given set of tasks or usage pattern I need far less hardware. (a cast-off computer has been working for me for years)
I'm glad there are people out there worrying about the lineage of my audio drivers. But day in and day out, I don't care.
An example: My current gig is support of a pretty good sized DNS environment for a large corporation. Monday I was given a list of DNS records, and asked to find out the number of times they'd been requested in DNS recently. They wanted the numbers for about a weeks worth of time. I have querylogging enabled on my servers so I can look at some stuff that helps me troubleshoot issues. The servers generate more than 5 GB of data per day as raw text.
I already have some scripts that go get the logs and store them on a centralized system and do some preliminary processing on them so I can know what names are being looked up most, and what systems are doing the most requests. The script produces a list of the top 20 records requested for each DNS server, and the top 20 requesters. What worked for me in this instance, is that I leave the intermediate files that are generated during this processing since they only take up about 100 M as compared to the original 5GB of data. These intermediate files consist of one line per record with a count of how many times that particular name was looked up.
I wrote an additional script that would take a list of records from a text file look at multiple days of data for those records, and add up the number of hits for each record, and output the result. Further, I was able to split out queries to internal and external queries into separate columns.
The end result was after some tweaking, the next time I'm asked for this type of information, I can take the list, feed it into my script, and have as a result a CSV that can be fed directly into a spreadsheet and sifted/sorted to your hearts content.
All of this was done using standard unix tools of grep,sed,awk,and perl in a manner that gives me a new reusable tool to get information management and our technical wants in a timely basis.
I've asked for this kind of information from the folks who support the AD/DNS servers for some internal domains, but the most I've ever been able to get from them is raw logs, which I then proceeded to slice and dice using slight tweeks to my older stats generating scripts because of formatting differences. I'm told that there is some utility in microsoft's "powershell", but I've not seen it used in the way I use scripts.
Some might say that work is different from home use. That's true enough, but I used very similar methods recently when I wanted to know how much disk space my audio files on my desktop were taking up. Yeah, I could have gone into the file manager and right-clicked on the directory and had it tell me how much space was consumed, but that wouldn't have broken it out into separate counts for mp3,flac, and ogg files, which was information I was also interested in.
I know there are Silverlight alternatives out there, like Moonlight or Mono but nothing seems to work for me. Is there anything else I am missing?
Hmm.. Not sure—what are you trying to run? I got mono to work for me for one app. Don’t have anything running moonlight.
Pipeline!
I found something called Pipeline and it is working!
Pipelight!
I found something called Pipelight and it is working!
Pipelight works. The cable company allows streaming online of all channels but it used Silverlight. Pipelight works.
...............
Google Chrome users can now use Netflix streaming btw
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/10/psa-netflix-ubuntu-now-working-box
not Chromium, just Google Chrome...
Thought this might interest you.
The Linux community, or many in it, have such a distaste for Microsoft (and Apple to a lesser degree) that it is funny. That is a “friction” in many Linux “communities” that the author left out. Stop the hate!
There is a lot of hating on “systemd” these days.
Yes there is. LOL! I can see both sides of that argument, though.
Very cool story. As an old prof of mine used to say - tools that allow real people to do real work.
Historically Perl was invented for exactly this sort of task. Nowadays, I’d probably choose Python but for projects of this size and scope you could probably flip a coin. Perl might be a bit faster, Python would certainly be more readable, and has a slightly better story as fall as objects and functions and extensibility with libaries.
Very cool story. As an old prof of mine used to say - tools that allow real people to do real work.
Historically Perl was invented for exactly this sort of task. Nowadays, I’d probably choose Python but for projects of this size and scope you could probably flip a coin. Perl might be a bit faster, Python would certainly be more readable, and has a slightly better story as fall as objects and functions and extensibility with libaries.
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