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Re: [News] "Linux is suitable for over 90% of the enterprise desktop"

Once upon a midnight dreary, while The Ghost In The Machine pondered weak
and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore...:

> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Roy Schestowitz
> <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>  wrote
> on Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:45:46 +0100
> <4943247.2B4FPLPhgA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> Is Linux ready for the workplace?
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | I now state that I believe Linux is suitable for over 90% of the
>> | enterprise desktop and I challenge you to give me any valid, validated,
>> | reasoned and thoughtful proof to enable me to retract my statement.
>> `----
>>
>>
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/linux/locutus/archives/is-linux-ready-for-the-workplace-11112
> 
> Define "ready".  Using a computer is a two-way
> communications exercise -- the user versus that darned box.
> Depending on expertise of the user, Linux might very well
> be more than ready, if one can put up with various issues
> such as slower invokes of OpenOffice (this is probably
> because Microsoft cheats but I'll admit I've not researched
> the issue) and slower reads (ditto).

For me, speed isn't an issue. My slowest workstation is a 1.4GHz Via. If
that isn't fast enough for most people to type in a document, then it's
time for them to remortgage and fork out for an UltraSPARC.

> The comparative 
> safety, however, is a big plus,

Absolutely. No viruses, no vendor-written scumware (read: WGA); massive and
constant peer review of the source code ensures that this status quo is
maintained. Good stuff.

> and while corporations 
> utilizing open source files won't realize it immediately,
> the ability to read archived data might save someone's
> bacon some years down the road, as that old document
> suddenly is important again.
> 

That, I think, is less to do with choice of userland apps and more to do
with the in-house backup policy.

> It's a competitive space for office use.  In a more
> sophisticated area such as software development, it depends
> on the user's expertise; a Visual Basic developer might
> have problems (no VB on Linux, after all -- Gambas might
> fill a void for some) but most Eclipse users probably
> wouldn't be overly concerned, and in fact Linux brings
> some advantages to the environment, mostly because of
> symbolic links.
> 

Python
C
Java
Perl
^but four of the (I would assume) many crossplatform programming and
scripting languages available. I'm not a programmer, but the way I see it,
using a platform-specific language pretty much locks one out of any other
platform. The face of the personal computer market is changing, that much
is blindingly obvious, and the dinosaur programmers better change with it
or get left in the tar pit of what will surely become, dead languages on
extinct platforms.

> We developers might also want to read those office
> documents in another program.  With Linux and ODF, we can.
> I suppose one could try to read Excel in Windows (as
> opposed to merely displaying them) but it would be more
> difficult for me personally.
> 
> JBoss has "hot deployment", and can accept symbolic links.
> Eclipse can package .WAR, .SAR, and .EAR archives.  The
> combination makes for fairly quick debugging, unless JBoss
> decides to get slightly confused and fail to hot-deploy,
> since Eclipse just writes directly to the .WAR file which
> JBoss can try to read at exactly the wrong time.  (So make
> a tiny edit and repackage, or touch the .WAR in a shell.
> It's a glitch, and until Eclipse has an option to create
> a temporary and move it, one I can probably live with.)
> 
> Despite JBoss's hot deploy redeploying .SAR or .EAR files
> is a bit of a gamble, mostly because there's now two copies
> of the MBeans flitting about.  ClassCastExceptions are an
> issue unless one is careful with packaging, and even then,
> one might have to restart.  The good news: if one bothers,
> the restarts can be very quick -- if one only needs .WAR,
> for example, and not EJB or JMS, one can prune the JBoss
> server to almost nothing.
> 
> As always, more RAM helps. :-)
> 
> gdb and ddd are slightly buggy for me for some reason.
> (Why, I'm not sure.  I suspect optimizer issues.)  However,
> considering I've actually *caught VC++ 5 in flagrante delecto*
> mangling Assembly listing code, I can probably live with that,
> and in any event I rarely use gdb nowadays anyway at work.
> 
> Java has its own issues, and I frankly can't say why it
> wants to occasionally dump hs-err.log files and go south.
> I wish it wouldn't, but it's preferable to a BSOD,
> especially since a daemon can restart Java in a server
> environment, and I don't know whether this is a hardware
> glitch or software bug on my work system.  Usually it
> hits me while I'm debugging, probably because more of
> the JVM is under stress.
> 

Not many people would like to admit it, but I love Java. Hell, if I can open
pretty much any Java package and run it on any platform I choose to, that's
a great thing. As I mentioned before, speed isn't an issue for me; this
seems to be the biggest complaint against Java IME. Price we pay for
platform portability.

> And then there are the little things, such as playing
> video on web sites.  I don't know if Linux can handle
> everything, but it handles a goodly chunk of that video
> (an annoying exception: CNN -- but that might be because
> I've not set up the codecs here on my Gentoo system).
> 

I've not particularly messed with embedded video, but the little exposure I
have had to it in Linux has been less than spectacular. Not that that's a
huge issue for me, it's not a mission-critical feature. So I'm not going to
pollute this or any other newsgroup with my bleatings. ;) If it gets fixed,
great, wonderful, but I'm neither holding my breath for it nor am I going
to start dancing cartwheels when every embedded video plays flawlessly.

> So I dunno.  I'm happy with Linux, but acknowledge there
> are some shortcomings.

Ditto. But, overall, it does everything I want it to.

> Honesty in communications helps. :-) 
> Especially considering some of the rather tortured error
> messages that occasionally come out of Windows.  Linux
> isn't immune to such considerations:
> 
> $ cd nonexistent
> bash: nonexistent: No such file or directory
> 
> (errno 2 -- aka "Help, I can't tell which!")
> 
> but usually I consider Linux better at communicating
> what problem it's having, if one knows the lingo,

Hey, it gives enough information (ie everything pertinent to the situation)
that I can Google it if I feel a screaming need to, and find out a: if it's
a reported bug and if so if it's fixed, b: if it's something I've done or
not done, or c: if it's something my system's done. Right there, that's my
contribution to the Open Source Revolution. :)

> and 
> Linux helps by not dumbing it down with "market speak"
> or "feeping creatureism": disks and cabinets [*] for
> partitions, folders for directories, documents for files,
> shortcuts for what looks a little like a symbolic link
> but isn't really.
> 
> [*] fortunately, cabinets got torpedoed early.  IIRC this
> was in the 1994-1996 timeframe.  Even today Windows users
> can still have multiple "drives" per physical spindle;
> Linux would more logically see them as drive partitions.
> 

As it should be. I mean, you'd expect user data to reside
in /home/~user/documents/, which the initial installer (from my experience)
offers to place on a separate partition /by default/, wouldn't you? Not
through a shortcut called My Documents which points to a folder
in /Documents and Settings/~user/~user's Documents/, on the system drive by
default. That's just... well, it's retarded. 

-- 
When all else fails... use a hammer.

http://dotware.co.uk 

Some people are like Slinkies; they serve no particular purpose,
But they bring a smile to your face when you push them down the stairs.

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