Oleg Basov. The shine and misery of Linux

The shine and misery of Linux
Oleg Basov

Publication date: January 18, 2002

"Linux is not Windows(tm) or its ilk. It is a different operating system. It is not any more complicated, but you will have to look at a lot of things differently to get to know it. If you put in the effort, you will be rewarded."
From the documentation for Linux Mandrake Spring 2000 Russian Edition.

To understand what Larry Ellison's goal would be - a world without Microsoft, it helps to look at its closest competitor - the Linux system. This review is a little late and does not claim to be too general: only the 6th and 2000th versions of Linux Mandrake RE were installed on my computer. But to understand the fate of the platform, it is not necessary to test all its versions; it is better to know the history and nature of the competition. The result will be determined not so much by benchmarks and not only by price, but also by how the product is perceived by the market.

What happened

In terms of the history of desktop operating system competition, it is appropriate to compare the last three years roughly with the period from 1992 to 1995. Then the cheapest operating system - MS DOS - was established on the market, ranging in price from $15 to $45 for the OEM version - a trifle in those days (and not only in those days). Big money was shared by IBM, HP, Solaris, SCO and other suppliers of the commercial Unix system. Who would have known that in some five to ten years all these monsters would be driven into narrow technological niches?

What now

Now the prices for the most popular hardware are about half as low. But the software has become more expensive - Windows XP retails from $100, and Windows 2000 from $150, that is, from 10% to 25% of the cost of the system unit. After the defeat of OS/2 in 1995, commercial competing systems are sitting on servers and are not encroaching on the desktop market. Only freely distributed Linux dared to do this. What prevented this version of Unix from taking revenge on earlier times, entering the market at prices ranging from the price of the carrier to about $30?

After all, the consumer has not stopped counting money. And Bill Gates is not the last genius of writing programs. And an operating system for a hundred dollars is expensive. What changed?

To answer this question, we need to understand how an IBM-compatible computer can be used. And how you can make a profit (or at least benefit) from this.

Here is an informal segmentation of IBM-compatible machines on a scale from the corporate market to the SOHO (Small office - home office) market.

a) Number crusher (file server, web server or workstation for tasks requiring uninterrupted and large-scale operation).
b) Developer station.
c) Office computer.
d) Computer of a professional non-programmer (image processing, video, design).
e) Household appliance; gaming station.
f) A means of communication in the broad sense of the word.

According to International Data Corp., using Linux in business can reduce IT costs by 50%. Amazon achieved a 24% contraction last quarter. Royal Dutch/Shell, Pixar, DreamWorks are switching to Linux. The dynamics of the user base recently were also quite good: game manufacturers noticed the new platform and gave it an advance, porting their products to it. Office programs came from such monsters as IBM and Sun.

In total, Linux runs on 27% of servers (versus 42% for Windows). If the bulk of the money now, as in the first half of the 90s, was in sectors (a) and (b), Windows would have a formidable competitor.

What will happen

Unix will give Windows 100 points ahead in terms of soundness of basic architectural concepts. Anyone who has written at least a couple of simple programs for them knows this.

I wrote my first program for Unix a couple of weeks after Linux arrived on my desktop. My “spider” itself surfed the Internet and downloaded the necessary data. Written in Perl after just a week of getting acquainted with both Perl and Linux. Let me note that I am not a programmer: I gave up on this specialty about six years ago, after the “minimal program for Windows” I made (eight dozen lines, there is no less) hung tightly on the computer of my friend, a fierce pro. And there was no way to find out why.

Over the past five to ten years, Unix has squandered its "ancestral" technological advantage, leaving the home computer sector to MS, pirates, and free programming. And Windows won a series of tactical battles outright, without a chance for revenge. Especially in terms of compatibility with a wide variety of hardware. I will give a short list of problems for migrants from Windows to Linux.

1) Modem. If the operating system overloads the processor with some of the functions that were previously assigned to the modem, then the latter costs about $20. Linux does not support such modems (win modems). Non-win modems start at $50. Need I say that they are gradually being replaced by cheaper ones?

In total, the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the system increases by $30. That is if you can find a non-win modem. And if not? Then look for a driver for the existing one. Is it easy to find on the Internet a modem driver for a system that has not yet installed or has just installed on your computer?

2) Printing. I quote the documentation:

Printing, especially texts in encodings other than Latin-1 (Latin - O. B), has never been Unix's strong point. Attempts to integrate it into X (the graphical shell of the X Window - O.B.) withered away without receiving serious development, and there is still no universal internationalized printing library.

Speaking in Russian, owners of Windows printers (many, if not most, inkjet printers) will have to wait until better times. TCO is rising.

3) The installer is not user friendly. For example, it will freeze without the possibility of a rollback if you incorrectly specify the COM port of your mouse. The directory sometimes does not correlate with the installation step. And it goes without saying that the user has an understanding of how to partition the disk and find a journaling file system ( Reiserfs ) from the long list of supported ones. If you don't know what a journaling file system is, you'll know that if there's a power failure, Linux can crash and not get back up. With a high probability.

4) Video adapter. Quote from the documentation: "if the installation program detected your video card, then you are in luck ." Otherwise, you will have to look for a similar one in the list of drivers, or even download a driver from the Internet.

To be fair, I will say that now this problem is not as acute as it was two years ago. You'll most likely be lucky. You may be unlucky in another way: if your motherboard has a built-in video card, but you are using another one that is inserted, then the installation program may ignore it. There are ways to combat this if you are a professional.

5) Localization, graphics, file formats, mounting partitions formatted for Windows. These problems are gradually being solved, very, very slowly. Fonts in X Window are displayed without halftones, and therefore look scary. Using telnet, X Window downloads graphics in raster format over the network. A teaspoon per hour, of course. The X Window standards are managed by the extremely conservative X Consorcium, inheriting from year to year the problems of early versions of Unix worse than Windows inherits DOS. One thing to be proud of: MS Office formats are already read by free “offices” without problems. Finally. XXI century.

6) Support. For freely distributed programs there is a separate charge. And in a random workshop it will cost two hundred dollars.

So, the functions of “a computer as a household appliance and a means of communication” - the interface of software with hardware, of a person with the outside world - are lost or made more difficult. They become even more difficult the closer the user is in his preparation to the representative one. That is, to the masses.

No, you misunderstood me. I am proud that Reiserfs was made in Pereslavl-Zalessky, I am pleased to have a domestic technological alternative, I adore Perl and TeX, I despise Word and Visual Basic, I worked on Linux for two years and will continue to do so. But - forgive me Richard Stallman - this activity fosters pity for the producers of free software. And respect for their users. After all, the latter have a cool head, a warm heart, skillful hands and... nerves of iron. I'm like that myself.

And for everyday tasks, I spent a hundred bucks on Windows XP. It is comfortable, easy to use and as enjoyable as driving a car.