Opinion

Being a Linux advocate, I could go on and on writing about all the reasons that make it an excellent computing platform. I’ve been using Linux as a server system for more than eight years, and also on the desktop since 2006.

Many people believe that Linux isn’t ready for the desktop, and in fact you could find hundreds of articles explaining why. And whether we like to admit it or not, the hard truth is that sometimes Linux on the desktop sucks, big time.

Many times though, the problems with Linux have nothing to do with Linux itself but with factors that are external to the operating system. For example, poor hardware support is one of the reasons why Linux on the desktop won’t be going mainstream any time soon. But is it Linux’s fault? Certainly not. The one to blames are probably all of the incompetent or unethical manufacturers that don’t release the source code for their drivers.

In spite of that, during the last years, hardware support on Linux has improved dramatically, and that’s mostly because thousands of developers around the world have spent inordinate amounts of time and energy on reverse engineering and open source driver development. Anyway, hardware support is still very far from what users of other platforms usually expect.

Continue reading "Linux and the Curse of the Missing Drivers"

Posted by Marcus Friedman

Are you tired of browsers that keep freezing at the most inconvenient times, that become sluggish when running some demanding web-based apps, or that consume unreasonable amounts of system resources?

If you are a Linux user who depends on a browser for getting things done, I guess that you must be quite disappointed with most of them by now.

I switched to Firefox around January 2005, a few months after the 1.0 version was released [see Firefox release history]. Compared to the other alternatives available at that time, I think that Firefox was a very promising product and an excellent choice.

That was four years ago. Release after release, Firefox kept getting bigger and slower, with a seemingly endless hunger for system resources. And now the project that was started to combat the Mozilla Suite’s bloat seems to be getting closer and closer to becoming what it was supposed to eradicate.

The web has changed dramatically since then, and I think that Firefox simply wasn’t able to keep up with recent web trends and usage patterns. And while the people at the Mozilla Foundation were quite busy trying to win a Guinness World Record, some developers at another organization were actually working on developing a product that would suddenly take the browser scene by storm.

Less than three months after Firefox 3 was released, a brand new product came along, showing how a great web browser should be done. By the way, that episode reminded me a lot of something that happened almost 15 years ago, while a well known software company based on Redmond was so obsessed with the release of its flagship product that it almost completely missed a rising phenomenon known as the world-wide web (having then to spend several years in order to outperform its competitor). Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Continue reading "Are you done with Firefox too? Maybe it's time to give another browser a chance!"

Posted by Marcus Friedman

And by “we“ I mean of course Linux users.

Over the years, Google has released several desktop applications (Picasa, Google Talk, Google Earth, to name a few). Every time one of those products was introduced, it was only made available for Windows, and versions for other platforms like Linux or Mac OS X were launched more than twelve months laters (and in some cases, they were never launched).

While I understand that, statistically, Linux users represent only a small fraction of the desktop market, on the other hand this issue makes you wonder if we are seen as some kind of second-class citizens by Google.

I’d like to share with you some facts that show that the answer to the question in the title is probably yes (at least, that seems to be the message that Google is sending to the Linux community).

• Google Talk

  Google Talk was officialy launched on August 2005, for the Windows platform. More than three years have passed since then, and there’s still no native client available for Linux.

  Since Google Talk is based on an open protocol (XMPP), you can use any other XMPP compliant client (such as Kopete or Pidgin) to interact with Google Talk users. There’s also Google Talk Gadget, which is a Flash-based application than can be run from a browser without installing additional software.

  Anyway, the full features of the program are only available for those running the native Windows client.

Continue reading "Google, are we second-class citizens?"

Posted by Marcus Friedman