no future for Linux?

[oui]

do you know other towns with the size of the German regional metropolis Munich using Linux as his only one operations system in all town offices depending of the City council?

Munich has a second magnet:

the major German press organ «Sueddeutsche Zeitung», one of the really major daily new papers of Germany

and today comes the SZ with following report on the use of Linux in Munich:

from M$ to Linux and back

hm ...

Linux has really very important deficits.

the first one is, that City Hall staff doesn't find easily enough high performance games to be enough occupied if not enough work at the office: the day can be long, very long really!

ahhhhh! be serious please...

ok, I will try it now:

- the health of the system depends of developments (new versions, rolling actualizations, changes in the most important libraries) with fundamental importance for the compatibility with other. "Other" can be an completely other authority (not using itself Linux but all the time M$: a supra regional authority, an authority on a field in the town absolutely not depending oft the City hall, like University etc.) with chaotic effects. If you don't actualize your Linux, you loose the compatibility with the other file systems established and being absolutely determinant world wide for the EASY interchange of data! the work in a City hall office where all the day you have to start conversion's scripts like doc2one_of_the_different_and_absolutely_not_compatible_named_Open_formats_of_Linux and back as Abi, OO, and Koffice are using, all absolutely different, all unable to open and save all their stuff as *.rtf (please read attentively this declaration on that page: « All subsequent releases of Microsoft Word for the Macintosh and all versions for Windows can read and write files in RTF format.» must be definitively wearing!)

- we need official formats in a weil organized world to interchange data. data are to be considered as important as munitions! and to say "I continue to use stones and wooden arrows as munitions (or food! it would be exactly the same discussion with food!)" is completely frivolous... Linux formats did never becoming that place! it is not possible as each Linux app can create own formats.

- the great among of Linux applications seems only out an important distance really as great: a great number of applications are not any more under development because it is really to difficult to follow the enormous dynamic of changes in libraries etc.

- this means that a City hall has to develop itself applications... I find: the taxes what I pay to the City hall are not destinated to develop dubios or silly dilly applications! a town has to use stuff being usable immediately without intervention of developer because it would be a open door for all kind of abuses: my town is NOT an exceptional town... the needs in my town are absolutely stereotypic and doesn't need other developments as in the comparative towns of my country!

- the education of personal is very very difficult! look: the first expressive user guidance for mTpaint (our standard since about 10 y.) did only appear yet! what does an authority not being able to manage pictures, portraits, maps etc.: It is simply

ridiculous!

Munich in Germany is not "one anonym" city: It is the city of the company being named SUN all the time where Java etc. did belong to SUN and not to Oracle

now as Linux does not work trustworthy any more (no original Java, no original StarOffice, no FlashPlayer of the best standard, no Skype any more) the town Munich, where SUN was established, say:

stop!

- next ascertainment is that Linux is being assaulted now by other systems very parents with it (google android, firefox etc.). Unix, the real parent from Linux were a system for bigger computers!

what is the future of a system for portable telephones only?

PS see also http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 186#795186 (in German)

[wjaguar]

interchange of data!

If any organization calling itself serious doesn't have a person on staff who is able to convert anything into anything else, it's wasting money allocated for IT. Simple as that.

- we need official formats in a weil organized world to interchange data.

Not possible. People do not value things they hadn't paid through the nose for. Only the costly commercial software can force its formats onto users - because users can't return what they bought, switching away costs real money. Simple as that.

a great number of applications are not any more under development because it is really to difficult to follow the enormous dynamic of changes in libraries etc.

When a program is capable to do what it should be doing, it doesn't need to be "in development" anymore. Users always prefer to use what they know, than to learn new tricks just to continue doing their old job. So the only real problem is "bitrot", when old programs become unable to run on new system with new libraries. And static linking takes care of this. Simple as that.

the taxes what I pay to the City hall are not destinated to develop dubios or silly dilly applications! a town has to use stuff being usable immediately without intervention of developer

Then you are an idiot. Simple as that.

because it would be a open door for all kind of abuses: my town is NOT an exceptional town... the needs in my town are absolutely stereotypic and doesn't need other developments as in the comparative towns of my country!

Any town in the real world does have at least some town-specific rules. A large city, a lot of such rules. These rules need be programmed by someone, if a computer is to abide by them in processing anything. If an employee of the City hall isn't doing that, then a contractor is. For a premium. Simple as that.

the education of personal is very very difficult!

As long as said personnel believes that whining can get them something, the education is flatly impossible. People in general do dislike to learn. But as soon as they understand that their work will have to be done by them and no other, be that with computer or without - then the unlikeliest persons become capable of unbelievable feats of understanding. Simple as that.

All other things being equal, people like costly items better than cheap ones - programs included. Because one who paid a lot for something and then dislikes it, demonstrates to the world that he got suckered. And no one wants to look a sucker.

[raffy]

Always in every organization people want to have what others have, especially if that can do some fancy tricks like the Win8 all-in-one PC that can take quick photos of visitors and can allow fingers to flick photos across the screen.

Of course, these are completely unnecessary in the office, but just for comparison, the typical Linux desktop does not come with those features yet.

Fun in the office is perhaps more important to people than counting
- money spent for software licenses
- energy wasted on monstrous processors to do simple clerical work

Perhaps count the energy and license fees consumed/accumulated by every person and then deduct his overuse from his retirement pay - that will start them counting the license fees and energy use in their computing.

[mcewanw]

But I think there is no doubt that it is Microsoft Office that ultimately still controls the commercial desktop and tends to force the (for most parts of the world) business/education monopoly. As far as I know, Latin America is more willing to experiment, which reminds me of Ivan Illich's wonderful book of 1971 entitled "Deschooling Society", which, ironically, was a favourite of mine at a time when I was once studying to be a teacher.

No matter how close import/export filters may be in Libre Office, StarOffice or whatever, they are never quite close enough (not so bad with Word, but Excel and Powerpoint filters never quite manage to keep up) and commercial users simply don't want to take (what they perceive, and which is to some extent unfortunately true) the risk of potential incompatibilities. One answer would be the adoption of open standard formats (including fonts, and codecs, and protocols), but that just doesn't happen - the monopolies make sure of that, via the fact of their monopolies and also via their constant creation of oft-dubious patents/licences (I like neither despite sticking GPL out of bad habit, and lack of legal knowledge).

At home, my partner is perfectly comfortable with Puppy Linux, and DebianDog, but still she tends to use MS Win OS for work-related office documents (and also for Skype, which always seemed to work slightly better in the MS environment, particularly when using video calls).

Adobe Photoshop is one of a few other monopoly creators, which caters well for Mac users and also MS, but not Linux. So I don't think it is only the long established MS desktop operating system itself that keeps an iron grip on the global market share - it is these types of app and also the level of driver support the hardware manufacturers (for example, latest graphics cards) tend to give as a priority to MS and Mac users. Pity, but I myself don't care about most of these items, though I do recognise that Linux desktop does tend to be a bit non-intuitive at times - even cut and paste can be a bit of a hit or miss experience between the different Linux apps; we just get used to it (and we have that lovely commandline with its many unix utilities to compensate us with scripting pleasure - would not be the right piece of cake for everyone though).

Facebook is another, albeit newer, monopoly. Hard to compete with that as the social media webapp used daily by so much of the world now. Even Google has failed to make a dent in that castle's wall.

Betamax failed to win over VHS, in the home video market at least, despite its technical superiority. However, the advance of technology itself proved to be the VHS ultimate demise. Web apps success also nowadays seems to be driven by user numbers (which may or may not reflect technical superiority), which also drives the price companies like Microsoft and Google end up being willing to pay to take them over.

Personaly, I believe Linux will always just hold a tiny market share of desktop users (albeit often dedicated ones), and most of these if not technical to begin with will become more and more technical in terms of their usage and understanding over time. Linux is certainly being squeezed in terms of monopoly app capability - and it is nigh impossible to force, for example, Skype users to move over to some 'other' Linux available app, open source or otherwise (even if that app is multi-OS capable). Linux remains well-established as a major server OS, however, and I can't imagine that situation, at least, changing soon if ever.

William

Note: And yes, there is that conservative attitude that dictates that a product isn't worth having if you don't have to (somehow) pay for it. No one can really claim that even Linux server OS is free in real terms - administering a server at a professional level, generally requires expensive expertise ('free' help from expert volunteers is hardly likely to be longterm reliable - everyone needs to make a living somehow). You get what you pay for, they claim. But Puppy and similar tends to break that rule. This is free-er than in beer, and so is the support.

[mcewanw]

Also, quote from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Ilich

Tools for Conviviality (1973) was published only two years after Deschooling Society. In this new work Illich generalized the themes that he had previously applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic elites in industrial society, and the need to develop new instruments for the reconquest of practical knowledge by the average citizen. He wrote that "[e]lite professional groups . . . have come to exert a 'radical monopoly' on such basic human activities as health, agriculture, home-building, and learning, leading to a 'war on subsistence' that robs peasant societies of their vital skills and know-how. The result of much economic development is very often not human flourishing but 'modernized poverty,' dependency, and an out-of-control system in which the humans become worn-down mechanical parts."[2] Illich proposed that we should "invert the present deep structure of tools" in order to "give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency."

Radical monopoly
He invented the concept of radical monopoly: when a technical medium is or appears to be more effective, it creates a monopoly which denies access to other media. The mandatory consumption of a medium which uses a lot of energy (for example motorised transportation) narrows the fruition of use value (innate transit ability).

By "radical monopoly" I mean the dominance of one type of product rather than the dominance of one brand. I speak about radical monopoly when one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition.
—Ivan Illich, [19]

Conviviality
Illich worked to open new possibilities. Illich devotes a chapter of Deschooling Society to the proposal to the Rebirth of Epimethean Man.[20] He argued that we need convivial tools as opposed to machines. A tool may have many applications, some very different from its original intended use. A tool may be thought of as an expression of its user. The opposite of this is the machine, where humans become its servants, their role consisting only of running the machine for a single purpose.

Puppy Linux (aided by this support forum) is, to a large extent, a convivial tool I believe.

William

[Karl Godt]

Four weeks ago everything was still OK , now that ?

Found no reports at heise.de from August .
It is pretty new .

Things are not eaten as hot as they are cooked ..

Best the Government makes a law to break the code monopoly of common used file formats like doc / rtf .

And Munich is rich enough to by the linux code from Adobe and develop flash further by their lazy programmers .

[ICPUG]

I read on the 'The Inquirer' that this turn of events has come into being since the local government in Munich changed. Those in power now were the opposition party when the decision to go to Linux was made.

This begs the question as to whether it is a political decision rather than one of practicality.
Alternatively, perhaps the opposition were more easily 'persuaded' by Microsoft.

At the moment it is still being considered whether to move back to Windows. There is still some hope that the status quo will prevail,I suppose.

[ardvark]

Then you are an idiot. Simple as that.

And such talk is not needed and not welcome. Simple as that.

If you don't feel you can continue on here without name calling, then you need to leave.

Regards...

[mcewanw]

Don't you use mtpaint ardvark?

[James C]

Don't you use mtpaint ardvark?

Evidently not.

But I certainly do. mtPaint is installed in every linux install that I use.

[ardvark]

Don't you use mtpaint ardvark?

Hi...

I hadn't heard of it until you asked. I tried installing on my laptop just now but gdebi wouldn't let me because I'm using a 64 bit version of Ubuntu 10.04. I saved a copy anyway, I can try it the next time I get a hold of another system to run Precise Puppy on.

Regards...

[raffy]

Don't you use mtpaint ardvark?

I hadn't heard of it until you asked...

Ahem, I guess ardvark was talking to the mtpaint developer...

Anyway, wjaguar's strong reaction above was about software development, so I am pretty clueless.

[ardvark]

Hi Raffy...

Weren't you on the Avast forum a few years back? I remember you from somewhere...

Regards...

[RSH]

Don't you use mtpaint ardvark?

Hmm...

what has got this quoted post and all following posts (until this here post) to do with:

- no future for Linux
- how Munich will go, humiliated, back to Microsoft software

???

Are you sure, you are posting in the right topic?

[mcewanw]

the taxes what I pay to the City hall are not destinated to develop dubios or silly dilly applications! a town has to use stuff being usable immediately without intervention of developer

Then you are an idiot. Simple as that. :-(

Then you are an idiot. Simple as that. :-(

And such talk is not needed and not welcome. Simple as that. :!:

If you don't feel you can continue on here without name calling, then you need to leave. :(

Regards...

Don't you use mtpaint ardvark?

Hmm...

what has got this quoted post and all following posts (until this here post) to do with:

- no future for Linux

@RSH: Per the above, it was part of the on-topic conversation, if, that is, calling someone an idiot can be considered on-topic... Certainly time now to move on with the core topic itself after that, hopefully, light moment of relief :-)

William