It’s been a long-held dream of mine to create an entire business that runs ENTIRELY on Linux, not Windows. These days, it is no longer beyond the realms of possibility:
If you’re tired of dealing with the awful, bloated, stupid, endlessly crashy and buggy and glitchy and annoying Microsoft platform, then Linux might just sound like a great way to go. And it is.
Except for one huge problem – and I’m not talking about lack of hardware compatibility or device driver issues or inability to run like-for-like software.
I’m talking about the fact that Linux is going to become rapidly SJW-converged over the coming years.
We’re already seeing this. The Linux Kernel Development team has adopted “Cancer” Coraline’s “Code of Conduct”, and it is already having an impact on their software development cycle and methods.
This is a disaster for those of us who love free software and high-quality product. It also spells disaster for the various distributions that base their code around the Linux Kernel. That kernel is central to the entire operating system; if it becomes unreliable and useless, which is ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED when you have SJWs in the mix and quelling any and all constructive feedback, then the power, stability, and flexibility of systems like Fedora, CentOS, SuSE, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint will all suffer badly.
That’s not to say that Microsoft is much of an alternative. The ONLY real reason to use Microsoft on desktop these days is… well, because everyone else uses Microsoft. For about 70% of users, equivalent Linux applications can do the same job as easily as the paid versions, and sometimes better.
Another 10%-20 consists of super-users doing CAD, working with graphic design through Photoshop and other advanced editing tools, and serious video editors. For those users, either they have to stick with Windows, or they use Macs.
And of course there are PC gamers, who are stuck with Windows no matter what. Linux simply will not be a gaming platform anytime soon, even though you can play a lot of great older games on it – the bleeding-edge stuff is designed and built for Windows.
That is less of a problem these days, what with the advent of MMORPGs and MOBAs, but if you want to play, oh, let’s say, HALO: The Master Chief Collection for PC, well, you’re stuck with WinDOZE.
The other major reason not to switch to Linux comes from banking and finance, where Excel reigns supreme. And it really does. LibreOffice Calc is very good, but it’s not as good as Excel and its OpenBasic macro language and IDE is nowhere near as good as Excel’s VBA and IDE.
But that is becoming less of an issue as more and more businesses switch to online shared documents and away from kludgy, buggy, home-built spreadsheet-based systems.
I know how dangerous those systems can be. I programmed them for years. If you have them – get rid of them. Build proper systems instead. The grief and headache caused by a crashed spreadsheet with security flaws is not worth the pain.
I do hope that I get a chance to put a Linux-based business into practice one day. It would be very interesting indeed to see such a thing come to life.
7 Comments
How hard is it to fork Linux Kernel? I can't code worth a d*** but there should be enough rayciss sexiss doubleplusungood straight white cis-male programmers to maintain a Kernel that forks off on the last pre-Code of Conduct version. Or has someone already done this?
Oh it's actually very easy to fork a Linux kernel. The source files are all publicly available. Anyone with a bit of tech savvy and access to Github and an svn (Subversion – version control utility) installation could do it.
In fact many HAVE done so. The problem with forking the Linux kernel is not the deed itself. It's maintaining and updating the device drivers and software updates and other stuff that is painful. That is why most kernel forks end up going basically nowhere over the long term.
From my experience with software development – and it isn't much – forking and maintaining a stable branch of software like that is very hard work that requires some serious infrastructure. It's not something that you can do on the fly as a one-man operation. It's something that requires an entire IT team – like, say, the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List).
I am confident that such a thing will grow out over time as downstream consumers of the kernel, like Linux Mint and the developers behind Fedora and SuSE and their corporate owners get annoyed by the increasingly stupid and crufty Linux kernel. The major downside is that there will no longer be uniformity in terms of hardware compatibility between all of the various flavours of Linux. And that is potentially a catastrophic issue.
Thanks for the reply. I always thought that Linux already had a yuge uniformity problem, but I guess it's about to become much worse. Will try to escape the system that Bill Gates named after his own Wiener; hopefully I can find some IT geeks who can help me.
Get in touch with me via email and we can set something up through Skype. I helped another one of my readers switch over to Linux Mint and he's never looked back over the past 2 years. If you just need a computer that surfs the web, writes documents, plays music, watches movies, and doesn't necessarily need the latest games, then Mint will do the job handily.
In a virtualised environment, what version of the Linux kernel you're running or the OS distribution that's wrapped around it matters a lot less than you'd think …
Most VM engines lag kernel development considerably. VirtualBox only recently began to offer support for guest extensions compilation on Linux 5.x kernels, and VMWare appears to offer much better support for anything that predates Linux 4.19 than anything after it.
But the real screw for The Soft is in being able to run older versions that you can buy for a lot less as previously used software.
Do you need a version of Microsoft Office that works with nearly everything that came after it?
On eBay you can put together a package of Windows XP retail and Microsoft Office Pro 2003 for under $100. Add to the Office Pro install some readily available packages for Office 2007 support and ODF support and you have most of what you'd get from Office 2007 or later, including support for DOCX files.
Run the stuff within a virtual machine where you can restrict how much RAM it needs to gorge itself upon, limit the number of CPUs it demands, and even do the entire install on a single CPU.
Then you can keep the rest of your system free to run other VMs, including Linux Mint 19 which actually does support compiling the VirtualBox guest extensions.
But why bother?
Most people don't even come close to using all of the RAM they've purchased except as cache memory, and then they complain about how awful Windows 10 performance happens to be. Doing this puts more of the system you've actually paid for to good use.
Put Windows 10 in a VM on a Linux host, accept that Windows 10 will always be a bastard step-child of an OS, and give it only the amount of memory and number of CPU cores that you think a badly behaving kid really needs to survive and perhaps eventually grow up. Turn off prefetch, "super fetch", indexing, Spectre and Meltdown "mitigations", and all of the other stupid systems bloat, and disable HPET (because it's broken on the latest Intel CPUs anyway). You'll soon have performance that resembles what you'd have on bare metal.
As for the host OS, you could put up with the rapid churn of something like Ubuntu or Fedora, but since the VM engines lag in supporting the latest releases, you'd do better with something older and more stable.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8 (or CentOS 7.8 for the free version) works very well as a host OS, and since it runs kernel version 3.10, getting VirtualBox guest extensions or anything else to compile with it is pretty much guaranteed. Even RHEL/CentOS 8.x gets you kernel version 4.4 which is very well supported these days under Linux long-term support arrangements.
The VirtualBox environment presents such options as LSI Logic SAS and SCSI virtual adapters, Intel IDE and SATA controllers, NVMe attachments, USB attachments, and support for USB 1.0, 2.0, and 3.x.
The biggest troubles involve getting host OS drivers for your graphics chipsets, but as long as you choose AMD over NVIDIA, you'll probably have fewer problems for a given chipset. As for sound, Intel HD audio sometimes creates problems, depending on how crappy the chipset you're stuck with happens to be. As long as your graphics chipset supports OpenGL (especially all of the variants of OpenGL ES), you should have few to no problems getting 3D graphics support going in any of your VM guests.
The POZ that's going on within the Linux Foundation will take years to be visible in any of the released OS versions, and for now it just doesn't matter.
But the real win against The Soft is in leveraging other people's sunken costs.
I look at using virtual machines as being able to run multiple laptops on my laptop.
I already run Linux as my main distribution on my laptop. I've been running Linux Mint for years and before that I was using Mandriva (like, 12 years ago) and subsequently Ubuntu.
I have a non-activated copy of WinDOZE 10 available as a virtual machine through VirtualBox on my Linux partition, as well as an actual WinDOZE partition (*eyerolls*) pretty much exclusively for gaming. I'm very familiar with how VirtualBox works for building out guest OS installations and I quite like it.
What I like about Linux Mint is that it uses only LTS versions of the Ubuntu base installation, which means that it isn't designed to be as unstable as Ubuntu can be sometimes.
I've actually never had a problem with NVIDIA drivers for Linux. The Ubuntu OSS drivers work pretty well and in the latest releases they've gotten to the point where you can offload tasks from Linux onto the GPU.
Youngster. Stopped using Windows after I lost a thesis 6000 words in. In 1999. Used red hat, then ubuntu, then Debian, played with gentoo and arch. I moved to KaOS — because KDE now is as fast as xfce and I prefer an Arch based rolling system. Works fairly well, including photo processing. If I NEED windows I do it virtually using dropbox.