11 ms·

"The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it."

by seccess 12y ago

"The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it." Doesn't this assume that this cost for commercial OSes is zero? In my experience, that hasn't been the case (as an OSX user, haven't used Windows for software development in a long time).

CamperBob2 12y ago
The cost isn't zero, but it's proportional to how many other people are likely to have encountered the same pain point. If you run a desktop OS with 5% of Windows' market share, you're going to have more trouble finding help (or at least sympathy) when things go south. Also, as an ISV or IHV, if your app or device fails to work with Windows, it's a DEFCON-1 emergency. If it fails to work with one of 5,000 random obscure Linux distros, well, they'll get back to you on that, someday, maybe. It's simply economics in action. Note that neither of these are issues in the tablet or phone markets, which is why people citing those markets to defend Linux on the desktop are all wet. (They're in good company, of course -- lots of people in the Windows world have failed to understand why those markets are different, including the developer of Windows itself.)
- secfirstmd 12y ago
  That would make for an interesting whitepaper by someone. A country by country or regional calculation of the costs of implementing open source. As an open source fan but also someone who has been burned by the hidden costs of implementing it in certain emerging market regions (extensive training, time, lack of people to fix it when it goes wrong, incompatibilities etc etc vs Windows environment with a wider base of support and usage), I would find this very interesting. I think things often look different in London or SF but the idea of "free software" in poorer parts of the world is often a false one.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Some hardware is well supported by Linux, some is not. Same with Windows, though most vendors support Windows if they support anything on x86. But it's not always that clear-cut. Particularly on laptops, if you diverge from the OEM-included drivers you can have issues. I had a Dell laptop that I obtained second-hand, and I reinstalled my employer's stock Windows 7 ISO on it. It randomly blue-screened even with the latest appropriate graphics drivers, until I went back to the Dell website and found the exact version of the driver needed for that laptop. FWIW OpenBSD, which I had installed on another partition, ran flawlessly with the exception of suspend/resume. This was a couple of years ago, I think there have been improvements since then.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
    Personally, I find suspend/resume to be critical functions without which a laptop is useless.
krylon 12y ago
It is far from zero. On Windows, it is just not considered Microsoft's problem by most people - the blame is spread across lots of different software vendors/developers. Just as an example, at our company, we run a Windows Server 2008 R2 Terminal server, with Outlook 2003 installed for email. A while ago we decided to replace the aging Internet Explorer 8 installed on that machine (shudder) with IE11 (still shudder - but it's company policy), and if people are going to use IE, I thought at least they should use a reasonably current one. Turns out, that Outlook uses IE for rendering HTML emails, and that Outlook 2003 using IE 9 or newer for that purpose results in HTML mails being truncated randomly. Since some of our users run Outlook almost exclusively in their RDP-sessions instead of their local desktops, this was a rather big deal for us, and it took me a while to figure this problem out. And keep in mind, this problem was caused by the interaction of two problems written by Microsoft itself. Imagine the non-deterministic fun you can run into with applications by a dozen or more software vendors, running across several versions of Windows, 32 and 64 bit. (Yes, I kind of needed to vent. Sorry.)
- yuhong 12y ago
  MS does seem to support Outlook 2003 with IE9 and even released a hotfix for an incompatibility. IE11 was released close to the end of support of Office 2003 though, I wonder what is the support policy in that case.
  - krylon 12y ago
    Thanks for the info! Now that Office 2003's support has ended, I don't think Mirosoft will do anything about the problem for newer versions of IE. (If I could, I would also upgrade Outlook on that terminal server, but that is another story altogether.)

by seccess 12y ago

CamperBob2 12y ago

The cost isn't zero, but it's proportional to how many other people are likely to have encountered the same pain point. If you run a desktop OS with 5% of Windows' market share, you're going to have more trouble finding help (or at least sympathy) when things go south. Also, as an ISV or IHV, if your app or device fails to work with Windows, it's a DEFCON-1 emergency. If it fails to work with one of 5,000 random obscure Linux distros, well, they'll get back to you on that, someday, maybe. It's simply economics in action. Note that neither of these are issues in the tablet or phone markets, which is why people citing those markets to defend Linux on the desktop are all wet. (They're in good company, of course -- lots of people in the Windows world have failed to understand why those markets are different, including the developer of Windows itself.)

secfirstmd 12y ago
That would make for an interesting whitepaper by someone. A country by country or regional calculation of the costs of implementing open source. As an open source fan but also someone who has been burned by the hidden costs of implementing it in certain emerging market regions (extensive training, time, lack of people to fix it when it goes wrong, incompatibilities etc etc vs Windows environment with a wider base of support and usage), I would find this very interesting. I think things often look different in London or SF but the idea of "free software" in poorer parts of the world is often a false one.
ams6110 12y ago
Some hardware is well supported by Linux, some is not. Same with Windows, though most vendors support Windows if they support anything on x86. But it's not always that clear-cut. Particularly on laptops, if you diverge from the OEM-included drivers you can have issues. I had a Dell laptop that I obtained second-hand, and I reinstalled my employer's stock Windows 7 ISO on it. It randomly blue-screened even with the latest appropriate graphics drivers, until I went back to the Dell website and found the exact version of the driver needed for that laptop. FWIW OpenBSD, which I had installed on another partition, ran flawlessly with the exception of suspend/resume. This was a couple of years ago, I think there have been improvements since then.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  Personally, I find suspend/resume to be critical functions without which a laptop is useless.

krylon 12y ago

It is far from zero. On Windows, it is just not considered Microsoft's problem by most people - the blame is spread across lots of different software vendors/developers. Just as an example, at our company, we run a Windows Server 2008 R2 Terminal server, with Outlook 2003 installed for email. A while ago we decided to replace the aging Internet Explorer 8 installed on that machine (shudder) with IE11 (still shudder - but it's company policy), and if people are going to use IE, I thought at least they should use a reasonably current one. Turns out, that Outlook uses IE for rendering HTML emails, and that Outlook 2003 using IE 9 or newer for that purpose results in HTML mails being truncated randomly. Since some of our users run Outlook almost exclusively in their RDP-sessions instead of their local desktops, this was a rather big deal for us, and it took me a while to figure this problem out. And keep in mind, this problem was caused by the interaction of two problems written by Microsoft itself. Imagine the non-deterministic fun you can run into with applications by a dozen or more software vendors, running across several versions of Windows, 32 and 64 bit. (Yes, I kind of needed to vent. Sorry.)

yuhong 12y ago
MS does seem to support Outlook 2003 with IE9 and even released a hotfix for an incompatibility. IE11 was released close to the end of support of Office 2003 though, I wonder what is the support policy in that case.
- krylon 12y ago
  Thanks for the info! Now that Office 2003's support has ended, I don't think Mirosoft will do anything about the problem for newer versions of IE. (If I could, I would also upgrade Outlook on that terminal server, but that is another story altogether.)