Category Archives: Operating systems

Linux

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tagsI write plenty of tedious posts about computers and technology, and I usually tag them according to what they’re about.

As I write this, the tag cloud for this blog looks like the picture on the left—Apple and Microsoft loom large, Nokia and Oracle get a look in, and there’s no reference to Linux at all.

But Linux is the main operating system I use, and it has been for the last 15 years or more.

I never write about it because, like the boy in the German child joke, I’m content with it. I write about things that fascinate me, and there’s nothing less fascinating than a system that does what you expect it to, again and again.

Although I also develop software for Windows, OS/X, and Android among others, Linux is my home platform.

I like that it gives me a sense of independence from any particular platform I might deploy to. I like that it allows me to make my own decisions about the type of desktop environment I choose. (Never trust an OS that won’t allow you to change the system font.) I like the transparency of the development environment, and I appreciate being given the opportunity to find out how anything in it works—even though I don’t take as much advantage as I might.

So far, using mostly Linux has been a fine way to observe developments in other operating systems, from just enough distance not to get too caught up in any one of them.

A touch of froth

A jolt, though, comes with the arrival of touch interfaces. I’m not the only one to be surprised to find how pleasant a touch screen is to use with a laptop. For me, Apple had it wrong: though familiarity means I still prefer a mouse for detail work, I’d rather have a touch screen than a trackpad.

Maybe I just haven’t used touch screens enough to become really fatigued. But I wonder whether the research might not have underestimated how fatiguing the crabbing action of using a touchpad is. I don’t think “I’ve been waiting all my life for this touch screen”; I think “thank goodness I don’t have to use the touchpad”.

I’ve heard it remarked that innovative input devices interest consumers in a way that novel output devices seldom do. There are many examples of new input devices becoming mainstream, sometimes in wildly popular ways: the joystick, the mouse, the D-pad, the touchpad, gaming controllers with accelerometers and gyroscopes, computer vision devices (the Kinect) and so on. Meanwhile various innovations in output (such as 3D and very high-resolution screens) have appeared repeatedly and been largely ignored—unless they came in packages that were attractive for other reasons, such as the LCD display with its slender physical dimensions.

So, over the years I’ve taken quite good advantage of the ability to pick and choose my desktop interface on Linux. Like all self-regarding programmers, I’ve used my own window manager. I’ve used KDE, until I switched away when KDE4 arrived. Then I used GNOME, until I switched away when GNOME 3 arrived. Right now I’m using XFCE4. But it’s not at all touch-friendly, and nor are any of the applications I use. This one has so far completely passed me by.

In short, then, those Ubuntu and Gnome people that I’ve probably been rather rude about might have had a point. There was some reason to be piddling about with the basics of the user interface after all. I need to start finding out whether Linux, other than Android, can work well in the touch screen world.

Windows Phone: a bit like BeOS

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Today’s possibly stretching-a-point Technology Analogy

In a previous article I compared the situation of Windows 8 on the desktop to that of OS/2 in the late 80s.

Windows Phone 8 is in a different position. While Windows 8 gets its awkwardness from the need to provide compatibility with the dominant platform—which in this case means earlier versions of Windows—the dominant platforms competing with Windows Phone are iOS and Android. And it’s totally incompatible with both.

So, why choose Windows Phone? Not because it has greater capabilities, all in all, than its competition. It doesn’t have any very significant platform-exclusive applications. It isn’t any more open (in either a useful or fun kind of way). There are two reasons you might choose it: a preference for its interaction design, or integration with some networked services.

BeOS is an operating system dating from the mid-90s developed, according to Wikipedia, “on the principles of clarity and a clean, uncluttered design”. (Sounds familiar?) It was pretty to look at and nice to use. It had decent networking support and made good use of the hardware available to it.

But it was always going to have niche appeal. By the time of its release, Windows 95 was dominant and generally tolerated by mass-market users, while Unix-based operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, and NeXTSTEP were working their way down from higher-end workstations with hacker appeal. BeOS was incompatible, no cheaper, no more open, and ultimately more limited by lack of useful applications. It remains a likeable curio.

 

Windows 8: A bit like OS/2

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Today in Technology Analogy Week…

In 1987, three years after the world’s perception of the possibilities of the PC had been changed by the Apple Mac and two years after the Mac’s cheap knockoff Microsoft Windows had been released, the world’s leading PC manufacturer released a new operating system.

OS/2 was the perfected pinnacle of many years’ development by serious software developers. Although IBM had initially worked on it with Microsoft, by the time of release it had become an IBM product alone. It was solid, sophisticated, fairly demanding of PC hardware of its time.

Given the resources, OS/2 worked well. But its compatibility with the popular software of the time—for MS-DOS or Windows—was always a bit awkward. Running such “legacy” software felt uncomfortable, as if you were ignoring the major part of the operating system and always on the verge of tripping up on the edges of its competent compatibility. But legacy software was almost all the software available: very few applications ever turned up in OS/2 native form.

The maddening problem of OS/2 was that it tried too hard to do everything. Its developers did all the right things, but it wasn’t different enough from the other popular operating systems of the time to be something you could choose for its strengths alone. It had to rely on compatibility with whatever everyone else was already using; but its compatibility with the technologically weaker market leader just wasn’t satisfying enough.

(You can see where this is going.)

In 2012, five years after iOS and its cheap knockoff Android, and two after the iPad, the world’s leading PC operating system manufacturer releases its new operating system…

Windows 8, like Windows Phone 7, is broadly a satisfying design—but only if you run nothing but native apps on it.

In the case of Windows 8, “native” means managed-code Modern UI software, a category so nebulously defined that nobody I know has yet explained to me the best method of developing for it. Meanwhile, Microsoft have effectively categorised every existing Windows application as a legacy app: they’re available only on the premium version of Windows (i.e. Windows 8 rather than Windows RT), and only in a subsidiary desktop mode.

Think about that for a moment. Windows 8 was released a few days ago. With it, Microsoft have designated every existing Windows application as a “legacy app”.

But Windows 8 isn’t a clean break. Like OS/2, it tries to do everything. It isn’t different enough from the other popular operating systems, iOS or Android, to be something you could choose for its strengths alone. It has to rely on compatibility with desktop Windows, and its compatibility isn’t very satisfying.

Next in Technology Analogy Week: How Nokia’s decisions during the last two years resemble British bands of the 80s and 90s whose managers have decided they must conquer America

Live Passport Net

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Microsoft plans to drop Windows Live branding — Microsoft are apparently renaming their Windows Live user account system to “Microsoft Account”.

They’ve changed the name of this service a few times over the years. I first found myself with a Microsoft account in 1998 when Microsoft bought Firefly, an early music-discovery social network, and took over its user database. Firefly had already rather lost its original direction and had for some time been promoting its user database as a general-purpose online authentication product, called Passport.

The account login interface is one of Microsoft’s more consumer-visible products or services, and also one that is relatively easy for them to rename because, after all, nobody really chooses it for its brand name.

I think we can track the changing focus of the company through its names over the years:

  • Microsoft Passport (1998–2001): Gripped by fear of consumers moving many of their activities online, rendering Windows platform and applications less crucial: we need to get everyone using our service to manage their financial and identification needs.
  • .NET Passport (2001–2006): Corporate focus drifts from consumers (they’re ours, now) to developers. Wrap everything up in XML and sell it as a unified network ecosystem to bring ‘em on board. Possibly a response to fear of Linux as a server platform, though as a Linux developer I might be overstating things.
  • Microsoft Passport Network (2006): I’m not quite sure where this one fitted in. Possibly a last-ditch attempt to get anyone other than Microsoft to use Passport by suggesting there could be such a thing as a community of sites built on it.
  • Windows Live ID (2006–2011): All hands on the Xbox, in response to a fear of getting squeezed out by initially single-purpose devices that begin to encroach on tasks previously carried out with a PC. A wave of newly capable consumer devices from other sources prompts a renewed focus on consumer appeal.
  • Microsoft Account (2012): The battle moves to the cloud! As Microsoft increasingly start to turn out applications for other operating systems besides Windows, the common theme is to ensure that the user is still part of the Microsoft “application platform” ecosystem, whether they are using Windows or not.

There’s been speculation that the forthcoming launch of the iPad 3 might see Microsoft release a version of Office for the iPad.

If this does come to pass, and Office ends up on the iPad, the one thing I really want to know is: will it sync with Microsoft’s SkyDrive, or with Apple’s iCloud?

Operating system updates

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Google have released a version of their Chrome web browser for Android, and it seems to be rather good—but it only runs on the very latest version of Android, version 4. Which is a bit of an annoyance, because hardly anybody has that version.

Glancing at the 12 most popular Android phones on the Expansys site, I can see only two—the two variants of Google’s Galaxy Nexus—supplied with Android 4. That’ll change, but in the mean time there hasn’t been much of a rush to provide updates for older phones.

I’m generally ambivalent about operating system updates. I believe that both phones and PCs are bought on the basis of the way they look and work at the time, not in the expectation that updates will change anything significant.

As a long-term Linux user I’m all too familiar with the concept of the Ubuntu update that breaks everything, but I think my uncertainty about the wisdom of updates is common among people using most kinds of computer.

I updated my Galaxy Tab from Android 2.2 to 2.3: it improved battery life a bit, stopped cut and paste working in some applications, and provided no obvious interface improvements—not a big net positive. I know iPhone users who complain about Apple persuading them to install updates that slow down their previously perfectly good phones. My wife updated her WP7 phone recently, grumbling about the amount of time and laptop disc space used by the installer, only to find the update made no detectable change at all. OS/X 10.7 had a decidedly mixed response from users of earlier versions.

Why would anyone want to update anyway?

What drives updates is application support. The only time most users will start hunting for an operating system update—as opposed to installing one that’s thrust into their face by the device itself—is when they find they can’t run applications they care about because their OS is too old.

Even then, they’ll probably resent having to update to do it.

I don’t really care about Android 4 on my own device, which is fortunate because it doesn’t appear to be available. But I would like to try out Chrome. (There are several OK browsers for Android, but no really good ones—and the one I like best in principle, Firefox, itself gets less stable for me with every update.)

I wonder how fundamental Chrome’s dependency on Android 4 really is. Perhaps the only reason it didn’t exist before was that it needed some quite basic OS support that earlier versions couldn’t provide.

Or perhaps the dependency is seen as a serendipitous one, and the release of Chrome as a way to encourage users like me, and phone manufacturers, to update as soon as possible.

Was Windows popular?

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Paul Robert Lloyd writes: “As more services require a Facebook account to use them, I wonder if it’s set to become the next Microsoft Windows; a popular piece of software that becomes the only choice available.”

I first read this as “an unpopular piece of software that becomes the only choice available.”

Plenty of people grumble about Facebook. Windows doesn’t seem to have inspired many people to delight when its manufacturer became the biggest company in the world, as Microsoft did in 1998. To me, it feels as if both are unpopular in an emotive sense, despite their ubiquity—though I feel more confident saying that about Windows than Facebook.

But my perspective is probably horribly slanted. Was Windows popular, in its heyday of the late 90s? Popular, that is, in the sense of being widely loved rather than just widely used?

Perhaps it was. I was in the privileged position at the time of being able to look on Windows from a height as a user of Unix workstations and tedious geek blah, so I would never have appreciated its value as a straightforward way of running a personal computer.

Perhaps there were millions of people given liberation and joy by the friendliness and flexibility of Windows, and by its universal availability as a result of its straightforward, resource-friendly design.

Were there?