Electronics > Altium Designer
Altium REJECTS takeover bid from Autodesk
T3sl4co1l:
--- Quote from: tooki on March 09, 2022, 08:42:25 pm ---Linux didn’t “pop out of the woodwork”, it was the alignment of the stars of a good open source kernel with the already mature GNU toolset. And frankly, Linux has hardly made a dent in Windows as a desktop OS, despite years of it being “ready for the desktop, for real this time!”. (The Mac has, however, made significant inroads over the past decade.) So whether it’s even truly a competitor is debatable IMHO.
--- End quote ---
It's not; and, as far as I can tell, never will be. Over the weekend, I decided to dedicate a day or two puttering around with an old laptop I have that dual-boots into Debian, 9 Stretch I think. Some casual observations:
- There's a lot of gibberish scrolling by during startup. Am I supposed to be reading this? I see occasional warnings, missing stuff, etc. If there's a problem, how would I diagnose it?
- This thing hasn't booted in forever, I'm sure it's in need of updates. Hmm, nothing seems to be going automatically though. And I don't see a "update OS" button in the settings manager, or whatever I can tell are the nearest equivalents of that. Matter of fact, I don't see an "update" on ANY application at all. How, uh... just how secure is this supposed to be if there's no updates for anything, ever, anywhere..?
- I'd like to do some simple embedded dev on this thing. Okay, so I need my toolchain. Code::Blocks is cross platform, no problem there. I guess it's not available via package manager, so download it.
- The files don't... "run". They're just .deb archives. What do?
- Okay, so almost everything pipes through apt-get, or similar package managers. Oh also dpkg is what runs the .deb's. Surely -- surely -- there would be a simple GUI wrapper for these, that's obviously titled, and prominently placed on the system menu? I guess there's reason why xterm is prominently placed, but... c'mon... seriously? Fuck is the point of booting up X if I have to memorize every magic incantation anyway?
And none of which are discoverable or obvious, so it's all searching for what to do. Maybe there's mans on the HDD already, I don't know. For sure, no one suggests looking at them. Google is the holy oracle of all. Good thing the Wifi connection "Just Works".
Discoverability is such a manifestly important goal of UX. There isn't a single video game in the top 100 that doesn't do this. Lead the player/user into what they need, or are most likely to need. And automate all the piddling work for them. (Or don't, depending on what kind of game it is; but generally, users aren't coming to an OS to play gnuClicker or whatever the equivalent would be.)
So I run some apt-get updates, upgrades, start getting some things installed that I need. We're like 6 hours in at this point. Having trouble locating python. I want version 3.8 specifically, so I know it's compatible with the toolchain on my desktop. Nope, doesn't exist, it thinks I mean some postgresql bullshit. Nearest I can tell, the default distro does not offer specific versions. I find it on another one (a quick search turns up dozens of sources). I enter it by name, no good. It does suggest adding servers to my sources.list. Seems straightforward enough, sudo a text editor, paste it in and go.
Also, all along the way there's confusion about dependencies. Because why would anything be easy. Apparently you have to --fix-missing and such, and also there's a -R to install a bunch of packages in a directory in the right order.
Anyway, I finally find python and get it installing. Text box (less). Some deep sounding (libc6) package has a critical security update so it won't install it for me. Or the new version is incompatible with what else I have on here. Fine? Q out, process finishes. Fine, I'll just get a new version of that I guess. Hey, why isn't sudo working anymore? Why isn't... anything working anymore? Reboot, maybe it's just gotten confused. Linux is supposed to be famous for changing out whole kernel modules at run time, I don't know why this should help, but y'know, computers? Hmm, X isn't even coming up. It blinks a bunch then gives up and stops. Rebooting into the "advanced" and "recovery" options doesn't make a difference. Look up how to get a console. Won't even login with any usernames I know. Did... did apt-get just fucking brick the whole goddamned computer?
So I booted into Win10 the next day, and in the span of a couple hours, got most everything installed, including Code::Blocks running avr-gcc on a successful build of a recent project. Still a slow and bothersome process, but most of it Just Works(TM). No package hell, Installer just does the one complete configuration it's made for. Or just dump it in some folder somewhere and run it, who cares. Most of all, the OS doesn't let me, just, you know, fucking delete system32, as they say.
So, all this just to explain:
Even for a user who has general knowledge about computer systems,
Linux is still a piece of shit.
I'm not asking for advice; I know what I'd need to do to fix that. Maybe it can be fixed from Windows, maybe run an installer, maybe flash a USB bootdisk. I don't know how much that's going to wipe, if it can patch whatever fucked up in the kernel, or if I have to go through all that torture again just to get back to where I was. I know I can look up a hundred different resources to figure that out. Which is part of the problem by the way -- there's as many configurations as there are PCs running the stuff. The paradox of choice. It's a very real UX problem, this time also with very real development costs. And with liability for the user of potentially destroying their computer.
Venting? Sure. Asking for sympathy? I mean, I wouldn't mind. Asking for solutions? I don't care. But that's really the root of the problem: developers write Linux for developers. They expect all their users to know all the magic incantations, to have an internet connection always handy to search things they don't, and to just debug or recompile the kernel if anything should go wrong. What could be easier!
It's -- it's the marketplace of ideas. It's free software. Free ideas. Some people like to make a big deal about "the marketplace of ideas", but what they conveniently leave off -- or ignore with a spiritual conviction as the case may be -- ideas aren't worth anything. In the legal sense, this is, well, patently true: you can't patent an idea. An implementation, an invention, something physical, sure. (Well, that's rather wishy-washy these days, between relaxed rules, less review than ever, and including more and more junk like software patents. But, the core idea at least, of the PTO, and actual practice in recent history.) So too it goes, free software is worth all the bits it's written on. Free software only attains any value when it has, not just a little buy-in from users, but a truly stupendous user base -- popular projects like Firefox and Chromium are commonly touted as examples, ignoring the fact that real money supports those projects (Chromium especially, for obvious reason), and ignoring the literal millions of side projects that various users have spun off from projects big and small, as well as created themselves. None of which you can get your hopes up about; they should be treated as only what they are: pet projects, by and for, one or a few users, with no intent of fitness-for-purpose, merchantability, support, etc. Quite literally, you get what you paid for.
So you'll excuse me if I complain of a little cognitive dissonance, when I see optimistic claims about things people don't even realize they're extraordinarily biased towards.
Tim
Doctorandus_P:
This Linux bashing is al lot of bollocks.
Debian is not a beginner friendly distribution. It never was, and it probably never will be.
Debian assumes you know what you're doing.
I'm not even sure if Debian "out of the box" is supposed to be used at all.
I see Debian more as a common root for more user friendly distributions.
My daily driver is Linux Mint, and it does have an update button.
Some time ago I re-started an old PC I had not used for a few years.
Just out of curiousity I tried to update with apt, and got into dependency hell.
I did not want to spend time on this, and almost wiped the SSD, then I thought of the Update Manager in Mint, and I ran it.
It solved all the dependency hell and got that old system running faultless.
It did need one or two reboots and restarts of the update manager but that's all.
About windoze...
A few years ago I was at a funeral and someone was doing a talk which got rudely interrupted because the PC which was giving a presentation on a beamer had to reboot itself because of a printer driver update.
A brother of mine had to baby sit an 6 hour CNC job because the PC wanted to reboot itself every half hour.
But in the end it's not the software which is to blame, but he people who are (ab) -using it.
And also the people who write the software in the first place.
I have not forgotten nor forgiven the FUD, smear campaigns and other anti-competitive behavior of microsoft, intel and a bunch of other "big companies"
In my end work for graduating from school I wasted several weeks because microsoft's idea of FTP was not compatible with RFC959.
It did force me to dive real deep into the FTP protocol back then (30 -odd years ago), and that was probably one of the moments that made me fall in love with Open source software.
It's not only the good they're trying to do. It's also the absence of malice which unfortunately rules in a lot of for-profit companies.
nctnico:
--- Quote from: Doctorandus_P on March 23, 2022, 08:28:17 pm ---This Linux bashing is al lot of bollocks.
--- End quote ---
Agreed. Every piece of software has a learning curve. Most people forget the amount of time they put into learning Windows and on top of that expect all operating systems to behave that way.
Try to switch CAD packages for example; suddenly all the 'muscle memory' is useless and the new package is total crap. Until you learn how to work with it... and only then you can have a valid opinion on which is better / worse at specific points.
PlainName:
The thing about Windows is that there wasn't an alternative at the time. Maybe OS/2, but my experience of that was quite poor (and Microsoft deliberately broke its compatibility). Pretty much any GUI would be cool compared to a CLI. Nowadays, if you're switching away from Windows there is always the comparison with the known slick (and despite its faults, Windows is slick) example with, as you say, years or decades of muscle memory invested (although that's not translated to W10/11 so well, I think). Linux, and the Mac, have a much harder job now in converting foreign users than Windows did.
tooki:
--- Quote from: nctnico on March 24, 2022, 08:05:27 am ---
--- Quote from: Doctorandus_P on March 23, 2022, 08:28:17 pm ---This Linux bashing is al lot of bollocks.
--- End quote ---
Agreed. Every piece of software has a learning curve. Most people forget the amount of time they put into learning Windows and on top of that expect all operating systems to behave that way.
--- End quote ---
Nah, the problems with Linux usability on the desktop go WAY beyond unfamiliarity. The open source model simply doesn’t lend itself towards user interface consistency, which is extremely important. This is where the Mac shines, Windows is OK, and Linux sucks.
CAD software is a genre which, regardless of platform, also generally sucks in this regard.
--- Quote from: dunkemhigh on March 24, 2022, 11:19:40 am ---The thing about Windows is that there wasn't an alternative at the time.
--- End quote ---
***coughs in Macintosh***
Just what exactly do you think Windows was copying (poorly)? ;)
--- Quote from: dunkemhigh on March 24, 2022, 11:19:40 am ---Linux, and the Mac, have a much harder job now in converting foreign users than Windows did.
--- End quote ---
Having in the past sold literally hundreds of Macs to people converting from Windows (they were about 90% of our customers), it’s honestly not a huge problem for most people. The best advice I gave ”switchers” (based on what prior successful switchers had told me) was to simply “forget how you’d learned to do it on Windows, and instead just do what would make sense if you’d never used a computer”. The people who struggled were the few who expected everything to work exactly the same as Windows, which of course it doesn’t. (These were folks who had never gained any understanding of what they were doing, but rather just repeated their workflows by rote memory. I’m sure Windows 10/11 are giving them similar issues.)
Another cornerstone of a successful transition, of course, is application familiarity: Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Mac work basically the same as Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Windows. A browser is a browser. (And that already covers 90% of what most people do on computers these days…) But the same applied to users of various commercial software packages like Adobe stuff.
This doesn’t translate to Linux, because the Linux ecosystem doesn’t have that much in the way of commercial software packages, and even fewer of them are cross-platform. So users aren’t only experiencing a new OS interface, but the new-to-them open source applications, too, which may or may not even do the same things as their old one did.
People who don’t truly, thoroughly understand the ramifications of the whole user experience (the usability of the OS, usability of apps, the user interface consistency within and between apps, availability of apps, and the ecosystem more broadly) will never understand why Mac and Windows have been so successful on the desktop, and nothing else has. The typical Linux defenders show in their responses that they still don’t understand these things, which is why Linux’s desktop market share has been basically unchanged forever. (Heck, even most Windows people don’t understand them fully, which is why they never understood why Apple continued to be successful even as so-called “analysts” predicted the company’s demise.)
Did Microsoft do some unsavory things back in the day? Yes. But that really only affected Apple, and even that effect is probably not as big as people think. (I think most of Apple’s woes in the late 80s through the 90s were self-inflicted.) Nobody else was a meaningful competitor. OS/2 is the only platform I think might have stood a chance, had it not been for Microsoft’s monopolistic behaviors.
I mean, if there’s one software company that really gets me angry these days, it’s Adobe… (No, I won’t ever forgive them for buying Macromedia and then just killing off FreeHand, which was so much better than Illustrator in so many ways. But also how they used InDesign to — rightfully — lure away Quark Xpress’s entire customer base with a better product and great customer service, only to turn around once they’d gotten on top and become even more abusive than Quark had been to its customers!!)
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